Paper short abstract:

Bariatric professionals direct patients to morally recuperate through “moral laboratories,” which invite moments of experimentation with moral change in everyday life. This moral project is understood through new relationships within various registers of patients’ subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

While overweight bodies have been radically medicalized in modern Western discourse, they are also culturally conceived as a moral project. In clinical settings aimed at transforming the impaired body, the encounters between bariatric professionals and patients reveal nuanced moral deliberations. I suggest that bariatric surgery becomes a site of a “moral breakdown,” where professionals direct patients to morally recuperate not only through technologies of the self, such as intensive bodywork and diets, but through “moral laboratories,” which invite moments of experimentation with moral change in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic inquiry in a bariatric clinic that deploys a multidisciplinary treatment, I argue that this moral project is understood through new relationships within various registers of patients’ subjectivity. First, patients are instructed to “listen to their bodies” and to reconnect to their embodied sensations. They are further guided to cognitively imitate an effortless “thin state of mind.” And finally, they are instructed to “put themselves first” by reorganize their interactions with significant others. Professional guidance encourages dialogue and reflexivity within the patient that are consonant with neoliberal understandings of the self-disciplined subject, yet they expand, and at times undermine these neoliberal notions by attending to other body ethics, and contesting elements of fat stigma.