Abstract
In Canada, forces such as the media, medical discourse, and public policy work to position childhood obesity as increased body fat content or excess adiposity due to various personal, social, and economic factors. Drawing on Barad’s ‘agential realist ontology’, this article aims to inhabit-with obesity in an effort to disrupt dominant understandings of childhood obesity, as illustrated in images from three children’s picture books. By troubling the positivity inherent in dominant understandings of obesity, in which obesity is a knowable entity that refers to an anatomical body with excess adiposity, we might instead foreground the matterings of the human body at play amid the dynamic intra-actions of agential matter. This article will imagine how novel orientations toward childhood obesity might be made possible if we populate the adiposity of obese bodies such that we might engage with the intra-activity of agential adiposity.
Patty is bigger – much bigger – than a lot of the other kids at school. This makes her feel ‘different’ and bad about herself. She often secretly wishes that she did not weigh so much and that her body looked like ‘normal’ kids her age. Thinking about this sometimes makes Patty feel really sad. When she’s feeling this way, Patty’s mom makes one of her special vanilla milkshakes to cheer her up. And it does. (Kern, 2007: 28)
Oh, poor Patty, the overweight 10-year-old girl who yearns for a thin physique. Or is it silly Patty, the girl who just needs to get a handle on her eating habits and go run around outside? Wait, maybe it’s Patty, the girl who turns to food for comfort and likely requires a mental health intervention. Of course, it’s Patty, the body filled with dangerous adipose tissue; the body at risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis. Better yet – perhaps it’s Patty, the vulnerable victim of transnational capitalism and its pervasive and powerful techniques of consumerism and overconsumption. Conceivably, we could even be referring to Patty, the complicated amalgamation of all these sociocultural and biological factors. Such an understanding of Patty, and all children entangled with the current epidemic of childhood obesity, would be consistent with dominant Euro-Western conceptualizations that position obesity as increased body fat content or adiposity due to various social and economic factors (Evans, 2010).
Amid this omnipresent characterization of obesity, might we approach childhood obesity, and bodies with increased adiposity, in a way that is not so strongly aligned with the certainty, individualism, and ‘time bomb’ (Evans, 2010: 21) terror tactics associated with a modernist Euro-Western understanding of obesity? What might be created, performed, or differentially excluded if we interrogate the ‘pervasive yet unpalatable belief [surrounding childhood obesity] that the anatomical body locates the unarguably real body, the literal body, the body whose immovable and immobilizing substance must be secured outside the discussion’ (Kirby, 1997: 70)? What if we attempt to trouble the certainty inherent to dominant conceptions of obesity in Canada, which generally echo the obesities active through the Global North, in which obesity is a singular, knowable entity that refers to an anatomical body with excess adipose tissue, and instead foreground the matterings of the human body at play amid the dynamism of obesity? Perhaps we might imagine Patty as an ever-changing, actively material Patty; a series of ‘nonarbitrary, nondeterministic, causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialization’ (Barad, 2007: 179). What happens if we inhabit the adiposity of obese bodies, such that obesity might be made momentarily perceptible through the intra-activity of agential adiposity?
Throughout this paper, I hope to disrupt dominant understandings of childhood obesity by ‘invok[ing] [adiposity] as our host’ (Barad, 2010: 240) while reading three children’s picture books that aim to prevent obesity. Adopting an ‘agential realist ontology’ (Barad, 2007: 33), I attempt to inhabit-with adiposity to challenge the affective and representational potential of the images in Making Healthy Choices (Kern, 2007), The Tale of Two Athletes (Griffith and Griffith, 2012), and They Call Me Fat Zoe (Martin et al., 2012), as is demonstrated in Figure 1. By foregrounding adiposity, I will explore ‘how the body’s materiality…and other material forces…actively matter to the processes of materialization’ (Barad, 2003: 809) that enact differential obese bodies.
Differently materialized story images. (From left to right: Griffith and Griffith, 2012: 32; Kern, 2007: 30; Martin et al., 2012: 29. Color altered.)
