Corporate academic body capital: weight stigma, masculinity, and the embodied corporate academy in Chile

How does weight stigma operate in the neoliberal university, and to what extent does professional survival demand bodily conformity? This autoethnography analyzes the intersection of academic ranking mechanisms and weight-based discrimination in the Chilean higher education system. Drawing on field notes written while I underwent bariatric surgery and, at the same time, applied for academic tenure, the article challenges the notion that bodily transformation is a purely personal health choice. I propose the concept of “corporate academic body capital”: the professional advantage conferred by weight-normative bodies in institutions that implicitly code fatness as a lack of discipline and intellectual competence. The concept is an original contribution that extends Bourdieu’s theory of capital and sociological stigma theory into fat studies scholarship on weight discrimination at work. Bringing fat studies into dialogue with recent research on weight stigma and the biomedicalization of weight, I argue that the “embodied corporate academy” creates a coercive environment where physical transformation becomes inseparable from professional legitimacy. The analysis shows weight stigma operating through structural mechanisms (exclusionary environments, weight-centric policies), through interpersonal dynamics (credibility deficits, surveillance), and through the internalized pressure to overperform to compensate for a non-normative body. The paper demonstrates how the neoliberal university weaponizes wellness discourse to enforce an aesthetic of efficiency, making bodily conformity a prerequisite for professional survival.