Material Feminism,Obesity Science and the Limits of Discursive Critique

The Critical Path of Social Constructionism

Critical fat scholars consistently present arguments that are in opposition to, or sceptical of, pervasive and dominant biomedical explanations. Writers such as Campos (2004), Gard and Wright (2001, 2005) and Saguy and Riley (2005) have made sustained critiques of the moral panic associated with the ‘obesity epidemic and crisis’, and claim that ‘the so-called obesity epidemic remains a highly contested scientific and social fact’ (Saguy and Riley, 2005: 869). The construction of obesity is presented as a ‘fat fabrication’ (Evans et al., 2008) and, in some cases, the biological basis of childhood obesity and its associated health risks are questioned (Moffat, 2010). While there are varieties of social constructionism (ranging from hard to weak; Guthman, 2013), this work remains foundational to current socio-cultural analyses of large bodies, in which the medical and scientific ‘facts and truths’ of obesity science are rightly scrutinized.

The territorial re-claiming of ‘fat studies’ is in direct opposition to the clinical term ‘obesity’, and is a political attempt to question and destabilize the popular and powerful language and knowledge that is associated with weight (Wann, 2009: x). Scholars in this field use a social constructionist lens to closely examine and critique the discursive construction of the ‘obesity epidemic’ and subsequent moral panic. Gard (2009) notes that words such as ‘myth’, ‘truth’ and, more extremely – ‘lies’ and ‘liars’ – are part of an ‘ideological package’ that is taken for granted in many poststructuralist discussions of obesity. The language of ‘obesity’ is itself routinely problematized by the use of quote marks and a preference for the alternative word ‘fat’ in an attempt to reclaim bodies from pathological, medical gazes (Wann, 2009: xiii).

In tandem with this body of literature are the Fat Acceptance, fat activism and Health at Every Size (HAES) movements, which present an alternative approach to the direct correspondence made between ill-health and weight. ⁴ Their aim is to highlight the social injustices that accompany weight stigmatization and, in doing so, move away from narrow biomedical discourses to broader health promotion ideals. In taking Orbach’s mantra of ‘fat is a feminist issue’ (1978) and attempting to de-stigmatize body size, these social movements emphasize diversity of bodies through ‘size acceptance, fat acceptance, fat liberation and fat politics’ (Cooper, 1998, 2009, 2010). The political force of this anti-obesity campaign is exemplified in Rothblum and Solovay’s (2009) Fat Studies Reader, where readers are incited to join the ‘revolution’ against the medicalization of fatness.

It is not my objective to provide an overview of this literature, for others have already comprehensively reviewed this field (see Cooper, 2010; Gard, 2011a, 2011b) and highlighted the complexity in differing camps (Gard, 2011a). What I aim to highlight is a common thread of the literature – the use of discursive analyses to demonstrate how discourse inscribes blank-slate bodies. Social science and feminist analyses of obesity are dominated by Foucauldian frames that examine any number of intersecting neoliberal discourses: the existing social regulation of obese bodies through relations of biopower, medicalization, governance, surveillance and discrimination.

There are many very important criticisms that this literature offers, including questioning the moral panic that surrounds obesity, the validity of the BMI as a standard measure for obesity (Evans and Colls, 2009; Oliver, 2006; Ross, 2005), the direct causal linking of weight with ill-health (Aphramor, 2005; Aphramor et al., 2013) and subsequent pathologization of fat (Gard and Wright, 2005), the governing of individuals and populations within a biopolitical and neoliberal climate (Wright and Harwood, 2009), the reductionist and decontextualized accounts of obesity, and the demonization of particular groups of people who are more ‘at risk’ of obesity (children, disadvantaged populations across race and class, and mothers) (Boero, 2007; Zivkovic et al., 2010). In my own research on obesity I have used these tropes to unpack the biomedical framing of obesity, and highlight the implicit gendered and classed discourses of blame (Warin et al., 2008, 2012) that are aimed at mothers and all ‘mothers-to-be’. These critiques have provided, and will continue to provide, powerful deconstructive analyses of interconnections between power, knowledge and subjectivities, and how obese bodies are discursively imbricated in such ‘regimes’.

