Shame, Blame, and Ozempic: The Social Meanings of GLP-1 Use

• In Event: 30210 - Shifting Contexts of Clinical Work

Abstract

Drawing on 73 interviews (with people who take GLP-1s, people who prescribe them- people who have heard about them, and health access/fat rights advocates); ethnographic observation of a dozen events featuring and discussing GLP-1s; and analyses of GLP-1 related hearings, laws, and newspaper articles, this paper uses public debates about GLP-1s to trace the incipient emergence of biopolitical citizenship in articulations for expanded access to the drugs. This citizenship is predicated on shifts in the underlying moral understandings of responsibility: of individuals for their body weight, of physicians for their patients, and of politicians for the health of the public.

Author

• Alka Menon, Yale University