From “I will” to “I do”: Motility trajectories after weight loss surgery

Growing sedentarization, the moralization of movement, and the increasing use of bariatric surgery form the backdrop of this study on motility among overweight people. Understood as the capacity to move, as well as the potentialities and conditions that shape movement, motility is revisited here through a social-science lens to analyze how medically induced weight loss impacts the body schema. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in Marseille, combining interviews and participant observation, the research shows that weight loss transforms the individual’s relationship to their body without the body schema adjusting immediately. The overweight people encountered during this study often continue to move as though they still inhabited their pre-surgery bodies, revealing a gap between the physical body and its lived experience. They continue to employ strategies of adaptation and anticipation in relation to their environment, activities, and others, demonstrating a motility that was both constrained and envisioned prior to surgery. The mobility regained after the intervention—and its gradual incorporation into the body schema—ultimately becomes situated within a normative horizon in which performance is valued: The once-envisioned “I will” becomes an embodied “I do.”