‘Look mommy, I'm eating the plate model!’ Biopedagogies and coping with obesity through objectification

Abstract

Childhood obesity is increasing in many parts of the world. For the child, obesity often involves major social challenges. Within the framework of social studies of children and childhood and employing the concept of biopedagogies, I explore how children with severe obesity who participate in a long-term rehabilitation programme changed the perception of their bodies from ‘being fat’ to ‘suffering from obesity’ by embracing the biopedagogies involved. Due to this transformation, ‘obesity’ was made into an entity – ‘a thing’ that the children could work on –, which was used for coping and change. The article is based on an ethnographic field study of a Norwegian randomized medical intervention trial for children with obesity. A virtual abstract of this paper can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA.