Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women’s Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy

Abstract

M. Unnithan-Kumar and S. Tremayne ( eds ) Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women’s Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy . USA : Berghahn Books , 2011 , £45.00 (hbk) xi + 231 pp . ISBN: 978-0-85745-122-4 This edited volume is the result of a seminar series and workshop organised by the Fertility and Social Reproduction Group at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Four main themes are discussed as arising from the different authors’ contributions that situate understandings of maternal fatness either within culturally framed notions of the biological, gender and sexual inequalities, food and nutritional perspectives or global notions of risk and modernity. The collection presents an array of complementary multidisciplinary studies of fatness and its effects on reproduction from both socio-cultural and biomedical perspectives. Importantly, the book offers a unique insight into how women from different social and cultural backgrounds experience and negotiate their lives in context with health intervention policies designed to reduce the ‘risks’ associated with maternal ‘obesity’. Here the book is very successful in raising important questions about what fat means today. The editors explicitly state that the book seeks to explore the ways in which biology works within and through cultural understandings of the reproductive body in order to provide new analytic insights into fatness. The insightful studies of Randall, Walentowitz, Mabilia, de-Graft Aikins, Clarke, Sridhar and Guntupalli do indeed provide fresh evidence into the ways in which the lives of women and the social valuations of maternal fatness are impacted on by the global import of medical concepts and regulatory frameworks. These authors unpack the complex subjective and corporeal processes that produce and value maternal body size through an examination of the local everyday and global perspective in which fat maternal bodies are made meaningful and connected. Drawing on global studies, feminism, bio ethics and governmentality studies this volume examines to what degree medical and health perspectives of maternal fatness carry authority among women from different backgrounds. The comprehensive introduction from Unnithan-Kumar opens a thread that is continued throughout, exploring the processes through which the maternal body is subject to the global circulation and authority of biomedical fact on fatness. The authors highlight the points where authoritative discourses on fatness have converged, forming hegemonic and mobile knowledge regimes. These dominant state, scientific and medical knowledge frameworks and interventions contribute to the standardisation of fatness. Consumption practices come to be increasingly constructed as pathological and unhealthy requiring correction through uniform intervention and management techniques. The individual is responsibilised and homogenised. The fact that bodies are ‘fat prone’ does not absolve them from the moral responsibility of their fatness. The final chapter broadens this theme to include a critical appraisal of current approaches in dietetics. Aphramor and Gingras construct a convincing argument for a critical dietetics that, in keeping with the book’s underlying thread, calls for an emphasis on embedding nutritional discourse in the local and lived experiences of populations. This chapter extends the debate surrounding the authority of medical and health discourse to include the production, reproduction and circulation of knowledge about obesity. As a volume, this book weaves together many concerns and debates of interest to, but not limited to, scholars of intensive mothering/parenting, monitoring parenting/new parenting science, feminist bio ethics, gender and development, policy analysis, health studies, class analysis, post-colonialism, fat studies, human reproduction, dietetics, epidemiology, subjectivity, the body, qualitative psychology, discourse analysis and psychosocial studies. Importantly, the focus remains on exploring women’s own meaning making and the regulation and construction of the maternal body within biomedical and health discourse. The volume makes a valuable and fresh contribution to scholarship across a variety of fields and is accessible. The introduction would be particularly suitable as a concise overview to third year undergraduate and MSc students from a wide variety of disciplines. Overall the book would make a strong addition to both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists.