Description
- Abstract:
- This senior thesis project explores the complicated intersection of food and culture, diabetes, biopower, and identity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an endocrinology clinic in Tennessee, as well as online ethnography and interviews conducted with individuals with diabetes, this thesis shows that those with diabetes are uniquely susceptible to what I posit as the moralizing aspects of biomedicine. Biopower at large posits healthy bodies as normal and unhealthy ones as subversive; in the realm of diabetes care, wherein individual behavior can shape the worsening or improvement of illness, biopower shapes clinician and patient perspectives of blame in illness, causing individual diabetic bodies—rather than sociocultural or environmental factors—to be blamed for poor health. Diabetes comes to occupy a medico-moral space, setting into motion a process of identity reconstruction for individuals with diabetes where they must negotiate between the desire to behave and eat according to pre-existing cultural preferences and the desire to be understood as a moral medical actor. For my interlocutors, the dual pressures of needing to be healthy for one’s own sake and needing to be healthy as a performance of morality could lead to highly disordered relationships with food post-diagnosis. This thesis also explores the gendered nature of diabetes care and embodied subjectivity in illness, arguing that post-diagnosis self-alteration is performed through the body. Female interlocutors, who embodied gendered pressures to maintain thin bodies pre-diagnosis, experienced higher rates of disordered eating after exposure to the additional medico-moral pressure of diabetes care.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2024
- Concentration: Medical anthropology
Access Conditions
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Citation
Sarig, Ya'el,
"“Good food, bad food”: Diabetes, medico-moralism, and the (re)shaping of identity"
(2024).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/09rn-n179
