The Future Is Fat

Theorizing Time in Relation to Body Weight and Stigma

Jen Rinaldi, May Friedman, Emily R.M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, Tracy Tidgwell, Jen Rinaldi, May Friedman, Emily R.M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, Tracy Tidgwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367714932
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000434088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Fat bodies of today are commonly assumed to have no future at all. In this line of thinking, a fat life is framed as failure, and a fast track towards death itself. Meanwhile, the histories of modern fat existence, communities, activists, and artists have been essentially unknown, written out of origins and existence. Most medical and cultural evaluations of fat have rendered the fat body more and more visible, and yet the lived experiences of fat people are continually erased.

At a moment when scholars from various disciplines are contending with the question of who has a future, this book explores the relationship between fat experience and the social construction of time. The works in this volume draw from fields as diverse as social geography, women and gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies, cultural studies, visual art and craft, social work, communication studies, and queer theory, generating renewed understandings of the relationship between fatness and temporality. The Future Is Fat reimagines understandings of time to allow for new expressions of fat experience.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.

Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the “War on Obesity”

George Parker and Cat Pausé

ABSTRACT

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.

They may look gorgeous with their round cheeks and roly-poly bodies but experts warn that obese babies may face a lifetime of health problems mapped out even before conception. (Browne 2011, para. 1)

It may be uncomfortable for mothers to eat less and change their lifestyles, but after nine months they will get a great pay off for their children. (Associated Press, 2010, para. 5)

Over recent years “obesity science” has progressively traced the origins of fatness to “life in the womb,” and even to “life before the womb” (e.g., Gluckman and Hanson 2008; Heerwagen et al. 2010; Heslehurst 2011; Stothard et al. 2009). Fat pregnant bodies have been described as “wiring” offspring for future “obesity,” placing them at the epicentre of the so-called “war on obesity” (Evans 2010). The temporary state of pregnancy has become a site for establishing the future health success and embodiment of resulting offspring. Drawing on qualitative research findings with fat pregnant people and new “mothers,”¹ this paper demonstrates the embodied temporalities and related affects that arise from pregnant people’s attempts to secure the future of the child they are yet to meet from the perils of their own fatness in the present. The pre-emptive biopolitics of fat pregnancy piggybacks on maternal care and concern, imbricating fat pregnant people in the tasks of self-governance as they struggle to protect their future child from the perils of their own body. This causes harmful effects on maternal affect and the formation of maternal identity.

Cause and effect

This recent wave of “obesity” science has been driven by the technology-enabled advances of epigenetics and fetal programming. These fields posit that the environment during early human embryo and fetal development, and specifically the interaction between environmental and genetic factors, influence health, body weight, and risk of disease over the life course (Hocher et al. 2001). This linear perspective positions pregnancy, and pregnant people, as the “cause” for all future “effects.” Studies describing the womb origins of the “obesity epidemic” have been sensationally taken up in the news media with stories that frame maternal fatness as a significant threat to future population health and the public purse, and therefore weight management as a maternal and citizenry responsibility of pregnant people in the present (Parker 2014). Health policymakers have responded to the crisis framing of “maternal obesity” by initiating a new wave of policies and practices aimed at regulating fat pregnant peoples’ bodies and behavior (e.g., Farquhar and Gillett 2006; Ministry of Health 2014; Office of the Controller and Auditor General 2013).

Social anxiety about the embodied temporality of pregnancy is by no means a new phenomenon in the West. Feminist analyses have highlighted how developments in reproductive technologies such as routine obstetric ultrasound have concertinaed the future potentiality of the child into the state of being pregnant, constituting the pregnant person as “already a mother” and the fetus as her “child in the womb” (Mitchell 2001; Petchesky 1987). They have described a process of objectification and alienation from which the fetus has emerged as the central subject of pregnancy and the pregnant person has been reduced to its stage, subjected to medical and social scrutiny of her pregnant body and drawn into her own objectification through the task of “taking care of herself” (Young 2005, p. 46). This separating out of the fetal subject from pregnancy has created the social and cultural conditions for the construction of maternal and fetal conflict, and the associated rise of fetal protectionism—laws and policies designed to protect the “child in the womb” from the threatening body that caries it (Flavin 2008; Lupton 2012; Oaks 2000; Parker 2014). In its most extreme manifestation this led to abortion restrictions, and the prosecution and imprisonment of some pregnant people for fetal abuse. However, all pregnant people have come to be disciplined by the temporal collapse of the future child into the womb restricting bodily autonomy during pregnancy in relation to what pregnant people wear, eat, drink, and do (Lupton 2012).

Fetal protectionism as future proofing

Feminist governmentality scholars have demonstrated the toxic effects of fetal protectionism for reproductive justice, especially as it has segued neatly with the rise of neoliberal biopolitical governance (Jette and Rail 2012; Lupton 2012; McPhail et al. 2016; Parker 2014; Ruddick 2007). Neoliberalism seeks, among other things, to decrease state responsibility for, and involvement in, the conditions that determine the population’s health and social welfare by responsibilizing the individual with their own self-governance (LeBesco 2011). The management and care of one’s own body through a range of lifestyle practices has become a feature of good citizenship under neoliberal biopolitics (Lupton 2012). The health and well-being of children holds a central role in neoliberal governance representing the future potentiality of the child as a healthy, responsible, and capable citizen. As a result of the gendered constructs of mothering, this special focus on children’s health has led to a double responsibility placed on women, who have become tasked with their own self-management as well as ensuring the health of their children as the nation’s future citizens (Lupton 2012; Maher, Fraser, and Wright 2010; McNaughton 2011). This maternal responsibilization can be seen in the framing of moral panic about “child obesity” in Western societies whereby the weight of one’s children has increasingly become a measure of “good mothering” (Boero 2009). Of course, as a result of colonization, structural inequalities, and institutionalised racism, it is poor women and women of color who have the least access to the resources required to perform “good mothering” and bear the disproportionate burden of blame for their failure to do so.

