Finding the ‘self’ after weight loss surgery: Two women’s experiences

Abstract

Drawing on narratives derived from two women’s YouTube vlogs (video blogs), we examine what weight loss surgery offers as a mode of being in the world. In these vlogs, Divataunia and Thebandinme have kept a record of their weight loss surgery ‘journey’. We explore the multiple selves they express, drawing on notions of embodiment and post-structuralist conceptualisations of subjectivity, to examine the contradictory and shifting experiences of having weight loss surgery. We examine the work that subjectivity ‘does’, in how each woman enacts her subjectivity, in what they ‘choose’ to express, and in how their choices are related to their perceptions and lived experiences of their bodies. In particular we investigate one subject position that the women both take up – a ‘fat subjectivity’ – and discuss how each woman relates to this subject position as her body changes. The notion of a weight loss surgery journey from an ‘old’ self to a ‘new’ one is explored and we conclude that the idea of a simple trajectory from ‘old’ to ‘new’ fails to adequately account for the complex vagaries of each women’s experience.

Keywords

Discourse embodiment subjectivity vlogging weight loss surgery women YouTube

Introduction

… feeling more confident in a lot of ways, my ego is swelling a little bit but also at the same time I don’t know who I am, I don’t know if I feel good about myself but I guess that is the journey and I know a lot of people consider lapband surgery as a journey and an emotional and personality type journey where it really changes you and it’s hard to anticipate how it’s gonna change you and who you’re gonna end up being. (Thebandinme,¹ 14 days post-surgery)

This passage is from Thebandinme’s video blog Surgery Blog Update! 14 days after surgery – Part D and captures the complexity of selfhood post-weight loss surgery (WLS), a mode of being that is ‘always already embodied’ (Murray, 2008) and constantly shifting. Thebandinme is one of many women and men ‘vlogging’ – video blogging – about their WLS ‘journeys’ on the video sharing website YouTube and one of the two women whose narratives are analysed within this paper. Thebandinme and the second woman, Divataunia, have both kept a consistent record of their journey both pre- and post-surgery through vlogging. In particular, their narratives offer an understanding of the complex negotiations of women who undertake WLS and provide insights into the ways WLS contours their embodied subjectivity. Their vlogs are an act of self-presentation and thereby offer multifaceted and rich insights into the lives and ‘selves’ they choose to communicate to the YouTube audience.²

In this paper, we explore the multiple selves expressed in Divataunia and Thebandinme’s vlogs and begin to make sense of them in light of notions of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and post-structuralist conceptualisations of subjectivity (Foucault, 1972, 1980), focusing on the inherent contradictions and shifting experiences of what it means to be a (WLS) subject/self. We are interested in the work that subjectivity ‘does’, in how each woman enacts her subjectivity, in what they ‘choose’ to express and in how their choices are related to their perceptions, conveying lived experiences of their bodies. This project is informed by sociological, psychological and feminist literature and contributes to a relatively under-theorised area of study of embodiment and WLS. This paper’s findings can yield insights for psychologists working with women who have had WLS, potentially assisting them to work in ways reflective of the diversity and complexity of women’s experiences.

We begin with an exploration of how Divataunia and Thebandinme’s subjectivities are embodied in various ways and argue, as many others have, for a fluid conceptualisation of subjectivity. We then discuss one subject position that the women both take up – that is, a ‘fat subjectivity’ – and discuss how each woman relates to this subject position as their bodies change. The loss of this collective fat subjectivity is part of a wider ‘identity crisis’ that both women speak of. The next section examines the WLS journey from an old self to a new version. However we argue that even while framed this way, the journey is not this straight forward. The binaries available to these women are not sufficient to describe their shifting experiences across categories with fluid boundaries. While these topics are addressed separately in this paper, we nevertheless emphasise the interwoven and messy nature of subjectivity (Davies, 1994) and the perils of separating out these aspects of the women’s construction of self in this way.

The context

Bariatric surgery is the medical term used to describe a variety of surgeries including gastric banding, gastric bypass and gastric sleeve; more popularly, all these techniques are referred to as WLS.³ WLS aims:

to limit the body’s ability to consume and/or absorb food through the restriction of stomach capacity and/or the shortening of the intestine. It carries risks of a panoply of chronic side-effects and complications (varying across different surgeries), including infection, malnutrition, vomiting, diarrhoea, digestive and intestinal problems, and in a relatively few cases, death (Ackerman, 1999), and is premised on a risk calculation that relies upon the unacceptability of the fat body and the equation of fatness with mortally dangerous ill-health. (Throsby, 2007: 1563)

WLS is an increasingly popular ‘choice’ and/or ‘solution’ to the avowed ‘problem’ of obesity, especially when other ‘interventions’ such as weight loss drugs have failed (Throsby, 2009). Indeed, in some quarters WLS is being touted as the last resort treatment (Buchwald et al., 2004) and the only permanent solution to this ‘problem’ (Throsby, 2009). Conversely, WLS is interpreted by Wilson (2005) as a cultural phenomenon that has emerged as a result of a climate of fat abhorrence. Consideration of Divataunia and Thebandinme’s vlogs takes place at a time when the obesity problem has gained significant purchase throughout the affluent Western world. While there is much evidence pointing to the lack of veracity upon which claims of an ‘obesity epidemic’ are based (see Gard and Wright, 2005), there remains concern in academia and within professional, governmental and popular media, regarding the health of populations (e.g. World Health Organisation, 2011) and non-normative modes of embodiment and practices.

