2026-09-22T18:35:17Zhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/server/oai/requestoai:mro.massey.ac.nz:10179/152122025-11-11T14:22:31Zcom_10179_294col_10179_296
DSpace at Massey University
author
Joensen, Clare
2020-02-18T23:24:56Z
2020-02-18T23:24:56Z
2019
http://hdl.handle.net/10179/15212
Q112948947
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q112948947
Weight loss surgery is increasingly being used to combat obesity, resulting in
recipients becoming more visible in society. This in turn facilitates the normalising of
what once would have been considered a radical medical procedure and the
proliferation of discourse that more often than not measures success against models of
slimness and appearance and underplays the downsides of surgery. Through the use of
a narrative phenomenological approach, this research explores the experiences of
surgery recipients, specifically Māori women, and asks the question; ‘how does the
embodiment of radical change impact on relationality, interiority, conviviality, and
‘being in the world’?’ Through learning from Māori women, this research also explores
how being Māori shapes experience both before and after surgery and in doing so,
contrasts to literature which frames experiences of indigenous women through a
Foucauldian lens of colonialism. I argue that, as Māori, these women are supported by
the collective – significantly so – but also have to grapple with and push back negative
discourses that leak into their world. I also argue that life post-surgery is entangled
with both liminality and potentialities; precarious, unsettled and unsettling, while
being simultaneously imbued with hope and focused towards an extending future.
Surgery does transform bodies through enabling tremendous weight loss but also
transfigures far more than it is designed to do.
en
The Author
Obesity
Surgery
Social aspects
New Zealand
Overweight women
Women, Maori
Attitudes
Wāhine
Ara kai
Kai
Mana
Anthropology
Aotearoa
bariatric surgery
becoming
commensality
conviviality
eating
food
Māori women
New Zealand
Phenomenology
weight loss surgery
Being big, becoming small : conversations with Māori women about weight loss surgery : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Albany, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Thesis
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