The wazan janch: The body-mass index and the socio-spatial politics of health promotion in rural India

The body mass index (BMI), which measures body mass divided by height squared (kg/m²), has become a popular technology for quickly measuring and assessing individuals' health and disease risk. However, the BMI has also been widely criticized by health professionals who argue that it’s a poor measure of health. Feminist scholars are also critical, arguing BMI is a technology of neoliberal health promotion that pathologizes body size, and produces responsibilized subjects invested in maintaining “proper” weights, while often ignoring the social and environmental conditions that result in differently sized bodies. In this paper, I look at a series of BMI “camps” held across rural North India in 2017 and put forth two central arguments. First, BMI is not an a priori technology of neoliberal governmentality, but can be also be a means to highlight social marginalization and create relations of care. I find the spaces of BMI deployment are tightly linked to the types of responsibility and care it produces. Second, while the intended goal of these BMI camps is to propel people, mostly women, to change their behavior to be more healthful, this behavior change was often stymied by the everyday business of surviving in India's current political economic climate. Despite that women were unable to implement much of the nutrition advice (and sometimes reported additional stress due to attendance at such camps), women continued to attend health-related camps. This paper draws on the notion of cruel optimism, which argues that the objects of our attachments, such as ideas of “the good life” can be self-detrimental, as a way to unpack the paradox of women who continue to show up for health camps despite not taking anyway many useful skill and sometimes causing them anxiety.