A feminist neomaterialist exploration of bariatric surgery in Canada

Rates of bariatric (weight loss) surgery have risen sharply in recent years as interventions into fatness have become increasingly medicalized and debates surrounding it binarized. We adopted a feminist neomaterialist perspective to challenge binary framings of weight loss surgery experiences still dominating the field’s conventional and critical approaches by thinking relationally about entanglements of discourse and materiality. Within our neomaterialist framework, we used conceptual tools from misfitting, debility, and affect theory to analyze interviews with 21 women residing in Canada who had surgery at least 1 year prior. Using reflexive thematic analysis and thinking with theory, we generated three processually oriented themes: the force of pre-surgical (mis)fitting, (un)certainty of a (non)fat future, and post-surgery as a liminal space. We argue that while surgery is often presented as a pathway to normality and “fitting in,” ambiguity and liminality emerge as hallmarks of post-surgery experience, unsettling binaristic portrayals of these surgeries.