Mothers at large: Governing fat pregnant embodiment

Abstract

This thesis responds to a cultural moment in which the reproductive potential of fat women’s bodies has been problematised as a public health crisis. A surge in medical scientific interest in the harmful effects of fat (termed “maternal obesity”) on pregnancy, childbirth, and the developing fetus has been sensationally reported in the news media and resulted in the reorientation of public policy and maternity care toward the management and discipline of fat maternal subjects. Informed by a feminist poststructuralist epistemology and methodology, and in particular Foucault’s method of problematisation, this thesis takes a critical stance on the contemporary logics and truth claims made in relation to maternal obesity, peeling back these knowledges to reveal them as social-cultural and politically influenced phenomena. Through in-depth, semi-structured caring conversations with 27 self-identified fat and ethnically diverse women who were trying to conceive, currently pregnant, or who had recently had a baby, this research reveals how the problem of pregnancy fatness has come to be, whose interests are served, the effects of this problematisation, and how this might be different. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using a form of poststructural discourse analysis incorporating the principles of intersectionality (e.g., Collins, 1986) and affective-discursive practices (Wetherell, 2015a). Dominant discourses of reproductive harm and being a burden on maternity care services are identified within contemporary maternal obesity knowledges and are shown to have a range of oppressive effects on fat women’s possibilities for being in relation to reproduction and mothering. In particular, fat pregnant women are shown to take up subjectivities of failed mothering and poor citizenship casting a shadow over their pregnancies and driving engagement with the self-governing imperatives of neoliberal governmentality. Fat pregnant women are shown to engage in pre-emptive biopolitical technologies of self in an attempt to minimise their pregnancy weight gain and gain control of their bodies. However, rather than enhancing their health, self-governed action during pregnancy that is energised by feelings of shame and fear is shown to have a range of harmful effects on fat pregnant people and their babies. This is compounded for women already marginalised along racial and other lines. Efforts to address the public health crisis of maternal obesity by undermining fat maternal identity are shown to be actually generating their own health harms. The thesis concludes by exploring the possibilities for generating a counter-knowledge of pregnancy fatness drawn from fat women’s resistances and incorporating the principles of reproductive justice. One that insists on a more holistic and complex engagement with the determinants of reproductive health, and that opens up spaces for more liveable and peaceful fat maternal subjectivities.