Shilling (2003: 5, emphasis in original) writes that in an era where our health is increasingly perceived as at ‘risk’ from ‘global dangers’, and especially those linked to excess ‘fat’, we are ‘exhorted ever more to take individual responsibility for our bodies by engaging in strict self-care regimes’. Assumptions about the perceived health risks attributed to excess weight generate a moral panic which in turn drives solutions premised on surveillance and treatment and an understanding that interventions relating to body shape, size and fatness are crucial (Evans et al., 2003). Lupton (1995: 5) contends that ‘the discourses and practices of [public health and health promotion] have also worked to produce certain limited kinds of subjects and bodies’. Thus, according to new public health discourses, undergoing WLS is the ‘right’ and ‘healthy’ thing to do as a ‘good’ neoliberal citizen, when all other options have been unsuccessful (see Throsby, 2009).

Within this discourse, fat bodies are defined as problematic and in need of re-shaping. However, the choice to have WLS is condemned by fat acceptance movements⁴ (see National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, 2010; Wann, 2005) and many feminists alike, on the basis that it supports thin supremacies (Murray, 2010; Throsby, 2007; Wilson, 2005). In some feminist commentary, women who undergo WLS are positioned as cultural dupes for embodying beauty imperatives (Wilson, 2005). In some ways, the women at the centre of this project are in a no-win position. Whichever choice they make (i.e. to stay fat, or to undergo WLS), they risk marginalisation and moral sanction from varying directions. These are complex positions to uphold at the nexus of competing discourses.

The discursive context shaping women’s orientations to their bodies privileges medical/public health messages, orthodox notions of feminine beauty and moral narratives of control (Murray, 2008). The prevailing assumption in such a context is that the self/body can and should be continually worked on to achieve a state of health (read: thinness). As Murray (2005: 155) poignantly asserts, ‘in short, the fat body is discursively constructed as a failed body project’ and accordingly something must be done about it. For Divataunia and Thebandinme that ‘something’ is WLS.

Theoretical resources

Foucauldian conceptualisations of subjectivity and discourse (Foucault, 1972, 1980) together with Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) work on embodiment guide our discourse analysis of Thebandinme and Divataunia’s vlogs. While these are two avowedly differing epistemological lenses of enquiry, each of these perspectives shares a commitment to foregrounding questions around bodies and subjectivities. Crossley (1993: 99) argued that the two approaches are ‘not only commensurable and compatible, they are mutually informing and complementary’. Crossley (1993) highlighted the shared view of the body as a bearer of socio-historical behaviour; both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault accepted the definition of the body as active and acted upon although each predominantly focused on a different pole, respectively.

In Foucault’s (1972: 49) terms, discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’. This theoretical orientation towards post-structuralism makes it possible to apprehend the multiple discourses that we are caught up in (Davies, 1994). The way Foucault conceptualised power is central to understanding this process of constituting subjectivity, particularly his arguments that power is productive rather than repressive and that it constitutes the individual as a subject (Foucault, 1980). This conceptualisation of power orientates us to examining the discursive contexts in which WLS takes place.

An analysis of the discourses that women who undertake WLS draw upon, and then re-work to make sense of their experiences, is important because we understand that an ‘individual’s subjectivity is made possible through the discourses s/he has access to’ (Davies, 1994: 3). Subjectivity integrates the ideas of being subjugated to someone else’s control and tied to one’s own identity through conscience or self-knowledge (Foucault, 1983). As opposed to identity, which connotes something fixed and essential, subjectivity highlights the multiple, contradictory and fragmented experience of the post-modern world; it allows us to see how we are constituted and potentially positioned differently according to the range of subject positions made available in a particular socio-historical context, shaped by the discourses operating therein (Burrows, 1997; Davies, 1994; Weedon, 1987).

In addition to the discursive context contouring subjectivity, we are interested in the intersection between discourses and the body. Murray (2008: 7) calls for research that ‘attempts to theorise the experience of the “fat” body in terms of philosophical and feminist conceptualisations of embodiments and corporeality’. This ‘fleshy’ experience, which we are seeking to understand, lends itself well to drawing on theories of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), especially so given our desire to examine what it means to be a subject in relation to experiences of weight. Embodiment is useful as a theoretical concept for understanding subjectivity (Murray, 2008) and it also emerges as a regularly recurring theme in the women’s narratives.

