Fat Indigenous Bodies and Body Sovereignty: An Exploration of Re-presentations

Hine-Nui-Te-Pō

Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is an atua, a goddess, she is an ancestor, and she is one of the most influential, powerful Māori women in our history. Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s story is complex and intricate. Within Māori creation, Papatūānuku is the Earth mother. She and Ranginui, the Sky father were connected, with their children between them. Their children wanted light and to be able to move freely, and so one of their sons, Tāne the god of the forest, used his tree trunk legs to push Ranginui and Papatūānuku apart, and thus bringing Te Ao Mārama, the world of light into being.

After this, Tāne longed for a partner, for the female essence. He searched everywhere for this. When the time was right, Papatūānuku told him where he could create a woman out of the earth at her kurawaka, her pubic region. Tāne did this and breathed life into her, and with a sneeze, she had been brought into Te Ao Marama, Hine-Ahu-One, the first human. Hine-Ahu-One and Tāne had a child, Hine-Titama, the Dawn Maiden. When Hine-Titama was older Tāne married her and they had children. Hine-Titama questioned her whakapapa, her genealogy and who her father was, Tāne told her to ask the whare, the ancestral house with cravings on the walls that told the story of how Te Ao Mārama was brought into being, who Hine-Ahu-One was and who Tāne was, and how Hine-Titama was their child. When Hine-Titama found out her father was her husband and the father of her children she departed Te Ao Mārama to Rarohenga, the underworld, and told Tāne to stay with their children in Te Ao Mārama and she would wait for them in the underworld and became Hine-Nui-Te-Pō, The Great Goddess of the Night. Various articulations of this story position Hine-Nui-Te-Pō as the Goddess of Death, however, the implication that she controls or causes death is inaccurate, she is a guardian of those who have passed on to the next world.

Māui is one of the most well-known demi-gods in Māori, Pasifika and Polynesian whakapapa. There are many stories of him fishing up islands and slowing down the sun for example. Māui was seen as a trickster and sought to gain immortality for people by tricking Hine-Nui-Te-Pō. In order to gain immortality, Māui needed to enter Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s vagina. There are multiple accounts of this narrative, some suggest that Māui entered Hine-Nui-Te-Pō in order rape her (Yates-Smith, 1998), some suggest he was trying to impregnate her, some suggest he was trying to be re-born, and others suggest that he was trying to exit through her mouth, reversing the birthing process. Māui the demi-god transformed himself into a lizard to crawl between the obsidian teeth in Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s vagina. Māui’s legs were sticking out of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō and the birds around at the time thought he looked amusing, the pīwaiwaka, the fantail started laughing at Māui and awoke Hine-Nui-Te-Pō who then crushed and killed Māui with the obsidian teeth in her vagina. Hine-Nui-Te-Pō killing Māui is often understood as creating a new understanding of the whare tangata or the womb, Yates-Smith (1998) suggests that through Hine-Nui-Te-Pō killing Māui with her vagina she emphasised the power both in the creation of life and death related to women. Some accounts suggest that Māui became the first menstruation and that menstruation represents the power of both creation and destruction (Murphy, 2011, 2013). Ngāhuia Murphy discusses other accounts of Māui’s death involving Hine-Nui-Te-Pō; in one version she speaks of ‘Māui being caught in the vulva of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō and as she convulses her vaginal muscles, he scrapes down the walls of the birth canal causing Hine-Nui-Te-Pō to bleed’ (Murphy, 2011: 51). This idea illustrates the power of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō and women through the birth and death processes, as well as menstruation, which Murphy (2013: 11) suggests is a ‘powerful site where colonialist assertions of menstrual putridity collide with Indigenous narratives of continuity’.

Often Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is re-presented through the re-telling of this narrative. Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is regularly re-positioned and re-named as the Goddess of Death, and as passive and dark for killing Māui (August, 2005). This re-defining creates a dual re-presentation that simultaneously glorifies Māui as a male heroic trickster for taking Māori women’s knowledges and seeking to cheat death by entering Hine-Nui-Te-Pō without consent, and positions Hine-Nui-Te-Pō as a taker of life (Yates-Smith, 1998).

