AUTHOR=Parker George , Pausé Cat TITLE=“I'm Just a Woman Having a Baby”: Negotiating and Resisting the Problematization of Pregnancy Fatness JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology VOLUME=3 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2018.00005 DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2018.00005 ISSN=2297-7775 ABSTRACT=

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 problematization of pregnancy fatness represents a concerning extension of maternal responsibilization to pregnancy, entangling pregnant people 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 pregnancy fatness 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 problematization 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.