Merleau-Ponty (1962: 82) insisted on the mind and body’s necessary interrelatedness, that we are our bodies and that they are our ‘vehicle[s] for being in the world’; that is to say we are embodied. As Murray (2008: 6, emphasis in original) suggests, ‘[w]e cannot separate our subjectivity from our embodiment, precisely because our subjectivity is always already embodied’. When using the term embodied subjectivity, then, we are referring to the ways in which one’s perception of self is tied up in and with one’s body. Following Murray (2008), whose work on embodiment we draw on heavily, we refer to embodiment and subjectivity separately at times; nonetheless, we appreciate the inextricable interrelatedness of these two terms.

Method

Divataunia and Thebandinme offered both quantity and quality of reflection in their vlogs. Of the many men and women vlogging about WLS on YouTube, Divataunia and Thebandinme were the two women we encountered most often, reflected in the high number of times their videos have been viewed and commented on (Divataunia, 1,238,800 views; Thebandinme, 422,700; July 2013). They both clearly had significant standing in the YouTube WLS community. Divataunia and Thebandinme are from North America and appear to be white, straight, able-bodied, middle class American women aged 35 and ‘20 something’, respectively, at the beginning of vlogging. Both cite health and psychological motivations for undergoing surgery. A limitation of this research is, as researchers from New Zealand, we are unable to fully grasp the discursive context in which the women’s encounters take place. In so saying, it is only ever possible to represent reality in an incomplete and partial way, regardless of location (Davies, 1994), and Divataunia and Thebandinme, through their vlogs, ‘speak’ to a global audience.

The sample size was limited to two due to the rich nature and immense amount of data generated by both women, allowing for a deep exploration of WLS experiences in keeping with our research aims (albeit at the expense of breadth). Divataunia began vlogging December 2007 (and continues in May 2013) and Thebandinme from July 2007 till November 2008; data included all vlogs until May 2010. During this time Thebandinme posted 66 and Divataunia 184 vlogs.

All Divataunia and Thebandinme’s vlogs were transcribed verbatim. In quotations, four ellipses indicates a section of the narrative has been omitted. Data were analysed drawing on discourse analytic strategies. Foucauldian discourse analysis draws on genealogical understandings, power analytics and critical hermeneutics (Powers, 1996) and has no ‘set’ or ‘prescriptive’ method (Burrows, 1997). Instead, readings of the texts – in the widest sense of the word – are undertaken, asking particular questions around discourses, power and knowledge, and subjectivity (Burrows, 1997). We used the theoretical resources outlined above, and the women’s narratives, to guide our analysis. We read and re-read the women’s transcripts several times for reoccurring emphases in the women’s talk, and subsequently followed these lines of enquiry. Questions driving this research were what are the discursive influences shaping these women‘s experiences of WLS, i.e. imperatives around how women should be or live that inform and influence their decisions, body orientations and practices? How do they resist, negotiate and take-up the operating discourses? What are the lived bodily experiences of WLS for these women? What does WLS offer as a mode of being in the world? And what does vlogging offer as a mode of being in the world?

The ethics around internet research are complex ‘due to the loaded nature of terms such as “public” and “private” and the difficulty of applying them to the online world’ (Berry, 2004: 323). The University of Otago Human Ethics Committee did not require an application for ethical approval, because the information was publicly available, nor did they require we seek consent from the authors (G. Witte, personal communication, October 6, 2009). Bruckman’s (2002) work outlines ethical guidelines for online research, contending that a researcher may freely quote and analyse online information without consent if it is officially, publicly archived, no password is required for archive access, no site policy prohibits it and the topic is not highly sensitive. Bruckman (2002: 217) argues that ‘the traditional notion of a “human subject” does not adequately characterize Internet users’ and instead outlines a continuum between ‘no disguise’ and ‘heavy disguise’ depending on the content of the research. We chose to use the women’s usernames to recognise their originality and did not obtain any form of consent. Our position is that given that the videos are purposively posted on YouTube for anyone who wishes to view them, we are therefore not putting these women at any more risk than they have originally put themselves to.

As with any recount of an experience to another person, a narrative is selected producing a particular representation (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). The online production of self is no different. There is a possibility of vlogs to be ‘staged’ or performed presenting a disingenuous account (although there is room for this in interview methodologies also) (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). Vlogging takes place in an online context that draws on offline discourses and norms. The internet potentially offers space for creating new meanings and constructing health discourses that are meaningful and explain the complexity of women‘s experiences (Miah and Rich, 2008), making YouTube an important site of analysis.

Social media sites such as YouTube are increasingly culturally, socially and economically important (Halvey and Keane, 2007). Vlogs themselves are a place for reflection about the self and increasingly they are a source of information (Wesch, 2008). YouTube typifies the argument that ‘the recording and watching of others – and ourselves – has become a naturalised component of our everyday lives’ (Murray and Ouellette, 2009: 8). Vlogging has been explained as ‘it’s as if everyone is watching yet nobody is. At once the most private space because it’s your bedroom, lounge and also quite possibly the most public space on the planet’ (Wesch, 2008: 25.05 min). It is intriguing to us that the women choose to so publicly document their bodies and weight, for example with weekly weigh-ins, given that weight is a conventionally a private matter, particularly for those deemed fat (Murray, 2008). Our analysis suggests that for the WLS community, or those considering it, YouTube seems to be an informative, supportive and productive tool for documenting and making sense of their experiences.

