Megan Warin

In the name of the child The gendered politics of childhood obesity

This paper investigates the ways in which ‘the child’ is positioned in obesity debates and, in doing so, examines the discursive relations between childhood obesity, mothering and child neglect. Using legal cases of parental neglect and an analysis of representations of obesity in Australian print media, we argue that a particular constellation of ‘child politics’ in which children are represented as innocent victims of poor parenting is at play. Parenting, however, is a code for mothers and it is their gendered responsibility for food and families for which they are now being held legally culpable in cases of neglect. The relationship between children and mothers has become the focus of moral discourses around childhood obesity, containing contradictory elements of innocence and risk, responsibility and danger. The intersection of child politics, mothering and individualized responsibility not only illuminates the ways in which gender is absent yet centrally implicated in obesity debates and policy, but also highlights how models of neoliberal governance encompass both State and decentralized forms of power in their attempt to regulate excess bodies.

Mothers as smoking guns: Fetal overnutrition and the reproduction of obesity

Mothers are expected to monitor their children’s dietary intakes and physical activities and are blamed for over feeding their children if they are obese. Women are also urged to manage their own weight in preparation for conception and during pregnancy in order to reduce complications associated with maternal obesity at childbirth. Through a theoretical lens of maternal blame, we argue that Australian media representations of scientific studies of the fetal overnutrition hypothesis extend behavioural maternal blame to the interiority of women’s bodies. Women’s intrauterine environments are positioned in the media as central to the intergenerational transmission of obesity, with women portrayed as responsible for passing obesity on to their children (and grandchildren) via biology and ill-informed ‘lifestyle choices’. Linking in with historical and contemporary discourses of maternal bodies and individual responsibility, the implications of the ‘double damage’ caused by women entails a concerning return to essentialism in which women’s bodies are being largely blamed for producing and reproducing obesity across generations.

Telescoping the origins of obesity to women's bodies: how gender inequalities are being squeezed out of Barker's hypothesis.

Aim: This paper traces the genealogy of the Barker hypothesis and its intersections with popular representations of scientific discourses about pregnancy and maternal obesity. Method: Drawing on Foucaults genealogical method, this study examines the historical ‘descent’ of the developmental origins of adult disease and its initial grounding in structural factors of gender inequality and low socioeconomic status. Results: In the more recent reproductive medicine literature, Barkers hypothesis has been used to understand the causes and consequences of foetal over-nutrition and has shifted its focus from social determinants to individual, gendered bodies. The print media has gainfully employed this conceptualization of obesity and, in doing so, placed women, and mothers in particular, as causal agents in the reproduction of obesity across generations. Such a ‘common sense’ understanding of obesity production and reproduction means that both the scientific literature and the public understanding of science has inadvertently assisted in putting women forward as the transmitters of obesity across generations. Conclusions: This powerful telescoping of the origins of obesity to womens bodies and their appetites is in stark contrast to earlier foci on gender inequalities and changing womens circumstances.

Transformations of Intimacy and Sociality in Anorexia: Bedrooms in Public Institutions

Anorexia can be characterized as a profound transformation in social relations. These transformations occur across a number of overlapping fields, and include a range of institutional and domestic spaces and myriad mundane bodily practices in each. Through an examination of household space and a conventional treatment programme this article demonstrates the ways in which people with anorexia use and transform space. While there are many treatment programmes available for those with a diagnosis of anorexia, the ethnographic focus here is on those who have undergone bed programmes in public hospitals. As a result of the particularities of time and space, these rooms are transformed into intimate spaces that represent domestic bedrooms, thus fundamentally changing the nature of shared space in institutionalized settings. These transformations, however, are not straightforward, for these bedrooms fuse a number of bodily practices (such as eating, sleeping and abluting) that are sharply demarcated in domestic architecture. In these hospital bedrooms, private and public space is conflated, reversed and made ambiguous. Moreover, this article argues that this institutional transformation of space reproduces many of the private practices associated with anorexia, a factor which has been overlooked in the recorded failure of these types of programmes.

The power of place : space and time in women's and community health centres in South Australia

This paper focuses on the importance of time and space in an Australian medical setting. It draws on research findings from a one year project that aimed to explore community perspectives of, and experiences of medical services in three South Australian womens and community health centres. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis were used in order to address these objectives. A significant finding was the way in which participants described the organisation and experience of time and space in these centres and how this impacted on their health and well being and that of the community. In analysing these spatio-temporal dimensions and the underlying philosophical structures of womens and community health centres, this paper argues that experiences associated with space and time have a positive effect on health status by: diminishing barriers to health services, improving quality of care, increasing community participation, providing safe places for social interaction and strengthening peoples sense of belonging or attachment to a particular community and place. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that the spatio-temporal dimensions of health care provision have empowering and positive impacts on a communitys health, a significant finding that has implications for the maintenance and future funding of this style of health service.

