This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses-practices of care of the self-that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote selfknowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster selfcare in face ofgendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.For feminists, weight-loss dieting has long been associated with the tyranny of slenderness and the enforcement, by patriarchal disciplinary practices, of an
Queer phenomenology as an interpretive framework can advance health research by illuminating why primary health care providers (HCPs) must move beyond definitions of sexuality as a set of reified identity formations indexed to normative gender, gender of partner, and sexual and reproductive practices. Our interviews with queer women participants and primary care nurses offer an implicit critique of heteronormative health care space, temporality, and power relations, as they form the lived experiences of our participants. We conclude by pointing to the limits of our methodology in exposing the larger relations of power that dictate experiences of heteronormative health care.
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