The Limits of Discursive Critique

Despite the increasing interest in obesity and the heterogeneity of critique within the broad critical fat studies literature, very few of these studies explore the material or biological dimensions of fatness. Notable exceptions include Yoshizawa’s (2012) analysis of scientific knowledge in obesity, Yates-Doerr’s (2011, 2014) ethnographic work on obesity and public health programmes in Guatemala, and Kendrick’s (2013) work on the ontological status of the metabolic body in relation to obesity. Nearly all other work in this area has been confined to the analysis of discourses about the body. There are some nods to multi-dimensional bodies of fatness (social, political and biological) (Monaghan et al., 2013), ‘crossing borders’ (Mansfield and Rich, 2013), and claims to not deny biological phenomena (Guthman, 2013), but any intellectual encounters with the complex biological processes that are involved in obesity science are viewed with scepticism or conspiratorially (Gard, 2013: 111). As Gard observes, obesity scepticism has become the default position for some academics (2011a: 43).

Social constructionists are writing about bodies, their ‘artifactual construction’ (Guthman, 2013) and everyday or ‘felt experiences’ (Guthman, 2013: 271), but the materiality of fat bodies has been ignored, resisted and forgotten (Grosz, 2004: 3). How can these analyses explain the relationships between bodies and obesity-related conditions such as diabetes and heart disease? How can you understand the ‘fraught standpoint’ (Throsby and Gimlin, 2010: 107) expressed by some feminist scholars who critique the discursive language of obesity, yet grapple with their own experiences of fatness (Longhurst, 2011; Murray, 2005) and write of their own experiences of bariatric surgery, weight loss and dieting? Moreover, in celebrating the fatness of bodies (often white and middle-class bodies) in order to counter stigmatization and discrimination, is the poverty that underpins and contributes to poor nutrition and weight gain in many cultural contexts overlooked?

In critiquing obesity science the scientists/clinicians that are talked about (but rarely to) are represented as a homogeneous group who wield hegemonic power. In extreme social constructionist cases obesity science is referred to as a state apparatus with ‘fascist structures’ (Holmes et al., 2006) ‘in which its hegemonic norms have instituted a hidden political agenda…in the name of truth’ (Rail et al., 2010: 262). As a socially constructed thing, obesity is thus a fabrication and a fiction – a classic example of what Latour (2004: 237) calls the fairy position (as opposed to the fact position). There is little acknowledgement of the different, conflicting and competing knowledges that occur within and between geneticists, epigeneticists, epidemiologists, clinicians and biomedical scientists (McNaughton, 2011, is perhaps an exception in her brief acknowledgement of uncertainty in epidemiological claims). This approach makes it impossible for feminists and social scientists to engage with medicine or obesity science in innovative, productive, or affirmative ways – and the only path available is the well-worn path of critique (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008: 4).

Coming from a slightly different angle Probyn agrees, and in a polemical paper suggests that current feminist analyses of obesity are ‘extraordinarily thin’ because they rely on a ‘simplistically framed notion of representation’ (2008: 402) that only addresses body image. In some, fatness is reversed to an identity politics in which super-sized bodies are accepted and celebrated as a mode of resistance to normative, gendered practices. Celebrations of ‘fat flesh’ do not engage with material or biological bodies, but squarely sit within a social constructivist frame that aims to ‘depict positive representations of fat bodies…and contest dominant discourses of obesity’ (Gurrieri, 2013: 207). These are important debates about identity, not about the materiality of flesh. In Probyn’s account, the conclusion of the ‘countless articles’ of this type leads to the same ‘catch-all cry against neoliberalism and governmentality’, in which ‘fat bodies are rendered fodder for the machine that produces “better” citizens – the spectacular analysis of the obvious’ (Probyn, 2008: 403).

Probyn is not alone in her view that social constructionist analyses of obesity are ‘painfully limited’ by constant reference to the body as textual/linguistic/discursive. Crossley (2004) argues that sociological approaches to obesity:

too often opt for the constructionist path, effectively retreating from important debates and conceding the ground of substantive issues to other sciences…we cease to attempt to explain phenomena, opting rather to ‘deconstruct’ the attempts of others, thereby underselling the explanatory potential of our discipline and marginalizing ourselves. (2004: 230)

I agree with Bombak that many critical fat scholars have not engaged with emerging scientific insights, but also point to more deeply embedded ideologies of representation that have constructed the materiality of fat bodies ‘as passive matter’ (Lam, 2012) and thus left them under-explored in social science debates. This is, in part, due to earlier and influential feminist critiques of science (Gard, 2011a: 43) which have provided a familiar ‘intellectual ballast for a number of widely used ideas and methods for seeing, interpreting and critiquing science’ (2011a: 43). This foundational thinking laid the path for engagement with materiality in critical fat studies to be forgotten.

