ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of maternal obesity as a problematising discourse and its effects through a critical feminist intersectional lens. I begin this chapter by charting the rise of maternal obesity as a contemporary health crisis resulting in significant changes to reproductive health care policy and practice, along with contemporary understandings of fat reproductive bodies. Drawing on examples from my own research, I demonstrate the value of critical obesity scholarship that draws on feminist, intersectional, and other critical social theoretical analyses to disrupt the certainty of problem discourses about pregnancy fatness and reveal their harmful discursive and material effects in the lives of fat women and gender diverse people who birth babies. I conclude by emphasising the key role of critical obesity scholarship in attempting to retrieve discourses of reproductive health from the toxic politics of anti-fatness and to argue for a much more complex and socially just view of the relationship between fatness, reproductive health, childbearing, and parenting.