Hine-Nui-Te-Pō and her expression of female energy meant that colonial re-tellings and re-definings present her as evil. This re-framing of women, particularly Māori women, as evil and unclean has been positioned by Māori academics such as Ani Mikaere (1999) as stemming from biblical narratives. She suggests that:

The one figure who could scarcely be characterized as passive was Hine-Nui-Te-Pō.. . . Faced with the irrefutable expression of female sexual power that Hine-Nui-Te-Pō posed, the redefiners of Māori cosmology recast her as evil and destructive. This fitted nicely with biblical notions of woman being responsible for sin. The negative connotations that men attached to the female sexual organs were also entirely consistent with Old Testament notions of women being unclean because of menstruation. (1999: 41)

Another way in which Hine-Nui-Te-Pō has been re-presented is through attempts to literally translate parts of her name. Hine-Nui-Te-Pō does not mean the Goddess of Death or the Big Goddess of Death. The essence of her name cannot be fully articulated in English; however, I would like to draw emphasis to the word Nui. Nui in relation to Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is often translated as big or great, however, this translation fails to consider the true vastness of who Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is. It can also be understood as one of the ways in which fatism as a system, like that of sexism and racism, seeks to re-present, re-name and re-shape Māori women. Nui has connotations of being large, being plentiful, being great and abundant, superior and great as well as vast and important. In this sense, Hine-Nui-Te-Pō is not only abundant in her mana and her essence, but also, I believe in her size. And this size is one of the ways in which her body sovereignty is continually disregarded or actively omitted from conversations.

These re-presentations illustrate colonial re-interpretations of (fat) Māori women in an attempt to re-define us and our bodies. The history of Māui entering Hine-Nui-Te-Pō shows how Māui died because he entered Hine-Nui-Te-Pō without consent, and I suggest that in fact, Māui’s death was an act of body sovereignty for Hine-Nui-Te-Pō.

Body sovereignty is a relatively recent articulation of what Māori have always known, enacted and recognised in relation to bodies, sovereignty and autonomy; as demonstrated by Hine-Nui-Te-Pō, however, body sovereignty is impacted by the isms. Understanding how racism, sexism and fatism operate as colonial systems that re-present Indigenous peoples and re-structure access based on who has power is central to understanding what body sovereignty can be and how acknowledging it can create equity.

The isms

There are various understandings of racism, sexism and fatism. Camara Jones (2000) positions racism as a system that allocates access to goods, services and opportunities based on phenotypical markers and assumptions of race and ethnicity. Racism operates by creating differential access to opportunity within society and occurs at institutional level and can be personally mediated and internalised (Jones, 2000). Jones places an emphasis on racism as a system that displays itself in material conditions such as differential access to education, employment, health care, healthful environments and more; in relation to power, racism results in restricted access to power by privileging dominant, hegemonic cultural histories through information that is accessible, whose voices are privileged and represented in policy, government and the media, and access to resources and wealth (Jones, 2000). As such, Jones posits personally mediated racism rather than interpersonal racism in order to re-focus on racism as a system rather than centring on individual acts and therefore ‘bad individuals’.

According to Paradies and Williams (2008), racism operates at societal, institutional, interpersonal and internalised levels. Expanding on this, Moewaka Barnes et al. (2013) posit societal racism as the imposition of the culture, epistemologies, values and sensibilities of one group on another, and they suggest that institutional racism is the praxis of policies and processes that re-create unfair and avoidable inequities across ethnicities. Subsequently, interpersonal racism under their conceptualisation involves direct interactions across power levels and often the prevalence of these experiences can lead to the internalisation and belief in these discourses and attitudes that restrict access.

Similarly to racism, sexism can be understood as an institutional-level system which is mediated at both individual and organisational levels. As a mechanism that utilises power, sexism assembles access to opportunities based on gender stratification and it is ‘perpetuated through concealment within culture, policies, the hierarchies that exist within how institutions are structured and regulated, and how responsibility is allocated’ (Whitley and Page, 2015: 38). Sexism can be personally mediated and internalised and is often invisibilised by the continued refusal to recognise it as a system. This further privileges those who benefit from sexism and reduces it to individual acts rather than an interconnected system that operates at societal and institutional levels to inhibit access (Whitley and Page, 2015).