The Ghost of Biology

Leaving the materiality of bodies unexplained is a major source of academic division between the binary categories of nature and culture. Like many social scientists engaged in explorations of gender, sexuality or race, I have been immersed in a landscape of linguistic deconstruction and trained to be suspicious of cultural apparatuses that are imbued with unequal power relations. Within feminist critique the category of ‘woman’ is haunted by its conflation with nature and biology, and has become a cultural repository of ‘the primordial…unruly passion…primitive deficiency and “the dark continent”’ (Kirby, 2008: 214). Nature (in its singular definition) is thus a ‘potent ideological node’ (Alaimo, 2008: 239) that is ‘treacherous terrain for feminism’ (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008: 12). As a constructed category, nature is very much part of a ‘grand narrative’ that is axiomatically tainted with essentialism, biomedical reductionism, patriarchy, oppression and stasis (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008: 4). Feminists like de Beauvoir, Ortner and Wittig have persuasively argued that a distance should be taken from such Cartesian logic as ‘much as possible…by taking refuge within culture, discourse and language’ (Akaimo and Hekman, 2008: 1). This move to non-naturalizing arguments effectively disentangled the category of ‘woman’ from the conservative grounds of nature to a rational and active realm of culture, and has been an underpinning theoretical trope of social science scholarship more broadly since the linguistic turn.

Wilson suggests that ‘without question, the early detachment of feminism from biological data and theories was a brilliant, indispensable political gesture’ (2008: 390). The same could be argued of the social constructionist literature in obesity/fat studies. Interestingly, there is a remarkable similarity to the early sex/gender debates in second-wave feminism and the current material/discursive debates in critical fat studies. The concept of gender was developed to disentangle women from essentialist identification with their reproductive bodies. Critical fat scholars similarly aim to distance themselves from the medicalization and essentialism of ‘obesity’ and strategically use the term ‘fat’. Both work within structuralist framings, of sex:gender and biological:constructivist – and both are unable to escape the tensions of these polarized positionings. In feminist debates this Cartesian mapping has been widely critiqued (e.g. Butler’s 1990 and 1993 theory on gender performativity) but remains the place where many critical fat scholars position themselves.

In the constant oppositional responses to biological essentialism, social constructionist positions in critical fat studies have failed to acknowledge the biological reality of bodies, or that the body exists as a real thing (see Shilling, 2005: 12). Social analyses of the body concede no place for nature at all (Kirby, 2008: 227), and as a result the biological forces that change, transform, constantly renew themselves and remodel themselves in interaction with the world (Alaimo, 2008: 241) have been repressed, foreclosed and denied (Grosz, 2005: 44). Nature has been bracketed, and in doing so, most fat studies scholarship has been ‘epistemically irresponsible in leaving in place a fixed, essential material basis for human nature, a basis which renders biological determinism meaningful’ (Tuana, 1996: 57).

Grosz suggests that there is a certain absurdity in objecting to the notion of nature or biology itself if this is (even a part of) what we are and will always be (2008: 24). If we are our biologies, then we need a complex and subtle account of that biology if it is to be able to more adequately explain the rich variability of social, cultural and political life (2008: 24). This doesn’t mean suddenly abandoning the critique and lessons we have learned from social constructionism/post-structuralism and so on, but to recognize the limits of these positions with respect to a reappraisal of the intersections and relations between nature and culture.

In many ways the continued hostility towards or negation of biology in critical fat studies is surprising, as there has been wide recognition of the body as multi-dimensional (see, for example, Shilling, 2005). Some decades ago it was recognized that new technologies demanded new theoretical models which have attempted to reinsert a biological body into the sociology of the body (Shilling, 2003 [1993]: 104), or indeed question the Eurocentric division of nature and culture (Strathern, 1992). Across the social sciences, theoretical inroads have broadened our understanding of new reproductive technologies (Franklin, 2003), genomics (Pálsson, 2008; Rabinow, 1992; Rose, 2006), biological experiences of affect and emotions (Ahmed, 2004; Sedgwick, 2003; Williams et al., 2003), reconciliations of human biology with feminism (Birke, 1999a, 1999b; Wilson, 2004a, 2004b) and biological frailty of embodiment as a basis to defend human rights (Turner and Rojek, 2001, cited in Newton, 2007: 2). ⁵

