Moral Biocitizenship: Discursively Managing Food and the Body after Bariatric Surgery

Abstract

In the U.S. large bodies are associated with disorder and lack of control. Reclaiming control can take various forms. Drawing on interviews with eight men who have undergone bariatric surgery, we analyze the specific ways in which they discursively retake control of food, their eating habits, and ultimately their bodies. They accomplish this in two ways: 1) by both (re)categorizing food and transforming the way they consume food, the men linguistically locate their bodies within a sphere of moral biocitzenship; 2) through indexicality and speaking as experience, these men describe themselves as exerting appropriate control over their bodies and food on their own terms.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…Kang's () study of South Korean educational migrant families in Singapore details how pre‐college youths and their mothers make sense of their migration experience in terms of distinct temporalities, with the students orienting to a chronotope of future‐oriented “constant becoming” and the mothers seeing themselves as stuck in a time of “intensive mothering.” Similarly, Baran () analyzes narratives of ethnolinguistic belonging produced by a group of former refugees from Poland to show how they ground their experiences in specific timeframes of the past, present, and future. Along with studies of narratives of self‐transformation—such as accounts of post‐bariatric‐surgery men described by SturtzSreetharan and colleagues (), in which contrasts of eating habits before and after surgery become an important basis for the men's claims of newfound moral biocitizenship—these works allow us to approach spatial mobility from a more general perspective of movement in material, social, and affective time‐space.…”