Deborah McPhail

Resisting biopedagogies of obesity in a problem population: understandings of healthy eating and healthy weight in a Newfoundland and Labrador community

High rates of obesity in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s eastern-most province, have helped to position Newfoundlanders as a ‘problem population’ within discourses of the Canadian obesity ‘epidemic.’ As such, biopedagogies of obesity have been deployed by public health offices in the province, through which Newfoundlanders are imagined as unhealthy eaters who are unknowledgeable about healthy eating, a narrative which aligns with older classist stereotypes about Newfoundland as ubiquitously poor, its population uneducated, backward, and naïve. A qualitative study with 28 participants (and a total of 54 interviews) from St. John’s, the urban center of Newfoundland and Labrador, however, not only revealed a group of people quite knowledgeable about and invested in biopedagogies of healthy eating and healthy weights as propagated by public health discourse, but who also resisted them through alternative understanding of healthy foodways. Results of this study therefore contribute to critical obesity scholarship, as they interrupt assumptions that position populations with high obesity rates as unknowing and uncaring about healthy eating and body weight, demonstrate the ways in which a population might resist biopedagogies of obesity, and highlight the need for research disrupting universalist stereotypes about ‘problem populations’ and their health behaviors.

I Don't Want to be Sexist But ... DENYING AND RE-INSCRIBING GENDER THROUGH FOOD

Abstract Reporting the results of semi-structured interviews with adults and teenagers in twentytwo urban and rural families in British Columbia, Canada, this paper explores how gendered divisions of food consumption continue to exist within a supposedly “non-sexist” ideological context. With a photo elicitation technique used to stimulate discussions of food and gender, investigators found that most interview participants reproduced stereotypically gendered categories of food and ate in typically gendered ways; they did so even as they resisted the naming of particular foods as gendered. We therefore argue that while food and foodways remain gendered, the denial of them, through a process we call “performing individualism,” strengthens gender inequality by allowing gender disparities to appear not as systematic instances of inequity but rather as isolated instances of “natural” tastes and personal choice.

Wombs at risk, wombs as risk: Fat women’s experiences of reproductive care

ABSTRACT Using the Foucaultian concepts of biopower and biocitizenship, critical scholars of childhood “obesity” have shown how fat mothers are labeled as “risks” not only to their children, but also to the State. Such discourses are salient even for fat women who have yet to birth children, as fat women’s “poor utero environments” are now imagined as “at-risk” spaces for babies particularly by the medical community. Critical theorists are only beginning to trace how such discourses of in-utero risk impact fat women who are attempting to conceive and who are pregnant. The authors add to this nascent scholarship by relating the results of a Canadian study exploring the weight-related healthcare experiences of fat women accessing reproductive healthcare while attempting to conceive, while pregnant, or while giving birth. Participants described how fetal risk was ubiquitously emphasized by healthcare professionals who continuously communicated fat women’s unfitness as mothers. At the extreme, participants described experiences resonating with so-called “hard” eugenic practices, wherein participants were routinely denied certain procedures that would have allowed them to attempt conception, including the removal of birth control devices. The authors suggest, then, that current medical biopolitics of “maternal obesity” are one inflection of a “new eugenics” that not only produces and manipulates life, but also prevents it all together.

Fat, queer and sick? A critical analysis of ‘lesbian obesity’ in public health discourse

Recent public health publications identify lesbians as a ‘risk population’ with regards to ‘obesity’ and related comorbidities. Work of this nature argues that lesbian populations have higher rates of obesity due to poor diet and exercise behaviours which are, in turn, blamed on ‘lesbian culture’s’ feminist-informed criticism of patriarchal edicts of beauty, which allow lesbians to develop a greater tolerance for body fat. Also blamed is lesbian sexuality itself, as it is purported that lesbians do not need to work towards the heterosexual feminine ideal, thus avoiding the male gaze which demands thinness. This paper is a comprehensive literature review and critical discourse analysis of public health research on obesity that constructs lesbians as a ‘risk population.’ We outline how public health literature on lesbian obesity relies on old, well-worn discourses of queer sexualities in general as ‘sick’, helping to re-pathologize lesbians through conflating lesbianism and lesbian culture with a condition that is always-already considered insalubrious and, sometimes, diseased. These findings are significant, in that the organization of lesbians as a risk population within public health obesity discourse has yet to be explored in depth by critical obesity and fat studies scholars.

Exposed social flesh: Toward an embodied fat pedagogy

ABSTRACT Recently, a small but growing literature has emerged investigating and outlining what a fat studies pedagogy might entail. Missing from much of this literature is a discussion about how the material body becomes a site through which “obesity” discourse is resisted or reproduced in the classroom. The authors attempt to fill this gap by focusing in particular on the educator’s body. They present the deepened understanding that results when three differentially positioned feminist and fat studies educator-scholars engage in a reflexive analysis regarding their experiences of teaching fat pedagogy within the academy. They argue that for educators of a marginalized topic such as fat studies, corporeal risks emerge as classrooms become spaces where the social stigma of fatness intersects with and instigates careful surveillance of (fat) bodies. Each of the authors explores her experiences of these risks, interrogating how her body is voluntarily and involuntarily interpolated (or not) into the epistemological and theoretical frames of fat studies or critical weight curricula to become a site of learning for students. In addition, the authors reflect on how critical weight and fat studies—not only through the offering of critical fat studies literature, but also through students’ readings of their teacher’s flesh, can be used in the university as a means to resist “obesity” ideology and potentiate a reconstituting subjectivity, thus reinforcing a socially just pedagogy that upholds the necessary view that bodies of all shapes and sizes count.