The gendering of ‘obesity panic’: a prospective intersectional research investigation (original) (raw)
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Mothers at large: responsibilising the pregnant self for the "obesity epidemic"
Maternal obesity' has recently been linked with poor childbirth outcomes and health effects on the developing fetus and future person. These studies have been sensationally reported in the Australasian news media, resulting in a reorientation of public health policy toward the management and prevention of 'risky' fat pregnant bodies. This article draws on Foucauldian governmentality theory and intersectional analysis to argue that the framing of 'maternal obesity' as a public health crisis represents a gendered, raced and classed biopolitical technology of governance with implications for fat women who reproduce, and for social justice in health more generally. It concludes by arguing for the potential of the intersectional concept of reproductive justice to provide a more complex and socially just view of the relationship between maternal body weight and reproductive health outcomes.
Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the " War on Obesity "
The embodied temporality of fat pregnancy in the mist of the "obesity epidemic" is explored through interviews with 27 ethnically diverse, cisgendered, self-identified fat pregnant people in Aotearoa New Zealand. The interaction of pre-emptive biopolitics and pregnant maternal responsibilities encouraged the fat pregnant people in this study to set aside their embodied knowing and enjoyment of pregnancy to focus on strategies that could protect their offspring from their fat bodies. The biomedical management of their pregnancies, and their experiences of their pregnancies as targets of key interventions in the war on obesity, produced negative affective responses and self-governance strategies that resulted in developed identities of failed pregnant mothers.
This article explores how fat pregnant people construct successful narratives around their pregnancies and birthing. Fat pregnant people are a critical site for the war on fatness; viewed as irresponsible: threatening the health of their pregnancy, and the far-off future of their child. Contemporary knowledge about pregnancy fatness is imbued with longstanding and powerful gendered biomedical discourses that have served to script women's reproductive bodies as faulty and deviant compared to the masculine " norm, " priming them for medical management and control. The problematization of pregnancy fatness represents a concerning extension of maternal responsibilization to pregnancy, entangling pregnant people in a politics of preemptive action to secure their children's future health, all the while denying the socio-political, economic and cultural realities of women's lives that constrain their ability to do so. Policy and media responses have located both the causes of, and solutions to, the problem of pregnancy fatness in women's individual self-management imploring them to take responsibility for the necessary lifestyle changes needed to reduce the risks posed by their fat bodies to their babies and the health system. This paper extends critical scholarship on the problematization of pregnancy fatness by identifying the importance of understanding not only how women are oppressed by these dominant discourses but also how they are involved in strategies of negotiation and resistance. By creating space for alternate versions and visions, discursive resistance offers a critical means by which individuals can exercise agency by redefining their lives and recovering their harmed identities.
This article explores how fat pregnant people construct successful narratives around their pregnancies and birthing. Fat pregnant people are a critical site for the war on fatness; viewed as irresponsible: threatening the health of their pregnancy, and the far-off future of their child. Contemporary knowledge about pregnancy fatness is imbued with longstanding and powerful gendered biomedical discourses that have served to script women's reproductive bodies as faulty and deviant compared to the masculine " norm, " priming them for medical management and control. The problematization of pregnancy fatness represents a concerning extension of maternal responsibilization to pregnancy, entangling pregnant people in a politics of preemptive action to secure their children's future health, all the while denying the socio-political, economic and cultural realities of women's lives that constrain their ability to do so. Policy and media responses have located both the causes of, and solutions to, the problem of pregnancy fatness in women's individual self-management imploring them to take responsibility for the necessary lifestyle changes needed to reduce the risks posed by their fat bodies to their babies and the health system. This paper extends critical scholarship on the problematization of pregnancy fatness by identifying the importance of understanding not only how women are oppressed by these dominant discourses but also how they are involved in strategies of negotiation and resistance. By creating space for alternate versions and visions, discursive resistance offers a critical means by which individuals can exercise agency by redefining their lives and recovering their harmed identities.
From the womb to the tomb: obesity and maternal responsibility
Critical Public Health, 2011
In recent decades overnutrition and obesity have been presented as a looming threat to the health and wellbeing of children and infants, most notably in western industrialised societies. However, this threat is not simply limited to ‘children’ who are ‘over fed’ by their ‘parents’. Increasingly, maternal overweight and obesity are said to inhibit conception, cause recurrent miscarriage, pose a serious threat to the development and health of the foetus and have long-term implications for the future wellbeing of the child. Parental responsibility looms large in these discourses, in which women in particular are held responsible for the future (fat free) health of their offspring from the womb to the tomb. In this article, it is argued that core assumptions at the heart of obesity science have been taken up uncritically in medical arenas focused on conception, pregnancy and reproduction and that this is providing new opportunities for the surveillance, regulation and disciplining of ‘threatening’ (fat) female bodies. It is shown that although all women of a reproductive age are being brought under the gaze of this deeply punitive medico-moral discourse, it is the bodies, lives and bedrooms of marginalised women that are singled out as posing the greatest ‘risk’ to their offspring and then targeted for even greater degrees of health/State intervention and surveillance.
In Canada, obesity is increasingly emphasised as a 'risk' to the health of mother and foetus. At a time when pregnant women are under greater pressure to personally uphold the health of their foetus, understanding the impact of the discourse surrounding obesity and health on young pregnant women is critical. Using a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we explore how pregnant young women construct their subjectivities either within dominant discourse on health and obesity or possibly resistant discourses. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 15 pregnant women between the ages of 18 and 28, coming from various socioeconomic and educational backgrounds in the Ottawa region. The analysis reveals that these women constitute themselves as complex, fragmented subjects who at times construct themselves within alternative and resistant discourses but generally reproduce dominant discourses of obesity, of individual and moral responsibility for health, and of maternal responsibility for foetal health. Implications for health promotion and policy strategies are discussed.
A Discourse Analysis of Denmark’s Public Health Policy Concerning Overweight among Pregnant Women
Advances in Applied Sociology
A recent Danish public health report classified being overweight during pregnancy as a chronic disease, marking a discursive shift from its previous classification as a risk factor for complications in maternal and foetal health. This discursive shift is considered a breach in the discursive field. Health care professionals' approach to governing overweight pregnant women is affected by this breach in the discursive field. Thus, overweight pregnant women have become an issue for medical experts, who are encouraged to use stricter rhetoric when addressing them. This shift also renders pregnant women subject to interventions by medical experts. The aim of this article is to critically analyse recommendations for how health professionals should govern these highrisk individuals and to discuss the implications of such governance for overweight pregnant women. In this study, overweight is classified as BMI ≥ 30 and severe obesity is classified as BMI ≥ 35 on the basis of pre-pregnancy weight. The theory of social construction and the concept of governmentality are applied in a discourse analysis of the prevention of overweight among pregnant women in Denmark. Using a discursive approach, this study analyses central governmental documents that discuss obesity prevention. Three forms of freedom (as discipline, as solidarity and as autonomy) are transferred to three forms of governing and constitute the conceptual framework. The main finding is that public health programmes encourage governing through solidarity, including a palette of autonomy-making, responsibility-making and disciplinary technologies, to promote physical health. Public health programmes conjure an image of overweight individuals as strongly burdened subjectivities. The implications for overweight pregnant women are the formation of new subjectivities, engagement in patient associations, the threat of exclusion from communities and social citizenship and other forms of stigmatization.