Material Feminism, Obesity Science and the Limits of Discursive Critique

This article explores a theoretical legacy that underpins the ways in which many social scientists come to know and understand obesity. In attempting to distance itself from essentialist discourses, it is not surprising that this literature focuses on the discursive construction of fat bodies rather than the materiality or agency of bodily matter. Ironically, in developing arguments that only critique representations of obesity or fat bodies, social science scholars have maintained and reproduced a central dichotomy of Cartesian thinking – that between social construction and biology. In this article I examine the limitations of social constructionist arguments in obesity/critical fat studies and the implications for ignoring materiality. Through bringing together the theoretical insights of material feminism and obesity science’s attention to maternal nutrition and the fetal origins hypothesis, this article moves beyond the current philosophical impasse, and repositions biological and social constructionist approaches to obesity not as mutually exclusive, but as one of constant interplay and connectedness.

Epigenetics and Obesity The Reproduction of Habitus through Intracellular and Social Environments

Bourdieu suggested that the habitus contains the ‘genetic information’ which both allows and disposes successive generations to reproduce the world they inherit from their parents’ generation. While his writings on habitus are concerned with embodied dispositions, biological processes are not a feature of the practical reason of habitus. Recent critiques of the separate worlds of biology and culture, and the rise in epigenetics, provide new opportunities for expanding theoretical concepts like habitus. Using obesity science as a case study we attempt to conceptualise the enfolding of biological and social processes (via a Deleuzian metaphor) to develop a concept of biohabitus – reconfiguring how social and biological environments interact across the life course, and may be transmitted and transformed intergenerationally. In conclusion we suggest that the enfolding and reproduction of social life that Bourdieu articulated as habitus is a useful theoretical frame that can be enhanced to critically develop epigenetic understandings of obesity, and vice versa.

The Weight of the Word Knowing Silences in Obesity Research

In this article, we examine the ethical and methodological tensions entailed in doing qualitative research in obesity studies. Framing our own embodied engagements through critical social theory, we consider how cultural meanings associated with obesity are silenced and negotiated in the research process. This negotiation is fraught with linguistic and corporeal challenges, beginning with the decision to use (or not use) the word obesity in research materials. Obesity is a visible stigma, and we argue that silencing language does not erase the tacit judgments that accompany discursive categorization. It is in a broader context of power relations that we examine the relationship between researcher and participant bodies and the ways in which collective knowingness about fat bodies underpins methodological engagement. The simultaneous presence and absence of obesity have a significant impact on the research process, in shaping both participants’ experiences and the researcher’s actions and interpretations.

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Child Care During Toddlerhood Relate to Child Behavior at Age 5 Years

BACKGROUND: Disentangling the effects of maternal depression in toddlerhood from concurrent maternal depression on child behavior is difficult from previous research. Child care may modify any effects of maternal depression on subsequent child behavior, but this has not been widely investigated. METHODS: We examined the influence of maternal depressive symptoms during toddlerhood on childrens behavior at the age of 5 years and investigated if formal or informal child care during toddlerhood modified any relationship observed. RESULTS: Data were available from 438 mothers and their children (227 girls and 211 boys); the mothers who completed questionnaires during the childrens infancy, in toddlerhood, and at the age of 5 years. Recurrent maternal depressive symptoms in toddlerhood (when study children were aged 2 and 3½ years) was a significant risk factor for internalizing, externalizing, and total behavior problems when children were aged 5 years. Intermittent maternal depressive symptoms (study child age 2 or 3½ years) did not significantly affect child behavior problems. Formal child care at the age of 2 years modified the effect of recurrent maternal depressive symptoms on total behavior problems at age 5 years. Informal child care in toddlerhood did not significantly affect child behavior problems. CONCLUSIONS: Recurrent, but not intermittent, maternal depressive symptoms when children were toddlers were associated with child behavior problems at age 5 years. As little as half a day in formal child care at the age of 2 years significantly modified the effect of recurrent maternal depressive symptoms on total behavior problems. Formal child care for toddlers of depressed mothers may have positive benefits for the childs subsequent behavior.

Threads of Memory: Reproducing the Cypress Tree through Sensual Consumption

This paper is concerned with the ways in which a group of Persian women, who have all fled Iran in the last two decades, give meaning to place and memory through the everyday practices of cooking and embroidery. While there are many different localised arts of patterning and flavour, we focus here on the recurring pattern of bota (the Cypress tree). In particular, we examine how the bota motif links both the making of domestic sweets and cloths, and is central in recalling and remaking a sense of place. The Cypress tree symbolises life: the continuation of life in place, and the continuation of place in life. In creating and consuming the bota motif, through eating, laying tablecloths, wrapping towels, sitting on cushions and drawing curtains, embodied experiences of landscape and relationships are reproduced. The embroidery items entail and occasion sensual engagement in and of themselves, and also serve as backgrounds for specific sensual engagements, including, for example, as tablecloths upon which food will be served. Engagement with the bota pattern cannot be characterised along strictly divided sensual dimensions. Rather, we argue that the senses are intertwined in a synaesthetic knot in which memory is embodied and reproduced.