Paper short abstract:

Life after surgery in Australia: shaem, blame and healthism

Paper long abstract:

Little is know about people's experiences and lives post WLS in Australia where anti fat sentiments remain one of the last bastions of bigotry. Drawing on ethnograhhic research with 40 women and men, I describe the hopes and expectations attributed to post surgery weight loss and consider how and if these were met. Emphasis is given to respondent's experiences of shame and stigma: the nature and contexts in which these occur; there impact and responses to them; as well as the challenges they pose to fulfilling the promises that weight loss, WLS and healthism make. I argued that a change in body size/weight while seen as a positive by participants, often remains caught up in the hegemonic moralizing discourses that frame the larger than average person/body in Australia as a lazy, disgusting, abject, irresponsible citizen, overrun by desires and lacking self control. Those who have had surgery can find it difficult to move away from an earlier stigmatized fat identity and often find themselves reframed as the person who used to be fat, who needed a surgical intervention to control their weight/desires/lack of self control and address their irresponsible and poor lifestyle choices, with surgery being seen as the easy way out, the lazy option. The paper concludes by asking just how empowering is weight loss in such settings?