Pre-emptive biopolitics

Despite maternal responsibilization already being embedded in the biopolitics of neoliberalism, the shift to the womb facilitated by a growing interest in fetal health and well-being is leading to unprecedented opportunities for pre-emptive biopolitics (Evans 2010). As Lupton (2012) argued, “pregnant women have thus become a prime target for neoliberal governmental strategies directed not only at the ‘care of the self’, but even more importantly, the ‘care of the (foetal) other’: the valuable potential child” (p. 335). Pre-emptive biopolitics has arisen as the solution to the temporal construction of the “obesity epidemic,” in which the “ticking time-bomb of obesity”—the womb environment—and the risks it poses to future population health (not to mention the anticipated burden to public health systems) is addressed through centering reproductive and young bodies as sites of failure in the present and the best chance at controlling the future (Evans 2010). Fat pregnant bodies are presented as risky, forecasting future costs and calamities of the “obesity epidemic.” This linear temporality is common in considerations of, and campaigns to address, obesity (Warin et al. 2015). What results is a climate wherein fat pregnant people and new mothers are perfectly positioned to be scapegoats for the health and social problems facing neoliberal states with vast and persistent inequalities, leading to unprecedented opportunities for the interrogation and control of their reproductive bodies. At its most extreme realization this could devolve into a eugenic agenda about who should and should not reproduce, with the most marginalized women being the most vulnerable to this. Indeed this is already bearing out in body mass index restrictions placed on eligibility for publically funded assisted reproductive technology (Farquhar and Gillett 2006), the exclusion of fat people as adoptive parents (Carter 2009), and an emerging role for child protection services in the management of “obese” children (Friedman 2015).

Embodied temporalities

But what of the quieter subjectifying and subjugating implications for fat pregnant people and new mothers as they negotiate their pregnant embodiment and emerging maternal identities in the shadow cast by pre-emptive biopolitics? In particular, what are the embodied temporalities and related affects that arise from pregnant people’s attempts to manage the future in the present and embody notions of maternal responsibility for a child they have not yet met? And how might this impact the relationship fat mothers form with their children once born and thus the development of their maternal identities? Our findings are drawn from in-depth semistructured interviews held in Auckland, New Zealand,² with 27 cisgender self-identifying fat people of varying ethnicities and socioeconomic circumstances who were at various stages of their reproductive journey: either trying to conceive, currently pregnant, or who had recently given birth. Participants were recruited through social media advertizing, notices in local newspapers, and posters displayed in maternity clinics. Interviews were conducted in women’s homes in the midst of their family life and were structured as caring conversations with the interviewer, herself visibly fat and pregnant (Frid, Öhlén, and Bergbom 2000). Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using Foucauldian-inspired discursive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2013).

Our analysis reveals the ways in which pre-emptive biopolitics piggyback on pregnant peoples’ deeply held care and concern for the well-being of their babies’ future, leading to negative affective responses and a range of self-governing practices. So powerful is the task of responsible pregnant motherhood, our participants readily took up the discourse that their bodies and lifestyle behaviors presented a risk to their babies’ future even when this contradicted their generally much more positive view of their own health and well-being. As Nadine described,

I was very, very worried, I was like oh my gosh, this is a bad thing that I’ve gone and got myself pregnant. I wasn’t thinking that I wasn’t healthy enough, but now that she’s [midwife] telling me I’m too fat I was like oh no, what am I going to do, is this child going to come out deformed? I was like is my baby… am I going to give it the right chance, you know, and then all these things that go through your head.

Despite navigating a lifetime of interpersonal and institutional fatphobia (Parker and Pausé in press), participants described their shock and shame to encounter the extent to which their fat bodies were problematized as a threat to their child’s future health when they embarked on pregnancy. Exposure to this problem discourse occurred across multiple sites both within maternity care encounters and institutions, and in wider society, for example, through news media stories. The subsequent internalization of their fatness as a risk to their babies’ future led most participants to question whether they were wrong or selfish to be having a baby at all. Stacey described her sense of society’s judgment of her pregnant fatness resulting from extensive media coverage of fetal programmin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the “War on Obesity”
• 2 Tempo-rarily fat: A queer exploration of fat time
• 3 Sedentary lifestyle: Fat queer craft
• 4 “Fats,” futurity, and the contemporary young adult novel
• 5 One summer to change: Fat temporality and coming of age in I Used to Be Fat and Huge
• 6 Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling: Making time with through thick and thin
• 7 “You can only be happy if you’re thin!” Normalcy, happiness, and the lacking body
• 8 Imagining body size over time: Adolescents’ relational perspectives on body weight and place
• 9 Against progress: Understanding and resisting the temporality of transformational weight loss narratives
• 10 The (fat) body and the archive: Toward the creation of a fat community archive
• Index