Mothering Out of Bounds: Inequality and Resistance in Fat Motherhood

What happens when "child bearing hips" become 'too' wide and layered with fat? The medicalization of weight and body size pathologizes difference as deviance, framing fat women as a danger not only to themselves but to society at large when daring to reproduce. This dissertation seeks to uncover the long term impacts of weight stigma at different intersections in order to expand sociological understandings of fatness, health, gender, and inequality in motherhood. It highlights parallel mechanisms of surveillance (for example, between fat and poor mothers) to show how society constructs who "should" and "should not" be parents. Based on a series of 36 in-depth interviews with 18 mothers conducted in the first half of 2022, findings illustrate that the negative social and medical perception of fat motherhood has a significant detrimental impact on the lived experiences of fat mothers. Findings also pull from material culture in the form of representational artifacts from motherhood brought by participants in order to understand how medical and social anti-fatness impacts identity and experiences, and contributes to inequality in fat motherhood.