I will begin by briefly interrogating dominant Euro-Western understandings of obesity, highlighting both the insidious undercurrents of capitalism and neoliberalism at work, as well as the position of matter and adiposity. In doing this, I will suggest that there are multiple obesities at play within the wider frame of reference known as childhood obesity, and that these obesities are brought into being through differential practices (Mol, 2002). I will then postulate what an agential adiposity might entail and conceptualize an adiposity that we might read with. Following this, I will explore how the stories might be read when we foreground agential adiposity. By changing the coloring, sizes, and focus of images, I hope to alter the performances of obesity that each story invites. In this sense, I am inhabiting-with adiposity at the site of the image. I will conclude by posing questions as to what this differential focus might lend practitioners and researchers who are in a relationship with childhood obesity.
‘Eww, I don’t want all that gooey stuff in me’
Visiting with dominant obesities
When Jasmine, the young girl in The Tale of Two Athletes, has ‘had enough of feeling tired, feeling bad about [her]self, and being teased by [her] classmates’ (Griffith and Griffith, 2012: 5), she goes to visit Dr G. The doctor weighs Jasmine, as shown in Figure 2, and tells her that ‘the amount of fat in [her] body [is] way too high’ (p.5) and presents Jasmine with ‘a jar of tan-colored goo…[which] resemble[s] what fat looks like’ (p.5). Jasmine is horrified and proclaims ‘eww…I don’t want all that gooey stuff in me’ (p.5). She then agrees to lose body weight and adopt a more healthy lifestyle.
Jasmine on the scale (Griffith and Griffith, 2012: 4).
Within the Canadian context, obesity is often measured by calculating a child’s Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure that is often longitudinally tracked through their lifespan. BMI is a mathematical calculation based on empirical measurements of a child’s weight and height (Singh et al., 2008). In this way, obesity is formulated as an entirely objective, ontologically and epistemologically stable entity located firmly within the Euro-Western medical model. Further, much research on childhood obesity describes the health complications associated with increased adiposity, such as increased blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, all of which are formulated through chemical and biological pathways processed within the medical model. This acts to delineate a known and knowable obesity with linearly predictable outcomes known through the solidified and ‘true’ practices and languages of empirical science. The obesity Jasmine confronts in this image follows the profoundly Euro-Western medical method of knowing an inert obesity.
Further cementing the certainty of an obesity known through the medical model, the practices of obesity at play in this fragment of Jasmine’s story seem to echo those of the dominant obesity discourse in Canada, which ‘offers a mechanistic view of the body and focuses on the assumed relationship between inactivity, poor diet, obesity, and health’ (Rail, 2009: 142). This conception of childhood obesity hinges upon ‘notions of certainty, fear, morality, and personal responsibility’ (Vander Schee and Boyles, 2010: 170) whereby ‘doomsday predictions are not just the stuff of shock journalism but they also pervade policy reports on obesity and shape policy action’ (Evans, 2010: 21). This formulation of obesity lauds the certainty of the medical machine, which frames the ‘fat body…as problematic because “fatness” is argued to be a “risk factor” for health conditions’ (Evans, 2010: 22). Further, the conditions for the possibility of a panic-driven and individualistic conception of childhood obesity are both rooted in, and continually fueled by, capitalistic enterprise and its accompanying forces of consumerism, consumption, and corporate interest (Vander Schee and Boyles, 2010).
Jasmine becomes the archetype of dominant Euro-Western conceptions of obesity, as through her body Euro-Western privileging of the medical model comes together with pervasive capitalistic forces through linear, mechanistic processes of becoming fat. As Dr G casts his exalted medical gaze on Jasmine, Jasmine visualizes various commercially produced food items, thus mapping the pathway neoliberal consumerism takes as it becomes chemically inert fat; Jasmine has come to desire such unhealthy foods, ripe with corporate interest as it preys upon children, which she then autonomously consumes, which then congeal into dangerous adiposity, which then becomes the ‘tan-colored goo’ Dr G employs to terrify Jasmine into taking responsibility for her health. Through Jasmine, an ontologically firm adiposity is translated into a personal imperative for health change, as dominant understandings of childhood obesity locate the onus for eradicating a problematic adiposity solely within Jasmine.
While a great deal of theoretical and empirical research attempts to add texture to Canadian engagements with childhood obesity by highlighting the importance of lines of race, gender, ability, and resources, among multiple other forces, it remains accurate that ‘short, uncomplicated and people-centered explanations that are well suited for the media dominate in obesity discourse’ (Rail, 2009: 142).