Analysis

Embodied subjectivity

Physicality and one’s sense of self are fundamentally entangled (Murray, 2008). For Thebandinme and Divataunia, their changing weight shapes a shift in their sense of themselves in the world.

… but tonight I just feel a new sense of confidence about myself and I walked around with my head held high. And I'm still a big girl. I just felt different and I felt like I belonged so not only is it physical things that have changed for me but emotional things too. (Divataunia, 3 months post-surgery)

I was uncomfortable being fat but that doesn’t mean that once you’re not fat you’re comfortable being skinny, it’s a totally different thing … . I guess I didn’t anticipate that. I always thought that as soon as I’m skinny I’ll feel exactly how I always wanted to feel and I’ll feel beautiful and confident and I won’t have to worry about people looking at me or me looking at myself in the mirror and feeling shitty or whatever. Some of that’s true, I feel good when I look in the mirror. (Thebandinme, 3 months post-surgery)

The women’s narratives illuminate the embodied nature of their subjectivities, pointing to the effects and affects of weight on Thebandinme and Divataunia’s sense of who they are and who they can be. These apparent effects and the affects arising, as a result of their changing body shapes, are not necessarily surprising. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) contended, our bodies give us our worlds and make meaning possible.

The relational nature of subjectivity, not only with reference to one’s own body, but also in and through encounters with others (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), is clearly foregrounded in the women’s vlogs. As Thebandinme (14 days post-surgery) puts it, ‘I’m having a lot of problems feeling unsure needing validation from people, way more than usual’. This need for validation, feeling unsure of who she is in this ‘new’ body, illustrates the way in which subjectivity is created, lived and experienced in relation to others. In other words, the self only becomes a self in relation to others, and through interactions with others (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

Murray (2008: 177) asserts, ‘subjectivity is always already unfixed, unstable, multiple and contradictory. In this way, ambiguity is the very state of our lived existence’. Over and above the already fluid nature of subjectivity (Murray, 2008), with their weight and bodies changing, Thebandinme and Divataunia’s subjectivities are presented as in a constant state of flux. Highlighting the connection of the physical to subjectivity, their changing bodies create uncertainty and instability:

… every time you lose a pound it’s different, you feel different … . I must’ve looked horrible, I must’ve been disgusting. But then I look back at videos of me, I was totally cute and great, I feel like I was a lot more humble and reserved back then. When I was 240 I was a lot more demure I think. I was a lot more self-conscious so I was a lot more, I don’t know, reserved is a good word … . And now 70 pounds later, I’m still feeling like I'm overweight. It’s like, all in your head really … . I'm more confident, but I'm also more critical … . It’s not that I'm more comfortable, I feel just as insecure but for different reasons. (Thebandinme, 2 months post-surgery)

Murray (2010: para 1) describes her own embodiment as ‘eliciting contradictory and multiple responses’ from herself which corresponds with the descriptions that are shared throughout the women’s vlogs. The ‘dramatic’ weight loss occurring for Thebandinme affected her subjectivity, yet not in predictable ways – disgusting versus cute, confident versus critical. The diverse experiences of her size and losing weight illustrates that subjectivity is always a shifting and an on-going project, replete with contradictions, multiplicity and ambiguity that one must negotiate. While ostensibly, one might expect that a slimmer, more confident, body would yield a stronger (or more acceptable) subjectivity, for Thebandinme, at least, this was not necessarily the case.

Divataunia and Thebandinme’s sense of who they are and their experiences of WLS are inevitably bound together. As their bodies change, so too does their sense of self, as illustrated in the following section.

Fat subjectivity

Davies (1994) emphasises the multifaceted, contradictory and shifting nature of subjectivity, and illustrates the ways in which discourses, power relations and context shape the multiple subject positions one simultaneously occupies. One such subject position, derived from prevailing weight discourses, that highlights the ways weight shapes subjectivity for both women, is a fat subjectivity (LeBesco, 2004).

This ascription to a fat subjectivity must shift over time, once ‘significant’ weight is lost, as the women begin to perceive themselves as no longer being fat, further reinforced by others’ attitudes and comments. Both Thebandinme and Divataunia are clearly willing and able to describe the constituents of a fat subjectivity and reflect on its imminent, potential, or actual loss. Illustrating that notions of fat and thin are arbitrarily and subjectively defined for Thebandinme, the physical fat loss does not necessarily remove the vision of the fat person she has always regarded herself as:

But you look at yourself after losing 20 pounds and you’re like god I’m still fat, I still look at myself and see myself fat. And I can see the difference, I can see 20 pounds off of me but I still see a fat person. (14 days post-surgery)

For Thebandinme, being fat is central to her sense of who she is as a person. The anticipated boost in confidence and exhilaration at losing the fat initially results in increased, rather than diminished, anxiety:

I just had this sort of wall up and it was really protective, that layer of fat protective and now its melting away its making me feel really scared, like vulnerable and sensitive and so I'm trying to deal with that. (Thebandinme, 5 months post-surgery)

Letting go of her fat sense of self is no simple matter. Despite the desire to lose the fat and the fat sense of self that accompanied it, its loss does not necessarily immediately, or inevitably, produce a fresh or less complicated sense of who they are, nor what they may desire to become.

