Fat and deserving: navigating the visibility and visuality of non-normative bodies in online medical crowdfunding

Abstract

ABSTRACT Medical crowdfunding is an individualizing and privatizing response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs in order to elicit donations. We present data from a study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to analyze weight-loss-related campaigns, with a focus on visibility and visuality. We highlight the complexities involved in making fat (and otherwise non-normative) bodies acceptable, marketable, and deserving to online audiences. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of text and images, across nineteen public Givealittle campaigns related to intentional weight loss, we identified five main themes relating to how the fat body was presented. These themes include: unwell bodies, transitional bodies, active bodies, objectified bodies, and wretched bodies. We show that the ability of particular bodies to generate specific moral emotions (that can, through these platforms, be turned into care/healthcare access) depends largely on their relationship to normative ideas of the “good” body. Our analysis offers insight into how people negotiate hierarchies of deservingness, based on entrenched normativities, while living in non-normative bodies. More specifically, we show how people pursuing intentional weight loss use images to regulate themselves according to a wider anti-fat and neoliberal logic of deservingness. We explore images on crowdfunding campaigns as a form of both media labor and moral labor, highlighting the double-bind of the digital gaze upon bodies that are unable to access privileged states of health without being made visible to scrutiny.