"You’re just another friggin’ number to add to the problem”: Constructing the racialized (m)other in contemporary discourses of pregnancy fatness

Abstract

Tracing a line from popular eugenicist and racist reproductive control policies of the past century, this paper argues that contemporary Western discourses of pregnancy fatness perpetuate and amplify reproductive injustices endured by minority women, particularly socio-economically disadvantaged women of color and Indigenous women. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand with 12 self-identified fat, cis-gendered, Indigenous Māori women and women from the Pacific, we demonstrate how contemporary discourses about pregnancy fatness are racialized, constituting oppressive meanings about fat Māori and Pacific women’s unsuitability to reproduce and to mother. We demonstrate how such oppressive meanings perpetuate the harmful relations of colonization and reproduce legacies of reproductive injustice by disrupting Indigenous and other cultural epistemologies of reproduction, and undermining reproductive self-determination. We draw on the intersectional lens of reproductive justice, as articulated by women of color scholars and activists, to demand a much more complex and socially just view of the relationship between fatness, reproductive health and mothering. This view moves beyond individual blame and sanction to attend to the impact of discursive, structural and colonizing threats to maternal and child health, indeed to population health. It also restores and supports the dignity of women of color in their transition to parenthood by centering Indigenous and other cultural epistemologies of reproduction that intrinsically value their human existence and contextualize maternal belonging in a wider network of relationships.