Fat subjectivity is performed in relation to other ‘fat girls’ (LeBesco, 2004). Exemplifying this is Thebandinme’s (9 months post-surgery) declaration, ‘you know all of us fat girls that love food’. While it would be inappropriate to speak of all fat girls loving food, being a member of the fat girls’ group being discussed here affords Thebandinme license to speak of what it means to be a fat girl. There is a certain expertise about fat that comes with a fat subjectivity, a particular license to speak about and on behalf of other fat people, an assurance that as a fat woman, one knows the codes, dispositions, behaviours and culture of that collective fat identity (LeBesco, 2004). Here we can see Thebandinme’s comfort and ease with which she locates herself within the community of fat girls. The conflict for both women lies in their sense of having betrayed this collective fat subjectivity by opting to have WLS, while still identifying with other fat women. A fat subjectivity persists in the absence of a fat body.

Like when I see fat girls I'm like what’s up ‘cause you’re my people. Like there’s this really fat girl in my maths class and I just want to hang out with her and talk like fat girl stuff! But then I feel like a fucking traitor because I was able to have surgery and lose a bunch of weight and now I’m not like obese anymore. I just feel like I betrayed them kind of. (Thebandinme, 9 months post-surgery)

Part of me is sad, especially as I had younger teenagers coming up to me telling me that I was a role model, which was amazing, you know part of me felt a responsibility to that, to be somebody who was strong. Because not everybody’s a size 2 … . but I’m embracing a healthier lifestyle and that’s what I need. (Divataunia, 13 days pre-surgery)

Divataunia, and Thebandinme elsewhere in her vlog, mobilises a health narrative, entrenched in new public health discourses (Lupton, 1995), as a discursive strategy to warrant her choice to have WLS. The responsibility and belonging that both women feel towards other fat women, their desire to support, to be a role model for others, and to stand up for their own and others’ right to be fat, points to the sense of community that their fat bodies facilitated. However, as Thebandinme’s (9 months post-surgery) comments attest, new feelings of belonging emerge such as being a ‘slightly overweight girl’ ‘like anyone else’. A feeling of ‘belonging’ within the YouTube WLS community also emerges, as something each of the women appreciates,

Hey YouTube, it’s been so long since I've talked to you and I'm really sorry. I've been getting mail from everybody checking in with me which is really nice to know you guys are still interested in what’s going on with me. (Thebandinme, 9 months post-surgery)

I just want to thank everybody, the best support and information I’ve gotten has been here on YouTube and I feel really thankful that this is a resource I'm able to use. Not only that, but just meet some really great people, you all are fantastic really and I mean that. (Divataunia, one week pre-surgery)

Although this does not necessarily replace the profound sense of community secured as a fat person, both clearly glean some measure of kudos, sense of a shared ‘mission’ and an opportunity to commune with others facing similar challenges, through their engagement with the YouTube WLS community.

It would seem for the women, losing weight translates to a loss of networks that afford significant resources, support and sense of community to women such as the fat acceptance movement and the big beautiful women movement (BBW). However, as Probyn (2009: 118) (see also Murray, 2005) points out, and we concur, ‘in a paradoxical manner, the focus on image and fat acceptance reduces women’s being to that of “fat woman”. Whether she is a proud fat woman or not, this is a limited way to understand human subjectivity’.

And how do I, how do I identify myself now? I don’t think I can be classified as a BBW anymore but I’m also not thin. I wish I didn’t have to have a label. But when you do personals online you have to say what your body type is. Uhh I hate it, I hate that you have to give a description. (5 months post-surgery)

Without the label of fat or BBW, the women find it challenging to locate and/or describe themselves to others. Thebandinme finds it ‘weird’ to no longer be physically identified as a fat girl:

… all these people see me and I’m sure they just look at me like anybody else, you know like that’s just whatever like another slightly overweight girl and that’s really weird to me to just be another one of those girls. I don’t feel like another one of those girls, I still feel like a fat girl. (9 months post-surgery)

Being betwixt and between the fat and ‘thin’ categories does not help. This is further complicated as such notions are socially constructed and fluid, though have very ‘real’ effects for the way bodies are experienced (Shilling, 2003). The lack of pertinent identity descriptors is one specific aspect of a larger ‘identity crisis’ that both women encounter. WLS creates for Divataunia and Thebandinme an ‘identity crisis’ (Thebandinme, 9 months post-surgery) of sorts:

