‘This growing genetic disaster’: obesogenic mothers, the obesity ‘epidemic’ and the persistence of eugenics (original) (raw)

2013, Studies in the Maternal

Ruth Cain, 'This growing genetic disaster': obesogenic mothers, the obesity 'epidemic' and the persistence of eugenics Studies in the Maternal, 5(2), 2013, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk Ruth Cain 'This growing genetic disaster': obesogenic mothers, the obesity 'epidemic' and the persistence of eugenics …this dramatic increase in omega-6 fatty acids in the diet of… mothers is causing transgeneration changes in our children due to fetal programming… This is called epigenetic programming and begins to explain why each succeeding generation …is getting fatter and fatter.…the "reward" response…induced by consuming junk food…can also be transferred to the next generation by fetal programming. So what can you do about this growing genetic disaster? If you are contemplating having a child, then beginning to cut back on omega-6 fatty acids and eating more omega-3 fatty acids is a good starting point. The benefits include having a thinner and smarter child. If you already have children whose gene expression has already been altered by fetal programming, then you have to control their diet for a lifetime to prevent reverting to that altered gene expression. (Sears 2011, np) 1 This article examines recent refigurations of maternal risk to child health within the heated debate on childhood obesity. Following theorists such as Lauren Berlant (1997; 2011) and Ian Hacking (1986; 1999), I wish to highlight and problematise the affective socio-cultural embodiment or 'making up' (Hacking 1986) of 'obesogenic' mothers-women who supposedly create 'obese' children both in and out of the womb, and thus engender a supposed public health crisis, which must be managed through various forms of regulation and surveillance. A popularscientific, medical and regulatory literature which frequently takes a remarkably gothic tone regarding the future of public health in affluent countries helps to shape a particular type of affective economy. Certain types of dangerous or abject bodies come to substitute social actors and agents so that the 'bad'/obesogenic mother becomes literally embodied through a variety of discursive, regulatory and representational means; an avatar of gendered 'truths' and anxieties. As recently described by Tracey Jensen (2012), the austerity agenda set in place by the British Coalition Government following the financial collapses of 2008/9, and the huge state of bailout of major banks, has been accompanied by a marked intensification in the rhetoric of 'undeserving' poverty (especially poverty relieved by state benefit payments). This also engendered a new politics of 'tough love', an affect associated with a rosy vision of functional 2 Ruth Cain, 'This growing genetic disaster': obesogenic mothers, the obesity 'epidemic' and the persistence of eugenics Studies in the Maternal, 5(2), 2013, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk families past, which appears to mandate thrift, self-control and refusal of waste; all characteristics associated with the responsible, self-sufficient post-austerity citizen who relieves the state of burdens of dependence, and embodies private respectability and a tidy, contained, and (crucially) inexpensive embodiment. Thus, I argue here, the figure of the wasteful, fat and irresponsible mother identified with working class (or 'workless' 2) families has become a particular scourge of the post-austerity state. Closely related to the working class/workless 'chav mum' stereotype identified by Imogen Tyler (2008), a highly recognisable caricature who stands in for a host of fears and assumptions about the nature of classed sexuality and reproductivity, the obesogenic mother comes into being as a 'real', socially problematic figure who is nonetheless hard to map onto any actual individual. Embodied as a 'social problem', she performs moral/ regulatory functions, emblematising the obsessional and simplistic 'dividing practices' (Foucault 1982). In turn, this repeatedly splits women, and particularly mothers, into the good/nurturing and the bad/toxic. Nikolas Rose (1999) has demonstrated that contemporary governance works by 'cutting' experience in specific ways, amid the ever more complex and confusing informational swirl which must be successfully negotiated by the good neoliberal citizen (Quiney 2007). Accordingly, I explore here how the contemporary neoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility refigures old and discredited eugenic ideas (i.e. rumours of the death of which, as Hanson (2012) argues, have been much exaggerated) about degenerative 'breeding' within the new 'social residuum' or 'bio-underclass' (Litt and McNeil 2003). The later is a group reconfigured as a dangerous drag on national fitness; and how the 'made-up' body and subjectivity of the obesogenic mother feeds into this revived tale of degeneration amid the accompanying scientific/regulatory narrative of an 'obesity epidemic'. The division of 'high-risk' from 'low-risk' mothers occurs repeatedly at various levels of political, medical and personal governance. From the directly legal/coercive measures of punishment, surveillance and segregation usually targeted at the most 'troublesome', to the popular, media-based, personalised forms of (self-)discipline through which the mother learns to become 'either divided inside (her)self or divided from others' (Foucault 1982, p. 208). The grim affective force of the purely-bad maternal figure produces a certain 'self-evident' and 'taken for granted' status in politics and culture, despite the apparent variety of her manifestations. This overwhelming and wearily familiar 'monstrous mother' fantasy 'tends to limit and inhibit thinking' about who or what mothers actually are or do (Seddon 2007, p. 3). Thus, specific fears spread from the false self-evidence of certain popularly conceived mother-fantasies and their