Heather Mackay
Postdoc
A feminist geographic analysis of perceptions of food and health in Ugandan cities
Author
Summary, in English
This article contributes to a feminist geographic analysis of how urban food and health environments and non-communicable disease experience may be being constructed, and contested, by healthcare professionals (local elites) in two secondary Ugandan cities (Mbale and Mbarara). I use thematic and group interaction analysis of focus group data to explore material and discursive representations. Findings make explicit how healthcare professionals had a tendency to prescribe highly classed and gendered assumptions of bodies and behaviours in places and in daily practices. The work supports the discomfort some have felt concerning claims of an African nutrition transition, and is relevant to debates regarding double burden malnutrition. I argue that a feministic analysis, and an intersectional appreciation of people in places, is advantageous to food and health-related research and policy-making. Results uncover and deconstruct a dominant patriarchal tendency towards blaming women for obesity. Yet findings also exemplify the co-constructed and malleable nature of knowledge and understandings, and this offers encouragement.
Publishing year
2019-11-02
Language
English
Pages
1519-1543
Publication/Series
Gender, Place and Culture
Volume
26
Issue
11
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Routledge
Keywords
- Feminist geography
- food
- non-communicable disease
- nutrition transition
- obesity
- Uganda
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0966-369X