… little changes every day are happening, they add up, they’re overwhelming, they’re wonderful, sorry I'm going to start to cry again, but it’s tricky. It’s tricky to figure out who you are, not just physically but emotionally and personality wise. Your whole life changes. (Divataunia, 8 months post-surgery)

What does it mean to you that’s like eating food, losing weight, being thin or being fat. How do you relate those things to who you are as a person, who you think that you are, and what you think you’re worth, and where you’re going. It’s weird, like before I was like oh I’m fat, lazy, that’s pretty much all I’ll ever be and so hmm I’m no prize, you know I don’t deserve a lot. And now it’s like wow I don’t have to be like that. I can go to school, and get a really good job, and have a stable relationship with someone I'm really crazy about and really attracted to, and have a cute little life and money, and self-confidence, and look cute and be attractive. Like holy shit that's a lot of stuff to all of a sudden have to think about. Where before it was so easy to be like, meh I’ll never get there. So I think that’s why I react so emotionally to these little things because it’s like before I didn’t have to deal with them, I could just be like I’m fat, I need to diet and let that rule my life and my thoughts, like my thought process never got passed that. It was like oh if I could only lose weight. Well now I have and now what? … . I like taking time like this for myself to think about what's going on, and where I'm at and who I am. (Thebandinme, 9 months post-surgery)

The changes from WLS are far from liberatory in the first instance. Rather, they are scary, producing a sense of vulnerability and sensitivity not present prior to surgery. WLS also enables reflexivity about the self and the future, producing both new ways of being and doing.

New, old and the journey of selves

An outcome of this ‘identity crisis’ is the creation of a new self. Divataunia and Thebandinme regularly refer to and reflect on their ‘new’ and ‘old’ selves in a variety of ways. Divataunia speaks of ‘who we become after the surgery’ (14 months post-surgery) and how she is ‘mentally having a really hard time balancing my new life and my new struggles but with my old bad habits and demons’ (22 months post-surgery). This notion also resonated with Thebandinme, ‘Us bandsters have a wonderful new life to enjoy’ (5 months post-surgery), mentioning ‘I’m a totally different person now than I was a year ago’ (6 months post-surgery).

The notion of a re-born ‘new me’ is frequently employed in bodily transformation narratives (e.g. in cosmetic surgery and dieting rhetoric) and WLS accounts are no different (Throsby, 2008). Throsby (2008: 130) suggests that the ‘slippery’ notion of ‘the new me’ ‘can be mobilized to normalize the surgical intervention and rebut accusations of having “cheated”’, positioning people as active subjects rather than as vilified objects of the ‘war on obesity’. In her analysis of WLS online discussion forums, Throsby (2008) found the idea of a ‘happy re-birthday’ is utilised to refer to women’s surgery date and this is also something seized upon in WLS marketing (Salant and Santry, 2006). Similar to this rhetoric is Divataunia’s talk of her surgery date as a ‘surgiversary’, signifying a date to be celebrated as a re-birth. The surgery marks a new beginning in life and a new sense of who she might become as a person. One of Divataunia’s earliest vlogs is a slideshow of pictures of herself with the following dialogue:

So this is sort of a goodbye to my overweight self. And a year from now I can look back and see what a transformation it’s been … . I just want to try and document everything I can for my view back on this journey. (13 days pre-surgery)

Even before having WLS, Divataunia is demarcating the old and new versions of herself. WLS becomes heavily incorporated into Divataunia’s new life, beginning with selling WLS supplements, starting a WLS radio show and becoming a board member of the Weight Loss Surgery Foundation of America (2010).⁵ WLS has created a new focus for Divataunia’s personal and professional life through fully embracing the WLS community and lifestyle.

Thebandinme and Divataunia frame their WLS as a journey from their old selves to new and improved versions. This idea of WLS as a journey is entrenched in the women’s understanding of their experiences:

… my ego is swelling a little bit but also at the same time I don’t know who I am, I don’t know if I feel good about myself but I guess that is the journey and I know a lot of people consider lapband surgery as a journey and an emotional and personality type journey where it really changes you and it’s hard to anticipate how it’s gonna change you and who you’re gonna end up being. (Thebandinme, 2 weeks post-surgery)

The emergence of this new self post-WLS is supposedly about creating the life they had always wanted. Based in a desire to change and be healthier, the image that emerges is a life where they are in control, confident and slimmer:

I have control over what goes in my mouth and what happens with my body now and that’s the best thing that’s happened from this surgery besides the weight loss. (Divataunia, 5 months post-surgery)

That’s the hugest part of lapband that was attractive to me. I get to control how much I eat, I get to control my appetite, I get to control my weight, I get to control my body, in a way that I've never been able to. (Thebandinme, 15 months post-surgery)

This new life and self is centred on being ‘better’, which is entrenched in neo-liberal discourses of health, control and self-realisation that impel people to be the ‘best’ they can be (Lupton, 1995). ‘It’s about me and making myself better’ (Thebandinme, 3 days pre-surgery); ‘The more I think about it the prouder I am of my decision to be proactive in my health and to really take charge of it and change my life for the better’ (Divataunia, 10 months post-surgery). ‘Being better’ explicitly means being able to do a multitude of things they did not feel able to do previously. For example:

I don’t feel like my body is holding me back mentally or physically anymore. And I still have about 40–50 pounds to go but just having 100 pounds off really makes such a huge difference in my life. In every way, my health, my stamina, my clothing, my self-esteem. (Divataunia, 5 months post-surgery)

Fundamental to this idea of the changing self, and the reflexivity around these changes, is a concept of the self as a rational autonomous being. Foregrounded is the notion that women have the capacity to rationally shape who they are and who they become, facilitated by WLS.

