Rates of bariatric (weight loss) surgery have risen sharply in recent years as interventions into fatness have become increasingly medicalized and debates surrounding it binarized. We adopted a feminist neomaterialist perspective to challenge binary framings of weight loss surgery experiences still dominating the field’s conventional and critical approaches by thinking relationally about entanglements of discourse and materiality. Within our neomaterialist framework, we used conceptual tools from misfitting, debility, and affect theory to analyze interviews with 21 women residing in Canada who had surgery at least 1 year prior. Using reflexive thematic analysis and thinking with theory, we generated three processually oriented themes: the force of pre-surgical (mis)fitting, (un)certainty of a (non)fat future, and post-surgery as a liminal space. We argue that while surgery is often presented as a pathway to normality and “fitting in,” ambiguity and liminality emerge as hallmarks of post-surgery experience, unsettling binaristic portrayals of these surgeries.
This article reports on a research project that we built around a dance theatre work to (1) bring bodily affectivity concerning the Dutch colonial slavery past into focal awareness; (2) survey the entanglement of mind, body, and world; and (3) explore dance/movement arts’ potential as ‘social medicine’. Farida Nabibaks’ Margaretha brings together a Euro-Western and an Africana (African and African-Caribbean diaspora) lineage of dance practice and philosophy. Performed at Castle Cannenburch (Gelderland) and combined with a guided movement workshop, the performance and accompanying exercises generated an understanding among the recruited volunteer participants of how the colonial past endures within bodies while creating a sense of what healing might feel like through attention to the body and bodily affectivity. Facilitating the exploration of the incorporations and (bodily) manifestations of a traumatic historical past, dance/movement arts, we submit, is a dynamic of shared enactment that may assist in healing the colonial wound.
This article introduces the idea of multiple habitus , a heuristic tool for analyzing the transmission, incorporation and social reproduction of religious teachings within a continuously transforming spiritual field. Drawing on data from the project ‘Buddhism in Italy’ we show how Italian Buddhism articulates a plurality of “core dispositions” that display notable congruence across major Buddhist traditions while simultaneously reflecting the localized ethos of specific pedagogical environments and of the broader neoliberal order. Through qualitative interviews, participant observation and survey data, we demonstrate that these dispositions are cultivated in collective meditation rituals and everyday practices, where interpretations of the body and its legitimate role intersect with broader neoliberal logics. By situating Italian Buddhism within the wider processes of religious pluralism, spiritual experimentation and the therapeuticization of the sacred, the concept of multiple habitus illuminates how practitioners creatively adopt and adapt religious resources in ways that resonate with the contemporary Western zeitgeist .
This paper examines the biopolitics of public health science concerning antibiotic prophylaxis and queer bodies. Some experts recommend that antibiotic prophylaxis should be used to curb the growing burden of sexually transmitted infections among queer people. Other experts caution that antibiotic prophylaxis will contribute to the rise of antibiotic resistance. Prescribers and patients therefore face a dilemma about the use of antibiotics that is yet to be resolved. With reference to queer sociomaterialism, we examine the antibiotic prophylaxis-resistance problem to understand its historical situatedness and the (mis)representation of queer bodies. By drawing on immunity and the body scholarship developed in this journal and elsewhere, we consider the epistemic elisions in the scientific practices of prophylaxis knowledge generation and how experts and advocates have attempted to build consensus with this partial evidence. We identify an agenda for building queer sociomaterial knowledge to help address the antibiotic prophylaxis-resistance nexus.
