Search

Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with larger bodied patients (n = 20) and their healthcare practitioners (n = 22) in Canada, this paper combines micro and macro approaches in outlining a social justice approach to caring for larger patients in healthcare practice. Theoretically, we draw upon structural competency and critical consciousness to address the question of how social justice is enacted, experienced, and understood in interactions between clinicians and larger patients. Our findings highlight four key themes that provide a framework for integrating social justice into healthcare practice: (1) an awareness of one's simultaneous experience of marginalisation and privilege in the clinical interaction; (2) navigating between additive and interactive understandings of intersectionality; (3) micro and macro approaches to change; and (4) straddling the line between equity and equality. The synergies in participants' perspectives across social identities suggests that the cultivation of social justice awareness potentially mitigates some blinders of privilege. Furthermore, practitioners' social justice orientation positively impacted patient experience, with most patients expressing appreciation for having their various histories of trauma and social challenges handled compassionately during appointments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical feminist approaches to eating disorders and "obesity" have recently come under criticism for relying too heavily on textual- and image-based analyses of health, identity and body weight, shape, and size. In this article, we examine qualitative interviews with self-identified anorexic and "obese" women using a new material feminist lens—particularly the work of Karen Barad—to see what this perspective contributes to conceptualizations of weight-based oppressions. In addition to outlining how the material world actively participates in ongoing processes of oppression, we also highlight how the body presses back, offering up potentially less oppressive processes of materialization. The article concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, pointing to how a new materialist framework may draw attention to micropolitical processes of becoming otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current sociopolitical context, the lean, muscular body has come to epitomize masculine health and beauty. Not all boys and young men, however, unequivocally subscribe to dominant constructions that position fatness as unhealthy and unattractive. Using qualitative inquiry with thirty-two “skinny” or “normal”-bodied young men (thirteen to fifteen years of age), I demonstrate that fat talk is a prominent resource through which “normal” masculine embodiment is achieved. More specifically, I reveal that sociocultural positioning influences how young men take up, make sense of, and articulate constructions of fatness and demonstrate how such articulations function in the materialization of their “normal” embodied subjectivities. I also examine how fat masculinities operate differently within diverse emplaced contexts and in relation to distinct discursive communities. Such a line of investigation I argue helps to reveal the ways in which power relations of privilege and oppression are performatively embodied in everyday contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]