The continued refusal to acknowledge sexism both at institutional and societal levels, and through personal mediation, perpetuates the normalisation of this oppression within various contexts. This also restricts ways in which sexism is defined and how sexual harassment and restriction can be identified (Whitley and Page, 2015). This shifts the focus from systemic sexist oppression, to victim blaming and works to de-credit those who experience sexism through questioning women’s credibility and in the ways society can ‘refuse to listen to women as verifiable sources of knowledge’ (Whitley and Page, 2015: 38).

Sexism revolves around power. Part of its pervasiveness lies in how the causes of sexism are difficult to pinpoint; as a system that privileges one group and disadvantages others, however, the concealment of that privilege is continuous and crucial to the maintenance of this system. This re-distribution of power and access is illustrated at systemic and individual levels, and it can be difficult (for sexists) to locate origins of inequities and discrimination that occur due to the vastness of it (Whitley and Page, 2015). However, this difficulty sustains these ideas of doubt around who is (un)(re)liable and whose experiences are acknowledged. This re-framing of women, particularly Indigenous women as (un)(re)liable cultivates the normalisation of sexism.

Understanding how these isms intersect and operate is important to comprehending how intersectionality influences the lives of peoples of colour (Crenshaw, 1991). Fatism again reiterates these ideologies of racism and sexism as systems. Negative stereotypes associated with fatness perpetuate fat stigma. This stigmatisation is maintained by societal systems and personally mediated and internalised through neoliberal individualised discourses. Fatism intersects with other oppressions (Pausé, 2014, 2017). Fat oppression is pervasive and traverses multiple facets of life, restricting access to employment, healthful environments and adequate health care (Warbrick et al., 2018).

Fat people are more likely to have negative health experiences, and subsequently cancel, postpone or not seek health advice for fear of being body shamed. Fat bias is endemic, and within a health context particularly hyper-medicalised. This stigmatisation is reflected in provider biases that elicit personally mediated fatism, and facilities and equipment that are inaccessible for fat people. Often fat bias and fatism have worse psychological, emotional and social effects than being fat (Pausé, 2014, 2017; Warbrick et al., 2018). I posit fatism as a system that again structures access to, among other things, goods, services and opportunities, based on body size; it also relates to ways bodies are seen as (un)desirable and (un)worthy (Cwynar-Horta, 2016).

There is a stratification of access, worthiness and (un)(re)liability within fatness and fatism, and this stratification is both gendered and ethnically/racially governed. Fatism is embedded within neoliberal colonisation. Experiencing body discrimination is not new to Indigenous peoples, as we have seen with the re-framing and re-presenting of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō. Warbrick et al. (2018) propose that fatism is not new to Māori, and that discourses around fatness and productivity are prevalent for Māori. They suggest that fatism is a manifestation of racism, and Murray (2016) suggests that fatism is highly gendered. Given the various ways in which Indigenous bodies are perpetually scrutinised within society (Rountree, 1998), fatism is extremely pervasive, normalised and linked largely to power and surveillance. Fat Indigenous peoples are (under)/(over)surveilled, (in)visibilised and (hyper)(de)sexualised through these mechanisms of oppression. The example of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō and the colonial re-tellings of her narrative illustrate the manifestation of these oppressions as well as the (in)visibilisation of her and parts of her history.

The fat female body, and I would argue, fat female Indigenous body, has become increasingly (over)surveilled, and medicalisation and moral panic have pathologised fatness (Murray, 2016). Murray discusses the ways in which fat women are routinely positioned as less than women, less than human and not having essence as they are unable to access their ‘true’ selves. The medicalisation and (under)/(over)surveillance of fat women’s bodies position fat women as a ‘source of suffering for others’ (Murray, 2016: 2), as being fat is seen as a moral failure and a threat to the expected aesthetics of women within society and subsequently fatness and fat women are treated as such (Murray, 2016), arguably through hegemonic racism and sexism as well as fatism.

For those who (hyper)medicalise and hyper-surveil fat women’s bodies there is often a level of discomfort in fat people, particularly fat Indigenous women, discussing our fatness. Speaking to your fatness requires a re-negotiation of the ‘representational contract between one’s body and one’s world’ (Sedgwick, 1994: 230). Sedgwick (1994) and Murray (2005, 2016) discuss (un/be)coming out as a way to re-think fat politics through declaring one’s body’s truth despite fatness being self-evident and hyper-(in)visiblised. This declaration enables the possibility for fat Indigenous women to been seen in new ways and to participate actively in a re-negotiation of our rights to access that can make fatists sit with their discomfort and de-humanising (Murray, 2005, 2016; Sedgwick, 1994). This speaking of truth can be understood in multiple ways, not just literally, but through physical manifestations of body sovereignty, as we have seen with Hine-Nui-Te-Pō through both her re-clamation of agency in changing her identity and through the death of Māui.