Despite these important debates about nature and biology in feminist and sociological inquiry, few feminist or cultural studies analyses have deeply considered the implications of biology (beyond critique, language or representation) for obesity/fat studies. Unnithan-Kumar and Tremayne’s edited volume does rethink nature through fatness, and like Ahmed (2008), cites writers such as Haraway (1993), Martin (1987), Franklin (2001) and Strathern (1992) to show that this is not a new theoretical concern. However, most of the chapters in this volume maintain a division between the biological and the social, thus keeping difference between concepts rather than as an internal ingredient. My own chapter in this volume, for example, discusses the language and representations used by Australian women to characterize their large bodies, which is at variance with the clinical characterizations of obesity. I go on to describe the ways in which women draw upon certain maternal representations of their bodies (‘nature’) to legitimize their body size, to show how ideas of nature are used in everyday discourses of fatness (Unnithan-Kumar, 2011: 17; Warin et al., 2011b). This is about the body as socially and experientially constituted, not as ‘matter – as physiologically, biochemically or microbiologically constituted’ (Wilson, 1998: 14–15).

Relational Biology

In this final section I return to the symposium example from the introduction to demonstrate how we can bring the material back into obesity scholarship without losing the insights of social constructionism. Key papers at the ‘Intergenerational and Familial Influences on Obesity and Related Conditions’ symposium used developmental origins of health and disease theory (DOHaD) as their basis. DOHaD (which is sometimes called the Barker hypothesis) has been embraced in reproductive medicine, and guides multi-million dollar research programmes and government policies, from New Zealand to the UK. It is prominent in obesity science, and has gained ground with the emergence of the field of epigenetics.

In the 1980s UK epidemiologist and physician David Barker (and his colleagues) advanced the theory that chronic disease originated, at least in part, in the womb. Barker’s central argument was that adverse conditions early in development (and particularly during intra-uterine life) could result in permanent changes to the baby’s physiology and metabolism (Barker, 1998). It was suggested that the fetus makes physiological adaptions in response to its environment to prepare itself for postnatal life (De Boo and Harding, 2006). This process, known as ‘fetal programming’, could be compromised at different critical periods of gestation and early life, and increased propensity to chronic disease in adulthood (especially cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes). Of particular relevance to the Barker hypothesis was poor maternal nutrition before and during pregnancy, contributing to reduced fetal growth, low birth weight and development of chronic conditions later in life (Moore and Davies, 2005; Warin et al., 2011a).

Barker suggested that this new focus on fetal environments replaced the old model of adult ‘lifestyle’ diseases, which was based on the interaction between genes and an adverse environment in adult life. So confident was he in the early origins hypothesis and its intergenerational transmission that he speculated: ‘the seeds of inequalities in health in the next century are being sown today – in inner cities and other communities where adverse influences impair the growth, nutrition and health of mothers and their infants’ (Barker, 1991: 67).

Barker’s hypothesis was met with controversy, and during the 1990s there were heated debates and scepticism on the part of his contemporaries (see Lucas et al., 1999; Susser and Levin, 1999). However, by 2000 the fetal origins theory had gained support and legitimacy through several large cohort studies (Leon et al., 1998; Rich-Edwards et al., 1997), and had taken hold in the public imagination. It was at this time that the idea that prenatal over-nutrition (rather than under-nutrition) might affect life-long risk of obesity also gained traction and this paradigmatic ‘new frontier’ (Paul, 2010) was mobilized to explain a relationship between fat mothers, fat babies and the transmission of obesity through generations. Some scientific interpretations of fetal origins theory suggest that maternal obesity is thought to alter the intra-uterine milieu in a number ways, inducing permanent changes in the appetite and metabolism of the fetus that can ‘accelerate’ obesity through future generations (Ebbeling et al., 2002: 475).

When I first encountered Barker’s hypothesis my reaction was one of what Squier and Littlefield call ‘knee jerk constructivism’ (2004: 46). Words such as ‘programming’ and ‘imprinting’ sent my biologically determinist and essentialist alarm bells ringing, and I baulked at the idea that biology has the power to explain social factors. The belief that the life-course and biological destiny of an individual is fixed and immutable because of their mother’s and their grandmother’s diet concerned me greatly (and I, along with colleagues working in this field, have criticized the narrowing of blame that is gendered, particularly in the public understanding of this science; see Warin et al., 2011a).