Practicing multiple material obesities
Holding this broad picture of childhood obesity, I want to take up the argument that ‘as long as the practicalities of doing disease [or obesity] are part of the story, it is a story about practices’ (Mol, 2002: 31). Childhood obesity might be conceptualized as a landscape of various enactments of obesity, with practices that bring into being, or make perceptible, different obesities. This understanding troubles the claim that there is a ‘childhood obesity’ and that this is a knowable and known entity. If we ‘[articulate] a sense of the world as an unformed but generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce particular realities’ (Law, 2004: 7) through ‘practices that are thick, fleshy, and warm, as well as made out of metal, glass, and numbers- and that are persistently uncertain’ (Mol, 2002: 31), it becomes possible to imagine that various obesities might ‘differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world as a result of the specific cuts and reconfigurings that are enacted’ (Barad, 2007: 176). When the possibility of grasping the onto-epistemological totality of obesity is troubled, ‘it is through specific-intra actions that a differential sense of being- with boundaries, properties, cause, and effect- is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency’ (Barad, 2007: 338). As ‘matter is differentiating…[in] the iterative production of different differences’ (p.137), it is the agential cuts ratified in any moment that are of consequence. These idiosyncratic matterings mark ‘which differences come to matter’ (p.137) and thus what might be possible, perceptible, or meaningful amid the various material-discursive practices configured when ‘matter makes itself felt’ (p.66).
I will engage with the material potentiality of thinking an active adiposity through the work of Karen Barad and the agential-realist ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad, 2007: 185) with which she diffractively engages the intra-activity of matter. Thinking with Barad through her agential realist engagement with matter allows us to delve inside the material-discursive markings through which we understand obesity. Drawing on Barad lends both a language and a diffractive methodology for moving beyond and into dominant Canadian understandings of childhood obesity, such that we can attend to the active matter, the continually re-marking adiposity, which marks childhood obesity as childhood obesity. In this way, we can imagine that agential adiposity is ontologically indeterminate as it participates in an ever reconfiguring milieu; adiposity matters because of the marks it makes on bodies, but comes to matter through the intra-actions that bring it into materialization. We are not abandoning the empirically rooted, BMI-driven, chemically dangerous obesity Jasmine collides with; rather, we are burrowing our way into the matters of that obesity, inhabiting-with it in an effort to disrupt the congealing of its ontology such that any hierarchical organization is broken and phenomenal intra-activity is foregrounded. As we inhabit-with obesity in tandem with picture books, we can no longer understand the adiposities in the books, nor the books, nor any body or matter as inert or singularly knowable; instead, the ‘stuff’ of obesity is entirely active in its own production and perceptibility and we can engage with the intra-actions, the patterns of mattering, that enact the material-discursive cuts that momentarily mark any of these matters as perceptible.
Chemical adiposity, evil adiposity, and hated adiposity
Attending to the agential intra-activity of matter, which enacts marks that bring adiposities into perceptibility, I will now explore potential obesities that might be practiced when the positioning and agency of adiposity is considered within current Canadian conceptualizations of obesity.
Adipose tissue is often portrayed as a biologically inert matter, an ‘inherent, fixed property’ (Barad, 2007: 151) of the body, which is made meaningful through the laboratory equipment that bring understandings of fat molecules as biochemically disruptive into existence. Popular imaginaries place trust in the scientist whittling away at his laboratory bench, dropping chemical reagents on fat tissue and viewing its reactions through a microscope. Through this ‘method assemblage’ (Law, 2004: 38) of physiological inquiry, which both stems from and sustains the ‘embedded hinterland of scientific method, [and] the practices it carries, [which] work to produce a reality that is independent, anterior, definite, and singular’ (p.37), cuts are enacted such that a ‘chemical adiposity’ is made perceptible. This obesity is quantifiable, and the matter of adiposity becomes appropriated to the machine of scientific objectivity.
