Deserving Patients and Undeserving Consumers: Intersecting Identities in Narratives of GLP-1 Takers

• In Event: Idealized Bodies

Abstract

How do people taking GLP-1s describe their motives? This paper draws on 44 interviews conducted in 2024-2025 with people who identified as fat, obese, or overweight. I argue that people who take GLP-1s selectively emphasize therapeutic, aesthetic, and preventive motives for taking GLP-1s for weight loss in a bid to present themselves in the most deserving light, drawing on tropes associated with identities like gender, class, parenthood, and age. At the same time, they express a range of narratives of GLP-1 deservingness by invoking others who are taking them, making sense of their individual experiences explicitly in comparison with other people in their lives and with broader debates about GLP-1s. Comparing GLP-1 takers’ experiences and attitudes with those of people who saw themselves as fat, overweight, or obese but were not taking GLP-1s, this article documents the different relationships people have with GLP-1s as a path to idealized bodies, idealized health, or neither. Both groups discuss how they face and cope with stigma for their large body size. This article illuminates the extra work that people do to obtain GLP-1s by drawing on repertoires of action as patients, consumers, citizens, and clients to gain resources to maximize their wellbeing.

Author

• Alka Menon, Yale University