The ways in which fatness and ultimately fatism are governed by ‘a series of gendered, classed, and raced imperatives for normative bodily being reiterates the extreme policing and surveillance and subsequently discrimination experienced for not fitting into the dominant hegemonic group’ (Murray, 2016: 2). This has resulted in formations of body politics in order to ‘renegotiate dominant understandings of the “fat” female body, and to investigate the problematics and dilemmas that form the experience of “fat” bodily “being-in-the-world”’ (Murray, 2016: 2).

Power and bodies

This re-negotiation can be seen within issues of power. Power influences Indigenous women’s bodies in extensive ways, as is evident with discussions around the isms. Berlant (2007) infers that sovereignty as a concept can be problematic. She discusses how ideas of control are often understood from limited contexts and traditions or, alternatively, based on the state’s understandings of sovereignty. According to Berlant, certain definitions of sovereignty can mask ‘the variety of processes and procedures involved historically in the administration of law and of bodies’ (2007: 755). Her critique also applies to ways sovereignty is often positioned as individual autonomy and how this can perpetuate the alignment of sovereignty with notions of self-control. Berlant discusses Foucault’s (1976) conversations around sovereignty and biopower, where Foucault talks about the ways sovereignty and biopower are linked in terms of re-presentations of people and bodies in complex ways. Elaborating on this, Foucault (1976) states that sovereignty is ‘not the right to put people to death or to grant them life. Nor is it the right to allow people to live or to leave them to die. It is the right to take life or let live’ (1976: 240–1). Describing how sovereignty has transformed, he highlights the power involved to ‘“make” live and “let” die’ (1976: 241). He goes on to say that ‘the right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die’ (1976: 241). This shift included mechanisms centred around bodies. These mechanisms were ‘used to ensure the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, their alignment, their sterilization, and their surveillance) and the organization, around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility’ (Foucault, 1976: 242).

These mechanisms were also used to control bodies in ways that survey and re-present bodies and assign value based on activeness and ability to fit into the dominant social reality. This (under)/(over)surveillance is highly racialised, gendered and fatist, through the individualisation of responsibility and notions of moral failure (Murray, 2016). Foucault (1976) argues that biopolitics revolves around processes of surveillance of, for example, births, deaths, reproduction and fertility, which can become biopolitical mechanisms of control. Biopolitics revolves around populations as political, biological problems inherently linked to and stratified by power. Through power, biopolitics is disciplinary and regulatory in its operationalisation, bodies are re-presented and hyper-medicalised as undisciplined if they are not conforming to their inscribed expectations, which are often sexualised and racialised (Foucault, 1976; Murray, 2016) and fatist also.

There is, however, a distinction between individual and collective agency and sovereignty. Biopower manipulates bodies through surveillance and control stemming from the dominant neoliberal discourses, and often conflates individual agency and self-determination with that of collective sovereignty. This fails to acknowledge the ways in which some individuals who are part of non-privileged groups and who experience these surveillances may still have scope for, or access to, agency (Le Grice, 2017).

Biopolitics and biopower significantly shape how people can experience and enact action, such as body sovereignty, within multiple contexts, as the re-tellings of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s story illustrate. Biopolitics controls bodies and social practice throughout society (Million, 2014). The ways neoliberalism operates reinforces the idea that people should always be ‘working on oneself’ (Million, 2014: 149) in order to become or, more importantly, be seen as a productive and vital individual member of society, as often seen within body positivity movements expanded upon later in this article. Million (2014) discusses how biopolitics inscribes our bodies with race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality in ways that intersect as forces of power. In her discussion, Million goes on to review the de-valuation and inscription and re-framing of Indigenous bodies and the ways this connects to the struggles of Indigenous peoples for human rights that are often linked to contested definitions of what human rights actually are. She suggests that Indigenous peoples ‘create new political and social spaces of “self-determination”’ (Million, 2014: 149) that we seek to define.