Following a similar process, it is possible to conceive of an ‘evil adiposity’, enacted amid the material-discursive conditions made relevant in the socioeconomic climate that informs the urgent call for reducing obesity, lest Canadians become a culture with unhealthy, unproductive citizens. This adiposity, which makes fat perceptible as a dangerous but knowable body, exerts its force in policy discussions and in much media coverage (Evans, 2010). Returning to Jasmine, we might grasp a ‘hated adiposity’, where adiposity is ‘crafted, assembled as a part of a hinterland’ (Law, 2004: 55) of psychology to enact an obesity that can be blamed for low self-esteem, bullying, and feelings of sadness. This adiposity frames matter as the burden of biological material; a weighty mess with social consequences.
Active agential adiposity
If, as seems to be the case in dominant conceptions of childhood obesity, ‘things [adiposity] seem solid, prior, independent, definite and single then perhaps this is because they are being enacted, and re-enacted, and re-enacted’ (Law, 2004: 56). How might adiposity be performed as obesity? What happens if we refuse to accept that matter is inert, and instead fully invest in conceptualizing matter as a ‘substance in its intra-active becoming- not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad, 2007: 151)?
Suppose we return to the figure of chemical adiposity, and understand the conditions that enact the laboratory apparatus(es) to participate in ‘causal intra-action’ (Barad, 2007: 140) with adipose tissue whereby active matter is in continual flux, constantly implicated in its own differentiating. In this way, the possible enactments of the laboratory, adiposity, BMI, obesity, the scientist, and other bodies, are always materially reconfiguring in tandem with novel material-discursive cuts that trouble the borders of these very bodies and the ‘spacetimemattering’ that brings them into perceptibility. If these conditions were to radically change, it is possible that a chemical adiposity would become irrelevant or imperceptible, or that what we take to be a scientific obesity and its accompanying practices, would be reconfigured. Now the agency of adipose tissue becomes foregrounded; if adiposity is active in its own production, it must be accounted for in the obesities it practices. No longer are the quantifiable certainties of childhood obesity primary, as instead they are thrown into the vast continual intra-activity of worldly forces that both constitute and alter the practices that make obesity perceptible.
The adiposity that I hope to invoke in the following section is not necessarily a becoming-adiposity, as per Deleuze, where ‘multiplicities…continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 249) and become-other. Rather, I aim to imagine an inhabiting-with-adiposity, or becoming-through-adiposity, where what is marked as human or adipose is an enfolding materialization of active matter and the ‘stuff’ of any body is also the ‘stuff’ of all bodies, where bodies differentially come to matter through the conditioning of an agential cut. By inhabiting-with adiposity we can conceive that ‘[matter] scribbles or flesh reads’ (Kirby, 1997: 127) as the intra-actions of adiposity mark the images we encounter and bring into perceptibility differential enactments of the images.
Inhabiting-with an agential realist ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’
If ‘our (intra) actions matter- each one reconfigures the world in its becoming- and yet they never leave us; they are sedimented into our becoming, they become us’ (Barad, 2007: 394), we must seriously delve into the constitution of adipose tissue before endeavoring to inhabit-with adiposity. To attempt to visualize the adiposity we might inhabit in our task of re-reading these stories, I wish to present the following image of a chemical rendering of a saturated fat molecule, as shown in Figure 3, in which the carbon atoms are marked by images from the stories.
Momentary materialized agential adiposity. (Images from Griffith and Griffith, 2012; Kern, 2007; Martin et al., 2012.)
The originary entanglement of all matter brings about an agential realist ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad, 2007: 185), by which Barad means that all matter is continually implicated in the cuts that perform obesity and is therefore accountable to the bodies that are enacted, or excluded, amid the material-discursive conditions of a continually enfolding childhood obesity. In this way, what we come to know as obesity is continually re-marked as obesity by the matter that makes obesity – the material ‘stuff’ of adiposity enacts material-discursive cuts that mark adiposity knowable as adiposity. This stance should inform our understanding of this image. While this image is not meant to be an accurate or exhaustive representation of the matterings that populate any adiposity, nor does it adequately cover the agential adiposity present in any one story we will read, it might act to trouble our formulations of phenomenal matter as pre-given or inert.
