Cat Pausé

Choosing whether to resist or reinforce the new managerialism: the impact of performance‐based research funding on academic identity

This article uses four academics’ gendered and cultural responses to life in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand under the new managerialist regime. Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) requires academics to submit evidence‐based portfolios every six years to categorise and rank them, with government funding assigned accordingly. When the authors met as members of a writing group, the talk often turned to negative aspects of PBRF. Using co‐operative enquiry, the four co‐researchers began writing observations of their individual experiences, differences and identities to help them reflect and understand the impact of the changed environment. The four phases of writing as enquiry were: deciding on a focus, writing observations, engaging with the written accounts and interpreting the outcome through metaphor. The article process facilitated a positive outcome by helping the authors regain a sense of collegiality and mutual support, along with a sense of preserving their academic identity by writing and publishing as a group.

X-Static Process: Intersectionality Within the Field of Fat Studies

From Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theoretical use to Flavia Dzodan’s more recent declaration—the issue of intersectionality is acknowledged within feminist circles as an important tenant of scholarship, pedagogy, and activism. In this introduction to a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, I explore intersectionality within the field of fat studies, as well as the themes addressed by the issue contributors. Consideration is given to how reflective intersections strengthen fat studies scholarship, and the conceptual and methodological challenges that intersectionality poses to researchers. I conclude by reflecting on ways in which fat studies scholars may move forward in embracing intersections and promoting social justice.

Stigma in Practice: Barriers to Health for Fat Women.

In this paper, we explore barriers to health for fat people. By shifting the focus from what fat people do or do not do, neoliberal principles are replaced by a focus instead on structural and institutional policies, attitudes, and practices. This includes the impact of stigma on the health treatment and health-seeking behavior of fat people. For example, we consider the role that provider anti-fat attitudes and confirmation bias play in the failure to provide evidenced-based healthcare to fat patients. This is an autoethnographic paper, which provides the opportunity to read research from the perspective of fat scholars, framed by questions such as: can fat people have health? Is health itself a state of being, a set of behaviors, a commodity, a performance; perhaps the new social contract? As a co-written autoethnographic paper, one aspect of the evidence provided is the recorded experiences of the two fat authors. This includes writing from notes, journals, compiled and repeated experiences with medical professionals, family, and the community. Framed by feminist standpoint and supported by literature drawn from Fat Studies, Public Health, Obesity Research, and other interdisciplinary fields, this is a valuable opportunity to present an extended account of fat discrimination and the impact of the stigma fat people face through the medical profession and other sectors of the community, written by fat individuals. The paper concludes by considering the health pathways available to fat people. Special attention is paid to whether Bacon and Aphramors Health at Every Size paradigm provides a path to health for fat individuals.

Die another day: the obstacles facing fat people in accessing quality healthcare.

In this issue of Narrative Inquiries in Bioethics, fat individuals share their healthcare experiences. Through reading the narratives, it becomes clear that access to proper healthcare is often blocked for fat patients by a variety of things, including shame and fat stigma. From physical spaces in which they do not fit, to doctors who diagnose all of their problems as ‘fat’, similar themes are echoed across the stories. And common are the refrains for better treatment, less shame, and access to evidenced based care from educated providers. In this manuscript, I highlight common themes from the stories and integrate them with themes from the literature. I allow the two dissenting narratives to suggest other ways of thinking about fatness and well–being. And I conclude by suggesting ways to provide better access to quality healthcare for fat individuals.

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

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.

Enlarging conference learning : at the crossroads of fat studies and conference pedagogies

ABSTRACT This article stages an encounter between the field of fat studies and conference pedagogy scholarship. After laying the foundations for a reading of academic conferences as learning spaces, the authors present two examples—International Fat Studies Conferences held in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2012 and 2016—to unpack these ideas. The framing of fat studies conferences as pedagogical spaces sparks questions that travel in multiple directions. It calls us to consider possible modifications to the design of fat studies conferences, as well as how discussions about fat pedagogy may have a wider application to academic gatherings.

Borderline: The Ethics of Fat Stigma in Public Health:

This article argues that public health campaigns have an ethical obligation to combat fat stigma, not mobilize it in the “war on obesity.” Fat stigma is conceptualized, and a review is undertaken of how pervasive fat stigma is across the world and across the lifespan. By reviewing the negative impacts of fat stigma on physical health, mental health, and health seeking behaviors, fat stigma is clearly identified as a social determinant of health. Considering the role of fat stigma in public health, and the arguments made for using stigmatisation in public health campaigns to promote population health, it is concluded that it is a violation of public health ethics to use stigma as a tool in combatting fatness. The article concludes by making recommendations of how public health in New Zealand can combat, rather than reinforce, fat stigma.

“I'm Just a Woman Having a Baby”: Negotiating and Resisting the Problematization of Pregnancy Fatness

This article explores how fat pregnant people construct successful narratives around their pregnancies and birthing. Fat pregnant people are a critical site for the war on fatness; viewed as irresponsible: threatening the health of their pregnancy, and the far-off future of their child. Contemporary knowledge about pregnancy fatness is imbued with longstanding and powerful gendered biomedical discourses that have served to script women’s reproductive bodies as faulty and deviant compared to the masculine ‘norm’ priming them for medical management and control. The problematisation of pregnancy fatness represents a concerning extension of maternal responsibilisation to pregnancy, entangling pregnant women in a politics of preemptive action to secure their children’s future health, all the while denying the socio-political, economic and cultural realities of women’s lives that constrain their ability to do so. Policy and media responses have located both the causes of, and solutions to, the problem of fat pregnancy in women’s individual self-management imploring them to take responsibility for the necessary lifestyle changes needed to reduce the risks posed by their fat bodies to their babies and the health system. This paper extends critical scholarship on the problematisaiton of pregnancy fatness by identifying the importance of understanding not only how women are oppressed by these dominant discourses but also how they are involved in strategies of negotiation and resistance. By creating space for alternate versions and visions, discursive resistance offers a critical means by which individuals can exercise agency by redefining their lives and recovering their harmed identities.

Frozen: A fat tale of immigration

ABSTRACT Fat people are constructed as failed citizens; they are believed to be a burden on society, consuming too many resources and costing too many healthcare monies. In modern neoliberal contexts, this results in hostile environments and the development of spoiled identities (stigmatized identities in which the bearer is held responsible for the stigma). These hostile environments are demonstrated in many ways: governments failing to designate weight as a category protected from discrimination, public health campaigns aimed at battling the “war on obesity,” and immigration policies that exclude people based on body mass index. The author explores the latter using an autoethnographic method; the author, who was excluded from obtaining a resident visa in New Zealand because of her body mass index, uses her personal experiences battling an immigration system to explore these biopolitics and their role in (re)producing fat oppression.