Body-Mapping the Affective Politics of Bariatric Surgery

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Bariatric surgery (or weight loss surgery, WLS), an increasingly common intervention into "obesity," remains a contentious topic amongst obesity experts, critics, and fat activists. As part of a larger study employing a neomaterialist framework, we worked with four women who resided in Canada and had WLS a minimum of one year prior to create life-size body-maps representing their pre- and post-surgical experiences. As a method, body-mapping can bring attention to somatic, embodied, and affective elements, uncovering structures of feeling informing/shaping WLS experiences. We used an affective analytic approach to make sense of the body-maps, which we present according to three affective strands: shades of gray, sensorial-cognitive relationalities with food and body, and entanglements of anticipated and unruly sensations and affects. Body-maps highlight the affective politics that are set into motion by, and set into motion, WLS and the hegemonic discourses and unruly affects that emerged.