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Thesis ID: CBB791800247

The Fat Subject in Transition (2018)

Tyrol, Katherine Anne (Author)
Campbell, Nancy D. (Advisor)

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Campbell, Nancy D.
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2125419197?accountid=12964

Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 182 pp.

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PubMed

Weight management Health care Women and health Women Science and gender Surgery Obesity

Amidst histrionic media coverage of a purported “obesity epidemic,” weight loss surgery (WLS) has taken on greater saliency to institutions of biomedicine, individuals implicated by the labels “obese” or “overweight,” and those who challenge the hegemony of slimness that overshadows this whole arena. WLS demands tremendous lifestyle change of its recipients and frequently results in extensive personal upheaval, yet it is touted as a solution to the struggle involved in weight loss. WLS is a gendered procedure because its recipients are in large part women, but also because women are strongly implicated in weight-loss discourse and because household food management is gendered labor. In this research project, I complicate simplistic biomedical constructions of WLS by relying on lived experiences of the procedure and demonstrate that WLS is both the result of and a contributor to larger sociocultural phenomena related to fatness. How do WLS recipients enact concepts relevant to their daily practices, such as will, appetite, and habit? This project relies on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation with WLS recipients. My findings in this project are that the influence of post-surgical alcohol dependence is far more significant to recipients than is currently represented in existing ethnographic or biomedical literature about WLS; that family roles are intricately intertwined with feeding, eating, and the moralization of fat; and that recipients of WLS use a variety of innovative techniques to stake claims about their knowledge, will, and personhood. This dissertation weaves together existing work in Science and Technology Studies that attempts to understand and critique how technoscientific procedures function socioculturally; scholarship in sociology of health that investigates patients’ lived experiences of WLS; and the burgeoning field of Fat Studies which attempts to politicize fat and problematize efforts to “cure” it.

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