ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we draw on interviews with 29 participants in Canada to explore fat women’s experiences of medicalization in reproductive care. Through participant stories, we argue that fat people’s navigation of conception, pregnancy, and birth care demonstrate the ways in which the fat pregnant body is highly medicalized by the healthcare system and discourses of risk in “maternal obesity.” Such processes of medicalization differ according to complicated amalgamations of race and class identity, as well as sexuality and place. Utilizing theories of new materialism, we further show how fat embodiments resist and even reject the medical modeling of their bodies in unanticipated and highly visceral ways, thus rearticulating discourses of risk and concern that underpin definitions of “maternal obesity.”