To avoid falling into a pattern of analysis where we understand material-discursive intra-actions to only perform the well-congealed patterns that have come to be marked as dominant discourses, which fails to capitalize on the potentiality of iterative matterings, I wish to highlight how we might inhabit-with an iterative obesity, rather than supervising or viewing active adiposity. This image calls us to imagine the matter of obesity as active, agential, and ethical as it iteratively marks and re-marks itself. It cannot, and does not attempt to, capture the complexity of any enactment of obesity and undoubtedly fails to highlight far more agential matterings than it embodies. Rather, we can be accountable to this image by using it to conceptualize the material agencies at play amid any intra-action with, or within, adiposity, while using it to underscore the continual enfolding and marking of bodies as matter continually enacts difference upon entangled phenomenal adiposities.
Reading stories with agential adiposity
I will now turn to three picture books about childhood obesity, Making Healthy Choices (Kern, 2007), The Tale of Two Athletes (Griffith and Griffith, 2012), and They Call Me Fat Zoe (Martin et al., 2012), in an effort to tug at the boundaries of the images contained in these stores to explore how agential adiposity is entirely, iteratively, and continually active. I have opted to engage with picture books as they are positioned as relatively common and taken for granted in both early childhood milieus and as health promotion strategies. By foregrounding the material-discursive cuts that differentially mark matters as perceptible, picture books leave the myopathy of the discursive and enter into the flux of the material-discursive, perhaps interrupting a traditional matter in early childhood education. Through examining how agential adiposity leaves marks on bodies, participates in a non-linear causality, and traverses anthropocentric-container boundaries to iteratively enact a transient spacetimemattering, I hope to foreground the differential enactments of human adiposity at play amid childhood obesity.
Marking and materializing obese bodies
Amid the ontological entanglement of matter in continual intra-action, ‘bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world as a result of the specific cuts and reconfigurings that are enacted’ (Barad, 2007: 176). Through these differential enactments of matter performed by agential phenomena, ‘marks are left on bodies’ (Barad, 2007: 176). It is these scratches or scribbles on bodies, these material manifestations of the agential cuts iteratively performed in any intra-action, that act to delimit both the intelligibility and consequences of any intra-action. How might agential adiposity participate in enacting differential patterns of mattering and their materializations within and around obese bodies?
In Figure 4, the image on the left is the unaltered presentation of Patty’s body, whereby the materiality of adiposity is secondary to the presentation of a body that ‘doesn’t have the energy to keep up with girls who do not weigh as much’ (Kern, 2007: 26). In an effort to inhabit this image by foregrounding agential adiposity, a shift in focus and size alters the image, shifting both the affective potentiality of, and material-discursive boundaries performed in, the image.
Materializations of a painful-obese-adiposity (Kern, 2007: 27).
In the image on the right, adiposity expresses its dynamism by enacting an agential cut such that Patty’s body materializes as a stuttering matter; a material cut, performed by the adipose tissue that is made perceptible through this cut, brings into being a body that is marked by a painful sensation. Adipose tissue is not inert, but rather, through its entanglement with other agencies, including those that momentarily bring into being Patty’s body, adiposity performs obesity as painful. Similarly, this adiposity also enacts cuts that bring pain into intelligibility as negative through its entanglement with, and in the making of, local and more widespread material-discursive practices. We can envision adipose tissue as a fleeting performance of coalescing matter, which participates in ‘the enactment of determinate…structures with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies’ (Barad, 2007: 140). In this way adiposity is continually reconfigured, while inseparably re-performing and re-marking other molecular bodies. Together, these cuts inform more macro cuts within the materialization of Patty’s body, such that in their moment-to-moment practices they come together as Patty’s obese body. Invoking adiposity in this way highlights the idiosyncratic enactment of adiposity, such that adipose tissue is opened to other intra-acting agencies. If adiposity no longer enacts cuts that make an adipose-pain perceptible, Patty’s body is no longer marked as defective because the material-discursive performances that conditioned this materialization no longer sustain this enactment, nor the pattern of agential cuts it entails.
Agential adiposity is also in continual intra-action with various other agencies that enact differential marks on the body, thus materializing a novel obese body. In the unaltered image shown in Figure 5, the screen of the measuring instrument can be considered a ‘measuring agency’ (Barad, 2007: 348). It conditions a representation of the mass of Zoe’s materialized body. The scale, and its accompanying representation of Zoe, is made perceptible through the material-discursive cuts enacted by adiposity and numerous other actants in this moment. Holding to the task of foregrounding agential adiposity, how might the obesity be performed differently?
