Body-Mapping the Affective Politics of Bariatric Surgery

Bariatric surgery (or weight loss surgery, WLS), an increasingly common intervention into “obesity,” remains a contentious topic amongst obesity experts, critics, and fat activists. As part of a larger study employing a neomaterialist framework, we worked with four women who resided in Canada and had WLS a minimum of one year prior to create life-size body-maps representing their pre- and post-surgical experiences. As a method, body-mapping can bring attention to somatic, embodied, and affective elements, uncovering structures of feeling informing/shaping WLS experiences. We used an affective analytic approach to make sense of the body-maps, which we present according to three affective strands: shades of gray, sensorial-cognitive relationalities with food and body, and entanglements of anticipated and unruly sensations and affects. Body-maps highlight the affective politics that are set into motion by, and set into motion, WLS and the hegemonic discourses and unruly affects that emerged.