Rather than dismiss Barker’s work I engaged with the biological sciences and discussed his work with social epidemiologists. I learned that his early work in the north of England and Wales was not essentialist in its scope, was not a ‘deeply punitive medico-moral discourse’ (McNaughton, 2011: 187) and was not biological determinism (as I had naively assumed). Barker focused on the gendered, socio-economic effects of maternal under-nutrition in pregnancy, and he argued that these associations were related to inequalities in health, and specifically to poor nutrition and health of mothers. His work throughout the 1990 s looked more closely at the life-course of individuals (rather than comparisons between regions and towns) but he continued to draw attention to geographical and socio-economic constraints on the health of women and their children. Barker argued that ill-health is an issue of social and economic inequality and continued to advocate for protecting the nutrition and health of girls and young women (2012: 185). As Yoshizawa (2012) argues, rather than reductionist, Barker’s hypothesis, and its invocation in developmental origins of health and disease actually allows for complex explanations of obesity (spanning biology, gender relations, place and social class) that occur across time (through the life-course and across generations) and in specific spatial locations.

In fetal origins work, food is a bridge or pathway that makes the uterus a social and relational space, not just a biological space. In critical periods of development (in utero, in early years and in adolescence) the body ‘goes through periods of plasticity and openness to the environment’ (Landecker, 2011: 174, my emphasis). Early nutritional environments are part of a dynamic bodily process in which food is eaten and digested, shapes metabolism and ‘become[s] part of the body-in-time’ (2011: 174) in which nature and culture enfold upon each other across generations. Biology is thus highly relational and constantly changing, and comprises molecules that are in relation to one another, ‘within long chains or nets of causality across time and space that reach in and through the body’ (2011: 179).

Landecker notes in her analysis of nutritional epigenetics, that Barker’s hypothesis and molecular mechanisms are concerned with how ‘things outside of the body are transformed into the biology of the body…and suggests a mechanism by which the wars and famines and abundant harvests of one generation can affect the metabolic systems of another’ (2011: 178). If we think of Barker’s hypothesis in the context of the Mayan research that was introduced at the beginning of this article, we can understand how Mayan bodies embody a legacy of social, economic and political repression, poverty, and shifts from traditional foods to fast foods in a period of nutritional transition. Mexico rivals the US as the highest per capita consumer of soft drinks in the world (Leatherman and Goodman, 2005), and Coca-Cola has key symbolic value in the community through fast food commodity status and provision of household items (such as free furniture). It is in this historical and economic context that women who suffered from malnutrition during their own growth periods tend to end up with shorter stature in adult life and tend to give birth to small babies who are at higher risk for overweight and other disease in later life (Varela-Silva et al., 2009: 657; cf. Aphramor, 2005).

As Martin suggests in her work on pregnancy-related micro-chimerism (how fetal cells can be found in women’s bodies long after the pregnancy is over) (2010a, 2010b), it is tempting to take for granted that what ‘is true about biology is what some scientists say is true…and easy to romanticize and reify a particular story about nature because it seems good for feminism’ (2010a: 42). The point in engaging with obesity science is to question what the implications of concepts like fetal origins are, and whether material feminism can help to rethink how we approach obesity, and critique core concepts (sex/gender; material/discursive; nature/culture) that have been positioned as mutually exclusive in social science and feminist critiques of embodiment.

Implications and Conclusions: Circuits of Exchange

Acknowledging the antecedents of material feminism, Kirby states that both Butler and Latour have specifically recognized that:

one of the most pressing issues in political analysis today is the question of critique – how to engage others more generously through interconnection, how to avoid the more murderous manoeuvres of dialectical reasoning that negate another’s position as wrong in order to affirm our own position as right – as the one (and only) position. (Kirby, 2008: 228)

Again, I return to the opening anecdote from the symposium that highlighted the glaring gulf between biological and social understandings of obesity. It was during the brief interchange of questions, between the spaces of what was biology and what was language, that I realized that the ‘default position’ (Gard, 2011b: 65) of obesity scepticism is untenable. To take flight from biology would actually be to take flight from politics and ethical principles. Ethical practices emerge from material realities, and to ignore the materiality of bodies is to ignore the significant social injustices that accompany bodies – which is precisely the critique feminists and cultural studies scholars have been levelling at biologists for years.

