Saying No to Weight-Loss Drugs: The Paradox of the Patient Consumer and Stratified Biomedicalization

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Medical Experiences

Abstract

Discourse around usage of biomedical technologies, like drugs that can aid weight loss (semaglutide, GLP-1 agonists, Ozempic, Wegovy), center around how people are precluded from access. However, this research finds people reject Ozempic even when they are invested in biomedical solutions to weight loss, not due to lack of access or capital, but because they seek to expand their consumer agency and are committed to a particular ideology of the body. This paper expands the concept of biomedical stratification by attending to a case of agentic disengagement, demonstrating how WeightWatchers members challenge knowledge systems of weight loss and health. Drawing on over 100 hours of ethnographic notes at WeightWatchers meetings and 15 interviews with members, I outline 4 dimensions which demonstrate how agentic disengagement may factor into biomedical stratification through: 1) The paradoxical nature of the patient consumer, 2) A focus on transformation and capacity building, 3) Biomedicalization as burdensome and risky, and 4) A cultural logic which emphasizes slow and social health interventions. Importantly, these processes are especially linked to the race, gender, class, and age of the participants in the study. This study will contend with how WeightWatchers members’ contestation of weight-loss drugs offers potential for more radical visions of health, while also being entrenched in a paradigm of health which pathologizes fatness.

Author

• Ni'Shele Jackson, University of Illinois-Chicago