Adipose-fat Zoe feet-scale intra-activity (Martin et al., 2012: 2).
In marking Zoe’s body as a 34 lb entity, adiposity intra-acts with the matter that brings the scale into being. Shifting attention to the moment of ontological inseparability between the phenomenal matterings of the scale and Zoe’s feet as they collide in this image can act to highlight the force of adiposity in materializing Zoe’s body. The matter-made-perceptible as ‘a fat Zoe[’s]’ feet (Martin et al., 2012: 15) is in continual intra-action with the phenomenal matter brought into performance as the scale. In this intra-action ‘measurements create and further extend entanglements’ (Barad, 2007: 344), as adiposity and the scale enact cuts that bring into perceptibility the material-discursive formations that mark the scale as expressing the truth of Zoe’s mass. This performs Zoe’s body as a weighted, obese body. When the certainty of the apparatus is no longer privileged and instead the moment of intra-activity, in which the atomic bodies that form Zoe’s body act amid their ontological entanglement with the matterings that make the scale meaningful, is foregrounded, the uncertainty and precariousness of this encounter are made primary. No longer is Zoe’s adiposity undeniably heavy, but instead adiposity can be conceptualized as marking Zoe’s body in this way. This alters our engagement with childhood obesity and adiposity, as the etchings enacted upon and among bodies as a result of the ontologically entangled character of adipose tissue are made primary.
Causality and patterns of agential adiposity
The image on the left in Figure 6 reflects the prevalent Euro-Western assumption that obesity occurs, and excess adiposity becomes present, through a linear sequence of events: Patty chooses the elevator over stairs, contributing to her unhealthy lifestyle, and thus she gains weight and becomes obese. However, amid an agential realist ontology, causality plays out as a ‘dynamic and ever-changing topology’ (Barad, 2007: 177) as ‘phenomena are forever being reenfolded and reformed’ (p.177). As such, ‘intra-actions are constraining but not determining’ (p.177); linearity is never assured. In the image on the right, one performance of agential adiposity might be the event of Patty’s left hand, which materializes as a symbol of her blockage of physical activity. Adiposity is present in the becoming-perceptible of her hand, such that it is entangled with the other atomic agencies of the matter of her hand as well as the material-discursive conditions that make this assemblage perceptible as both an appendage and a symbol. If we grant that adiposity is at work in the motion of splaying Patty’s fingers, as well as the intra-activity of this motion with the body of her friend, adiposity can be seen as active and dynamic in this performance of obesity.
Differently perceptible adipose intra-actions (Kern, 2007: 25).
Similarly, as ‘agency is a matter of intra-activity; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has’ (Barad, 2007: 178), the moment of intra-action between Patty’s hand and the elevator button can be conceptualized as another series of cuts and performances of adiposity. Without the flux of adiposity, the performance of pushing the button on the elevator would be altered, as would the material-discursive conditions that make such a transfer of momentum perceptible. If adiposity was differentially marked in this moment, both the hand that materializes and presses the button and the instant of intra-action between the button and the limb would matter in a differential way, in consort with an iterative refiguring of the material-discursive conditions that enact the intra-action as perceptible. In this way, a novel performance of obesity would be patterned, disrupting the presumed linear causality associated with dominant arrangements of childhood obesity.
Linear causality is also disrupted in Figure 7, wherein taking unhealthy food into the body is presumed to lead to excess adiposity and thus obesity. Focusing on the moment of intra-activity between adiposity as it comes to matter within and as Zoe’s body, and adiposity as it is materialized as saturated fat in the ice cream, highlights the ontological entanglement of adiposity. Iterative ‘intra-actions cut “things” together and apart…[that are] not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all’ (Barad, 2007: 179). Instead, adiposities are in continual intra-action, always marking and making adiposities.
Differently perceptible adiposities (Martin et al., 2012: 29).