Rather than closing down debate, fetal origins opens up new ways of thinking about obesity that have clear resonance with material feminism and social justice principles. Barker’s work provides a counterpoint to discourses that tend to individualize blame and responsibility for obesity. In pointing to the wider contexts of people’s lives that occur across generations – the socio-economic, political, gendered and environmentally driven impacts of feast and famine, war and the global financial crisis – people cannot be singularly blamed for the circumstances in which they live, which are often beyond their control. Moreover, in positioning obesity within a context of gender equity and providing sustainable support for women, responsibility is shouldered and shared by a range of agencies and policies, and obesity is not simply seen as an individual health problem that is concerned with behavioural changes to lifestyle. Barker is not the only researcher who argues for greater attention to gender inequalities in relation to health and, considering that obesity, gender and social class share a gradient (Broom and Warin, 2011), it is surprising that more attention is not given to the materiality of bodies and the status of women (see also Wells et al., 2012).

Together with colleagues I have previously argued that governments and health policies should invest in and support wide interventions that change the socio-economic circumstances of women’s lives. From epidemiological evidence we know that poor women are more likely to be obese, and obese women are more likely to be impoverished as a result of their body size (Warin et al., 2011a, 2012). Higher obesity prevalence in women arises for different reasons in different global settings, relating variously to issues such as gender bias in children’s nutrition (fetal exposure to maternal work conditions during pregnancy, baby boys might be better nourished, or even constraints on adult behaviour for religious reasons). Education, social independence and economic independence (as well as the role of fathers in intergenerational obesity) are all important factors in understanding obesity. A recent international study of gender and socio-economic status in relation to obesity concluded by stating that ‘improving women's status may be a key area for addressing the global obesity epidemic over the long term, with potential benefits for the women themselves and for their offspring’ (Wells et al., 2012: 482). Inclusion of biological processes (rather than outright rejection of biology) in debates about women’s social status can develop political strategies of change that address existing forms of power, disadvantage and exploitation.

Material feminism offers an important and timely way forward in relation to obesity studies. Hekman suggests that those of us trained in feminism and post-structuralism:

have been so convinced that the world, and especially the social world, is a linguistic construction that discussions of the ‘real’ seem like heresy. But the social world is very real; there are bodies and matter and real consequences of this materiality. If feminists are to understand – and change – that social reality, we must bring the material back in. (2008: 116)

Such engagement with biology does, however, require ‘careful discernment’ (Grosz, 2004: 3), as well-meant efforts to improve poor women’s living conditions often end up as intrusive, moralizing, punitive and ineffective (Kirkland, 2011). This careful discernment comes from critical accounts of obesity that continue to alert us to the dangers of decontextualizing bodies, such as directly linking ill-health with weight, and narrowly focusing on individual women’s reproductive bodies and social roles (Aphramor and Gingras, 2011; Warin et al., 2011a, 2012). While this article argues for attention to the opening up of material possibilities, there is a danger that Barker’s work has been used to make exactly the sorts of biologically essentialist claims I am concerned about. Maternal over-nutrition is ‘amplified’ in media and obesity science discussions of obesity, showing how, across the life-course, women are portrayed as entirely responsible for passing on obesity to their children and across generations as a matter of their biology and ill-informed ‘lifestyle choices’ (Warin et al., 2011a).

Evans continues this careful critique, and notes the inherent danger in positioning some bodies as more ‘at risk’ through the anticipation of fatness and ‘the linear temporalities of biological time that underpin medical and developmental models of embodiment’ (2010: 23). However, taking on board the insights of material feminism and the ‘corporeal generosity’ (Diprose, 2002) of early origins theory (the movement and exchange of metabolic processes between fetuses, pregnant bodies and generations), I would argue that bodies are in no way fixed in such a linear fashion. Fetal origins mixes up times and enables bodies to embody past and future bodies, as the information gathered at a cellular level during early development does not predict the likely future environment of the child, but rather reflects the mother’s own developmental experience and the quality of her environment during her own life-course (Wells, 2007: 143). Moreover, this intermingling of history and biology challenges us to rethink the assumed integrity of bodies (cf. Blackman, 2010) and the mutual constitution of bodies and persons.

As Yoshizawa (2012) suggests in her analysis of Barker’s work, health and disease are emergent, not always known, and evolving and contextual. Material feminism supports this concept of emergent interplay and the viscous porosity of molecular/bodily interactions (often classed or racialized) out of which phenomena emerge (Tuana, 2008). In refocusing on the material rather than abstract forms of embodiment and flesh, material feminism allows us to understand fat bodies as ‘products of complex biosocial processes which are not reducible to any of their elements; they are neither simply nor primarily a biological fact, nor are they purely socially constructed artifacts’ (Lam, 2012: 17).