The moral economy of obesity surgery: continuing stigma or lasting destigmatisation?

Drawing on repeated interviews with ‘obese’ patients who were authorized to undergo bariatric surgery, this article questions the work of meaning-making carried out by patients and the medical staff, in an attempt to inflect the moral career that associates weight gain with personal “fault” and the choice of surgery with an “easy way out”. This article shows under which conditions this negotiation contributes to the emergence of a legitimate category of patients, who are both active and responsible for the bodily transformations produced with surgical support. In doing so, it explains how bariatric surgery can be used to break down the stigma associated with a deviant body type.