Dichotomies of Cure and Care in the Medicalization of Fat Bodies

Abstract

Though Fat bodies have not been absent from historical knowledges collected and known around the globe, the West’s preoccupation with declaring Fatness as a looming moral and medical danger drives multidisciplinary discourses centering Fat people as the epicentre of the “Fatpocalypse” (Pausé 135), undesirable proprietors of excess body mass who threaten the (enforced) collective agreement on embodiments and categorizations of “health”. These body knowledges, whose basis for so-called-empirical truths are born from cultural western notions and regulatory striving, are continually held to a higher regard than the (Fat) bodies and inhabitants of these bodies who navigate the clinical setting. Fatphobia, an imperfect term that encapsulates the fat hatred, “weight bias, weight discrimination, and weight stigma” (Kost et al. 03) experienced by larger bodies particularly from healthcare practitioners, is woven so tightly into the clinical gaze that it can easily be disguised by authoritative medical knowledges, an excuse that permits and excuses malpractice of Fat individuals. As a result, care and cure become fractured, a dichotomous arrangement that shifts responsibility of health solely onto the Fat patient.