Simultaneously, ‘we are also called on to witness to and to define ourselves as the product of the state’s violence’ (Million, 2014: 149). Smith (2012) and Pihama (2001) reiterate this in Māori contexts. This is further highlighted in relation to how biopolitical power structures re-presentations of and access for Indigenous bodies, and Indigenous narratives like our understandings of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō.

Biopower and obesity are linked; there are notions of individual responsibility that are present within body positivity movements, rather than placing emphasis on the systems that re-present certain populations as deviant (Berlant, 2007). If we expand our thinking around the ways in which agency and personhood are exercised ‘within spaces of ordinariness’ (Berlant, 2007: 758), we can note the way fatness, re-presented through biopolitics, can be seen as a ‘shaming sickness of sovereignty, a predicament of privilege and of poverty, a crisis of choosing and antiwill . . .’ (2007: 758). This focus on responsibility and the ability to fit into the dominant social reality perpetuates fatism, racism and sexism in ways that continue to (re-)assign worthiness and access based on the hierarchical structure of these systems, that is, (re-)assigning worthiness and access away from fat Indigenous women.

There have been social movements in order to address these systems of oppression that can operate through biopower. In understanding ways these political movements function, we can recognise the importance for Indigenous peoples, in particular fat Indigenous women, of a focus on body sovereignty.

Bodies: movements

As a now largely social media-oriented cause (Kelly and Daneshjoo, 2018), body positivity (BoPo) stems originally from fat liberation and acceptance movements which were a part of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, and now more recently throughout third-wave feminisms (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). As a movement, body positivity seeks to address the struggle for recognition, acceptance and equity that fat people and our bodies undergo, this movement, at times, can centre bodily (self) acceptance (Sastre, 2014). Body positivity attempts to centre non-normative bodies, bodies that are classified as deviant (Pausé, 2014) in ways that challenge dominant and often Westernised ideals of beauty standards by re-visualising bodies of various sizes, shapes, colours and ableness (Cohen et al., 2019; Cwynar-Horta, 2016). In her work, Jessica Cwynar-Horta (2016) defines body positivity as ‘any message, visual or written, that challenges dominant ways of viewing the physical body in accordance with beauty ideals and encourages the reclaiming of embodiment and control over one’s self-image’ (2016: 2). She goes on to suggest that body positivity can involve any action that seeks to:

denounce the societal influences and construction of body norms, and instead promotes self-love and acceptance of bodies of any shape, size, appearance; including rolls, dimples, cellulite, acne, hairy bodies, bleeding bodies, fat bodies, thin bodies, and (dis) abled bodies. (2016: 2)

Body positivity movements, occurring largely on social media, particularly Instagram since 2012 (Cwynar-Horta, 2016) mean that re-visioning bodies centres a user-generated approach and reinforces ways in which some marginalised peoples and bodies can have access to being heard and seen (Cohen et al., 2019). Cohen et al. discuss how there has also been a theoretical shift in discussions around body image that have previously focused on body disturbance to that which is now understood as body positivity.

According to Cwynar-Horta, the overall goal of body positivity is to ‘address unrealistic ideals about beauty, promote self-acceptance, and build self-esteem through improving one’s self-image and learning to love oneself to the fullest’ (2016: 6–7).

However, body positivity and inclusiveness are not always synonymous; while attempting to centre inclusivity, at times body positivity can construct:

proprietary boundaries around normativity despite . . . [its] paradoxical emphasis on dismantling bodily standards altogether. This move to create dedicated spaces wherein even the supposed diversity contained within an idea like bodily acceptance can be transformed into a prescribed set of visual and textual practices re-inscribes, rather than liberates, the body into a rubric of appropriate, self-conscious citizenship. (Sastre, 2014: 930)

This continuation of biopolitics reiterates why body positivity has received critiques around inclusiveness of all identities as often re-presentations of bodies within the movement fit into white-heteronormative, hegemonic beauty standards (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Often this emphasis perpetuates a white feminist view of self-love and self-acceptance. At times, this means that intersectional approaches to body positivity are excluded from the movement and those who experience multiple forms of oppression actively omitted, or further de-visualised from this ‘revolutionary’ movement (Sastre, 2014). The mis-appropriation of body positivity by white women (often ‘thin’[ner] and meeting conventional beauty standards) (Cwynar-Horta, 2016) has led to the lack of complex analyses of (bio)power structures that restrict access for women – specifically of multiple identities – from being a part of this movement and potentially having access to body positivity.