In this image, we can conceive of ‘matter [as] an agentive factor in its iterative materialization’ (Barad, 2007: 178) as structurally similar trans fat molecules intra-act within and among the momentary materializations of Zoe’s body and the ice cream. If there is nothing ontologically determinate about the phenomena of these molecules, it is challenging to imagine a causal agent in this intra-action; is the adipose tissue that has already been assembled in Zoe’s performed material body the causal agent in her obesity, or are the fat molecules that come to matter in the ice cream? An agential realist ontology would posit that it is neither, as it is only in their mutual constitution that Zoe’s body, and the adiposity at work in Zoe’s obesity, come to matter as obesity. Further, while in the image on the left, adiposity is marked as ‘unhealthy’ or ‘dangerous’ through its association with ice cream and trash, in the image on the right adiposity becomes perceptible through the ‘agential cut [that] enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological…indeterminacy’ (p.140); no longer is the performance of obesity centered on a disobedient body, but obesity is enacted in the intra-action between the matters of Zoe’s body and the matters of what is made perceptible as ice cream. This acts to disrupt the presumed linearity inherent to obesity and destabilizes the logic fundamental to many childhood obesity prevention programs.
Bodily boundaries and spacetimemattering
If ‘intra-actions are the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced’ (Barad, 2007: 179), then considering childhood obesity while foregrounding agential adiposity can act to trouble the traditional boundaries of human materiality as well as its spatial and temporal orientation. As in the above image of Zoe in Figure 7, all phenomena are originally and forever ontologically entangled and thus ‘human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity’ (Barad, 2007: 172).
Where does Patty’s body end in these images shown in Figure 8? Is it at the skin? What are the material boundaries of her physicality – or do such boundaries exist? I wish to posit that in the second image the boundaries of Patty’s materiality, the practiced container of matter that marks Patty as obese, result from an ‘intra-play of continuity and discontinuity, determinacy and indeterminacy, possibility and impossibility’ (Barad, 2007: 182); the borders of bodily adiposity come to matter in that they are porous and ‘[teeter] on the cusp’ (p.182) of dissolving into differentially indeterminate matterings.
XL body-adipose limits (Kern, 2007: 30).
Adiposity does not only physically strain the boundaries of the material shirt encasing the body it brings into being, but also challenges the borders of the body that such a shirt is meant to encase. Barad (2007) argues ‘it is when the body doesn’t work- when the body “breaks down”’ (p.158) that the leaky nature of its created borders becomes apparent. Adiposity can be seen to exert its inherent dynamism through a myriad of intra-actions, such that the body it performs is no longer consistent with the dominant intra-activity that creates an ideal spatiotemporal body; the body ‘breaks down’. In this way, matter comes together to facilitate a novel environment in which material-discursive constraints might be configured differently. When adiposity is foregrounded in the image, it becomes challenging to privilege the sizing tag of the shirt and the material-discursive conditions that bring this knowledge into perceptibility. The agential cut enacted by adiposity does ‘not disentangle the phenomena into independent subsystems [for example “Patty’s fat body” and “the XL shirt”]’ (Barad, 2007: 348), but instead enacts a ‘local determinacy’ (p.348), as adiposity comes to matter as a performance that strains the limits of the dominant pattern of agential cuts that sustain the material-discursive conditions of the shirt and its accompanying bodily practices.
In Figure 9, Jumper and The Thumper walk through a drive-through lane and realize that The Thumper is ‘as heavy as a car’ (Griffith and Griffith, 2012: 33). In the image on the right, agential adiposity can be foregrounded such that the cuts enacted dramatically alter the materialization of an obese body. If ontological indeterminacy is the flavor of matter, it stands that it is through the agential cuts at play within this moment that adiposity might participate in the cuts that make The Thumper’s body perceptible as a ‘car obesity’. Agential cuts that mark an obese body as something human are disrupted, as the matterings that constitute the drive-through sensor enter into a differential pattern of intra-activity with the adiposity that constitutes this performance of obesity. Through foregrounding the agential play of adiposity, this image might act to highlight how the meaning and practice of mattering in any moment is ‘not [a] human-based activit[y] but [a] specific material (re)configur[ing] of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted’ (Barad, 2007: 183).
Car obesity (Griffith and Griffith, 2012: 32).
Vanishing agential adiposity
In all of the examples we have traversed thus far, adiposity seems to be actively present – the actions that bring adiposity to matter act to make adiposity perceptible (Mol, 2002). What happens when adiposity seems to disappear; when the spacetime configuration adiposity enacts is such that it is no longer overtly at play?