The on-going nature of WLS is revealed in the women’s vlogs. The ‘outcome’ is unknown for Thebandinme as she ceases vlogging without notice. Divataunia is still vlogging about her journey five years on from her surgery, and has maintained her weight loss.

Yes I think I have already succeeded, I think the question is, can I maintain it? And that is where the struggle comes in … . There’s not anything that makes me sick. And that is good, but it’s also bad because it could lead me back to old behaviours of my past. (Divataunia, 8 months post-surgery)

It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, there’s lots of struggles, people still with the issues that are up here [points to head] even after they’ve lost weight. And then there’s, like how do I feel about my body now that I’m skinny, am I ok with it now? And relationships, and anxiety, and emotional eating. (Thebandinme, 5 months post-surgery)

The women reflect on the continual physical and psychological work that is required of WLS patients and the new self. There is no actual end to the journey (Throsby, 2008), due to the maintenance that is required to sustain the weight loss. Throsby (2008: 126) notes that paradoxically ‘claims to the authentic “new me” are predicated on the acknowledgement of the self as an on-going project that is never “finished”’. The body may have changed but the old anxieties and emotions are not necessarily resolved. Further, as the above excerpts illustrate, new feelings and expectations for themselves crop up. Questions, including how do I maintain my new body, what does it mean for me and the way I relate to other people, must be addressed. Corporeal changes are not enough to ensure a subjectivity that works for them, psychological shifts are required too. In addition, expectations of oneself and from others escalate after having had ‘drastic surgery’, requiring self-surveillance to maintain ‘the new me’.

Simultaneously, whilst splitting herself – her post-WLS new self from her old self – Thebandinme also positions herself as the same person as before. Perhaps rather than new and old, there is a re-making of self occurring:

I’m missing the person that I was before surgery. I know I'm still that person in a lot of ways but losing all that weight throws you for a loop you know. (Thebandinme, 9 months post-surgery)

I want to date and be this new person. I think that’s the struggle in maintaining a relationship, you feel like you got a second chance on life. You just reinvented yourself and you reinvented what you want, what you want out of life, what you expect from other people, what you expect from yourself. I think all of that stuff is different for me than a year ago. (Thebandinme, 1 year post-surgery)

The new body may have yielded alternative ways of thinking about her ‘self’ and opportunities to engage with her life in different ways, yet the legacy of the past remains. Simply severing one’s old self, is not, it seems a simple matter. Indeed, as Thebandinme’s account below suggests, there are constituents of that ‘old’ self that are missed:

So I was watching my surgery videos and just how goofy, and sort of funny I was being. And I was like, I kind of miss fat Ashley … . But watching me before surgery I seemed a lot more jolly. I know that was kind of facade because really I was really fucking depressed and just like I was excited to be having surgery but in a lot of ways too when you’re fat you don’t have to worry about all the people looking at you and holding you to certain standards, or like getting attention from certain people you might not want … . Before I could just be loud and boisterous when I want to be … . I got to like be assertive when I wanted to be assertive, I didn’t have to care about being some pretty um super feminine girl, I just worried about being funny and cool and fun. (9 months post-surgery)

Being fat can be interpreted as a ‘resistant’ position alongside dominant social expectations for Thebandinme. It seems she wants to defy the passive, super feminine girl archetype who is not concerned with being funny, fun and cool. Given her openness regarding going ‘back’ to her other self, this evident commitment to a narrowly defined notion of femininity is somewhat surprising, and speaks to the power of pervasive discourses for people who, in this case, can critically reflect on gender norms yet still embody very traditional forms of femininity (Murray, 2008). It is possibly the freedom to choose the self she wants to be that Thebandinme misses, rather than being limited by ‘certain people’ who expect her to behave according to what her new body shape dictates.

Missing one’s old self is just one of the various unintended and unexpected results of the WLS journey. In the following examples, Divataunia and Thebandinme and her partner discuss what happens after surgery:

When I was 300 pounds my skin fit me, and it wasn’t like I fooling anybody, I was fat, that’s just the way it was … . But now that I’ve lost 110 pounds I’m starting to see the effects of that in my body and I’m not liking it at all. And I’m having a lot of insecurity issues which are driving me crazy because I’m turning into someone I don’t like. I’ve always been very confident and I’ve always been completely in control of my feelings about myself and I’m not now. I’m insecure about a lot of things, most importantly the way I look and the way people respond to the way I look. (Divataunia, 6 months post-surgery)

Partner: I think that your upcoming changes will only have a positive effect on your view of yourself, your confidence and everything.

