Reproducing fatness and disability: Risk avoidance and the womb

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on neoliberal discourses of health, “obesity,” and disability by analyzing pregnancy biopedagogies, specifically maternal “obesity,” through United States government agencies and public health campaigns warning against fat pregnancy. This discourse constructs fat women as irresponsible mothers and deficient citizens who put their bad habits ahead of their unborn children’s health. Focusing on pre-pregnancy weight essentializes women, reducing them to their reproductive capacities and exposing them to increased state interference in their reproductive choices. Conceptualizing health as risk avoidance seeks a future in which fatness and neurodiversity do not exist. I propose cripping and fattening time as possible remedies for this erasure. Reconceptualizing time allows fat people to live in the present without prescriptive cures to achieve normativity. Fat time and crip time challenge the capitalist logic that the only desirable bodies and minds are lean, intelligent, fast, independent, and productive. Instead, these non-normative temporalities provide a slower and more sprawling experience of time and offer an expansive understanding of what minds and bodies are expected to do and be.