The image on the left in Figure 10 depicts Kate before and after her weight loss. In attempting to foreground adiposity in the images on the right, we are faced with the task of confronting where agential adiposity may have gone; can intra-active matter disappear from within the body that it acts to constitute?
Disappearing adiposity? (Martin et al., 2012: 25, 37).
Within an agential realist ontology, if all matter is ontologically indeterminate, it follows that adiposity cannot not vanish. Rather, adiposity is in differential intra-activity within worldly events and no longer acts in the materialization of Kate’s body in the same fashion. Adiposity now marks Kate’s body in its absence or shrinkage, such that it enacts a body that is ‘thin’ or ‘healthy’ amid dominant patternings of agential cuts. In addition, by marking a differential presencing, adiposity can be appreciated as ‘an ongoing flow of agency…through which causal structures are stabilized and destabilized’ (Barad, 2007: 140), whereby the materialization of obese bodies is not linked to adiposity in a linear fashion but rather continually co-performed. Further, this reassembling of intra-active adiposity works to disrupt the spatiality associated with adiposity and the bodies it marks, as performances of obesity ‘never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded through one another’ (Barad, 2010: 240). As such, adiposity continually reforms the boundaries of both the body it conjures and the matterings it intra-acts with. It is here, in imagining that adiposity enters into a differential set of worldly relations as the material phenomena of Kate’s body also intra-act in novel ways, that agential adiposity can be understood to actively mark bodies, interrupt any semblance of traditional causality in obese bodies, and iteratively constrain and tug at the spatiotemporal material-discursive borders of the human body.
Accountability to and with agential adiposity and childhood obesities
When matter, specifically the matter of adiposity, can be foregrounded, the traditional configurations of obesity that modern Euro-Western society has come to rely on can be profoundly disrupted. No longer is obesity an ontologically firm entity, as ‘biology [becomes] a changing, differential script’ (Kirby, 1997: 159) and ‘even the very atoms that make up the biological body come to matter’ (Barad, 2003: 810). Through this interference, differential enactments of obesity can emerge as perceptible, such that we might engage differently with the materialization of obese bodies. Appreciating the dynamism of agential adiposity exposes scholars and early childhood educators who engage with childhood obesity to the immanent flux of material agencies, and we are challenged to reorient our understandings of the matterings at play amid performances of childhood obesity. Educators must also examine the performances of obesity that the intra-activities we are implicated in bring into being, in an effort to be accountable to the intra-active potential of adiposity and multiple childhood obesities.
Re-imagining childhood obesity through a temporary foregrounding of adiposity is not meant to act as a means of promoting agential adiposity as a dominant approach to obesity. Rather, it aims to add complexity to an already complicated phenomenon by burrowing into the mechanisms and implications of how ‘phenomena come to matter’ (Barad, 2007: 140) in the materialization of obese bodies.
Reading childhood obesity with an agential realist ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad, 2007: 185), where ‘the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter’ (p.185) and all matter, and the etchings it enacts on bodies, is ‘part of the world-body space in its dynamic structuration’ (p.185) calls early childhood educators to take seriously their engagements with agential adiposity and foregrounds our ethical accountability in the production and practices of childhood obesity. No longer can even a picture book be approached as singular; rather, it is re-markable as the matters that enact its material-discursive perceptibility are in iterative flux, continually performing the indeterminacy that is a book, childhood obesity, adiposity, educator, me, you – agential matter.
Attending to the ontological indeterminacy of adiposity raises various questions for early childhood educators: how might conceptualizing an agential adiposity orient practitioner bodies and the bodies of those we are in intra-action with? How might we be accountable to non-human enactments of adiposity and the performances of obesity this might make perceptible? How can we understand the affective potential of adiposity in childhood obesity? How might we reorient our mattering if we wish to participate in enacting a differential affective adiposity? Finally, what interventions or orientations to the matters of adiposity emerge when we consider the ontological inseparability of the phenomena that bring into being the material-discursive conditions that make childhood obesity intelligible? Inhabiting-with obesity gestures strongly toward the need for early childhood educators to continually think through and with the complexities of childhood obesity – to tangle with the productive re-markability of matter, such that we might begin to imagine the vast potentiality inherent to agential adiposity and the myriad materializations of childhood obesity this might make perceptible.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.