“You will face discrimination”: Fatness, motherhood, and the medical profession

Abstract

This is an autoethnographic article that explores the intersection of fatness, pregnancy, motherhood, health and diabetes, and interaction with the medical profession. The autoethnographic approach used includes both written stories and photographic narrative. There have been times when my fat body has been seen by the medical profession as barren, incapable, and excessive and also times when I didn't know whether I could trust a medical opinion to be objective, because I inhabit a fat body. I discuss medical and cultural assumptions about a fat woman's ability to conceive, oppressive medical policies, such as how much weight a fat woman "should" gain in pregnancy and what she "should" eat according to medical guidelines. In addition, I document the complicating factor of having diabetes and the hypermonitoring of blood sugar and "dieting" to keep a baby safe, and the return of guilt about eating "the wrong things." I tell these stories to illuminate what the medicalization of fatness, pregnancy, and early motherhood have been like, including the effect it had on my ability to practice fat acceptance. The article is framed by both scholarly and fat activist approaches to the discussion of fat embodiment, pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, in an attempt to expose discrimination and oppression of fat women's bodies within the medical field. I consider the question: How can a fat woman have a voice during pregnancy and into motherhood?

Weight loss, cure, and temporality in the “Diet Capital of the World”: Disciplining fatness in Durham, North Carolina

“…Kafer (2013) suggests that "cure" constitutes a myriad of "normalizing treatments that work to assimilate the disabled mind/body as much as possible" (Kafer, 2013: 28). Anti-fat disciplining technologies can also be thought of as "cures" for the supposed threat of fatness, including the clinical use of the BMI (Anderson, 2012), reduction diets (Besio and Marusek, 2015;Lee, 2020), weight loss (Parker, 2014), and gastric bypass surgery (Boero, 2012). Feminist geographers consider spatial processes as central to the management and control of certain bodies.…”

«Deberías adelgazar, te lo digo porque te quiero»: reflexiones autoetnográficas sobre la gordura

“…Las autoetnografías tienen también un valor terapéutico para quien escribe y para quien las lee; pues la persona lectora puede hallar en este tipo de textos una «legitima-ción» de sus vivencias y una vía para «reinscribir en su biografía lo sucedido» (Esteban, 2004 p. 17), así como un revulsivo para vivir de manera más reflexiva y para superar las experiencias de dolor y malestar (Lee, 2020).…”

“…Sin embargo, compartir historias y exponer nuestra vulnerabilidad nos conecta con el mundo en un 'acto esperanzador', cuestión especialmente relevante para grupos sociales estigmatizados, como las personas gordas (Lee, 2020). Personalmente, recibí el estímulo para escribir una versión temprana de esta autoetnografía de una profesora, cuando años atrás, mientras cursaba un máster de género me instó a politizar mi malestar con la gordura.…”