Thebandinme: You think that, but a lot of people get really freaked out by it. Like people that were fat that had lapband surgery and like noticed that while they’re losing weight and after they’ve lost weight people are like way nicer to them and like treated them totally differently, and give them more opportunities and stuff like that and they’re just really disturbed by the sort of prejudices that fat people are faced with every day. And it’s true, there’s like so many pre-conceived notions and just the way that people approach fat people, it’s weird. Sometimes it can be really traumatising to get skinny … . They’ll always think that they need to be thinner, they’re still fat, blah, it’s Body Dimorphic Disorder. (Thebandinme, 2 months post-surgery)

For each woman, these newly found challenges are always embodied, existing in context and expressed in relation to others, in particular in relation to how others respond to them, (re)constituting their subjectivity. Accompanying the new self are unexpected concerns connected to the new lives, bodies and positions they have come to occupy. Whether as part of an old, a new or a re-invented self, subjectivity is not a static thing (Davies, 1994). It must constantly be created, recreated, produced and reproduced and vlogging contributes to the on-going and dynamic construction of selfhood.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the embodied subjectivities that Thebandinme and Divataunia occupy over their WLS journey. The vlogs are an act of self-presentation and a means to constitute the self (Wesch, 2008). Illustrated are the multiple selves, both old/fat and new/normal, that are expressed throughout their narratives. From this paper, three conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, vlogs are a useful site through which to examine women’s construction of subjectivity. Secondly, dualisms are inadequate vehicles to explain the complexity of Thebandinme and Divataunia’s experiences of WLS. And thirdly, the nature of WLS is an on-going project.

The depth of the narratives garnered from the vlogs has been a valuable source of data for this investigation into WLS subjectivities. By examining vlogs, insights into the nuances of individual experiences and different outcomes of WLS can be explicated. Vlogs record contradictions within and across a single narrative and how, through discourse, these women engage, negotiate, reconcile subject positions. Given the increasing numbers of people undergoing WLS (Hill, 2009), this research offers important insights into the questions around selfhood encountered as a result of ‘dramatic, drastic’ (Divataunia, 2 months post-surgery) surgery and the central role that vlogging plays in this for Thebandinme and Divataunia. Vlogs are an area that would benefit from future research.

We have illustrated the multiple selves, old, fat, new and normal, that are expressed throughout their vlogs. Interpreting these selves through the lenses of embodied subjectivity (Murray, 2008) highlights the intricacies of relationships between so-called mind and body. The old/fat and new/normal subjectivities derived from weight and neoliberal discourses available to these women across their WLS journeys do not always meet their experiences. The fluidity of such categories further complicates identifying oneself in a singular or fixed way. In examining the discursive configurations that shape what it is possible to be, we endeavoured to contextualise two women’s stories as well as to situate their complex engagements with discourses of the self. They are engaging with multiple and contradictory discourses, including what Gard (2009) refers to as the inclination and encouragement to consume versus the moral requirements to be a controlled citizen.

WLS is framed as a journey by both women, signifying a departure from their old self towards recreating a new one. However, at the same time, Thebandinme recognises the durability of her old self. The on-going nature of WLS has connections to literature around the body as a project and body work (e.g. Gimlin, 2002; Shilling, 2003). Affirming Thorsby’s (2008) findings, WLS allows Thebandinme and Divataunia to re-create themselves as the self they wanted to be. This is caught up in achieving the body they had always wanted to have, informed by neo-liberal discourses of being the best one can be (Lupton, 1995). The WLS journey is one that is oriented towards becoming a new version of oneself that is controlled, healthier, slimmer and more confident. Yet the WLS journey is not a simple linear one that has a finite ending which solves the ‘problems’ it set out to ameliorate. That Divataunia continues to vlog and weigh-in years later attests to this.

With the on-going work that subjectivity requires, amidst constantly shifting contexts, embracing ambiguity (Murray, 2008) may offer a way forward through the mind/body, old/new selves and fat/normal dualisms through which we can explain ourselves. The uncertainty and fluidity that characterise post-modernity create the conditions in which we can occupy multiple positions that constitute our subjectivity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Otago Research Committee, by means of the University of Otago Postgraduate Publishing Bursary. We would also like acknowledge the role that Divataunia and Thebandinme have played in this research; their honest sharing of their experiences and sense of self offered on YouTube have posed interesting insights for consideration. Thanks to Tony Egan, the reviewers and Virginia Braun for their feedback on this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Jessica Young is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Department of General Practice and Rural Health and Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago. This research was completed as part of her Masters of Physical Education. Her research interests include health discourses and the ways people take up, resist and negotiate them.

Lisette Burrows is an Associate Professor at the School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Otago. Her research interests include the place and meaning of health and physical culture in young people’s lives, critical obesity work and the impact of ‘new’ health pedagogies on schools, teachers and young people.

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