Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the “War on Obesity”

The embodied temporality of fat pregnancy in the mist of the “obesity epidemic” is explored through interviews with 27 ethnically diverse, cisgendered, self-identified fat pregnant people in Aotearoa New Zealand. The interaction of pre-emptive biopolitics and pregnant maternal responsibilities encouraged the fat pregnant people in this study to set aside their embodied knowing and enjoyment of pregnancy to focus on strategies that could protect their offspring from their fat bodies. The biomedical management of their pregnancies, and their experiences of their pregnancies as targets of key interventions in the war on obesity, produced negative affective responses and self-governance strategies that resulted in developed identities of failed pregnant mothers.