Body positivity also reinforces the notions that the onus for acceptance of fat people, especially women, lies with fat people/women themselves. This ‘love yourself’ and ‘accept yourself’ narrative perpetuates the invisibilisation of (perpetrators of) inequitable power structures and oppressive systems that restrict and assign access to bodily acceptance, acknowledgement and value. This parallels the onus placed on Hine-Nui-Te-Pō, as a victim of Tāne’s actions, and her subsequently leaving this toxic environment. The re-presentations and implications that Hine-Nui-Te-Pō ‘fled’ to Rarohenga and was ashamed of herself due to Tāne’s actions reiterate those of self-love movements that focus on women’s actions and (lack of) (self-)acceptance, and perpetuate these as failings, rather than focusing on the actions of others that result in a restriction of access to consent and body sovereignty.

The acceptance-driven societies in which we live are highlighted through body positivity, particularly when it is suggested that ‘we should be striving for everyone to genuinely and authentically love themselves and the body they’ve been given’ (Body Positivity, 2014). In this capacity, body positivity is seen to reflect more than it ‘challenges a neoliberal paradigm of bodily compliance’ (Sastre, 2014: 929).

The lack of intersectionality in relation to body positivity movements often (re-)creates restrictions of access to both body positivity and to understanding the ways in which multiple oppressions (Crenshaw, 1991) can affect body positivity. Within the social media context, often ethnicity/race is absent and omitted from body positivity conversations, or not acknowledged in the same ways as those who still meet conventional, white-heteronormative, hegemonic beauty criteria (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). This failure to account for how multiple oppressions intersect and influence body positivity can perpetuate the racialisation of fat acceptance as a movement. The racialisation of fatism and sexism create multiple instances of and layering to the discrimination that fat women of colour are subjected to (Crenshaw, 1991). This can perpetuate inaccessibility (to body positivity) and continue to restrict the ways in which power is often (re-)assigned. The way systems of oppression operate in conjunction with each other is illustrated within the body positivity movement, as it is in various facets of our lives, restricting access to opportunity and services based on ethnicity/race (Jones, 2000), gender (Cudd and Jones, 2007), and body size and fatness (Pausé, 2014, 2017).

Body positivity movements do have limitations; however, as movements largely accessible via social media, they have (re-)created spaces for dialogue around fat acceptance within wider and, arguably, at times more accessible contexts available to those who are not oppressed also. Body positivity’s ‘love yourself’ message is not a negative one; as a largely pictorial movement, body positivity can create a re-visualisation of bodies that are hyper-politicised, hyper-(in)visible and that are often not re-presented in conventional media as they are often classified as deviant through this re-imaging (Pausé, 2014). As mentioned earlier, this re-visualisation and re-declaration of fatness can re-negotiate one’s interactions with the world (Murray, 2005; Sedgwick, 1994). However, body positivity does not address the systemic factors that create fatism, sexism and racism, it supports addressing the internalisation of oppressions (Jones, 2000).

Body sovereignty

Body positivity is a stepping stone in the re-normalisation of bodies, expressly fat bodies; it can often reiterate the quest for accurate re-presentation that Indigenous peoples and Peoples of Colour strive for within wider society. The limited critique of systemic oppression and the focus on acceptance that body positivity perpetuates creates a space for body sovereignty to address.

Body sovereignty involves an intersection of identities, power and agency, often the ways bodies and people are re-presented and gazed upon are dictated by societal and colonial discourses and ‘norms’ (Mikaere, 1994; Ritenburg et al., 2014). There are varied interpretations of body sovereignty. Ivancic (2017) suggests that body sovereignty is focused on the:

general need to feel safe from physical harm and in control of and able to make decisions about the body . . . in terms of health, body sovereignty is located in particular discourses about women’s ability to have jurisdiction over their bodies (e.g., sexual assault, sterilization, reproductive rights, childbirth) . . . The concept of body sovereignty fits in the context of other conversations around health and autonomy. (Ivancic, 2017: 4)

In an Indigenous context, often the ways fat Indigenous women’s bodies are re-presented within colonial and neoliberal contexts do not align with actualities, agency or Indigeneity (Ngamanu, 2006; Young and Nadeau, 2005), as illustrated in the re-tellings of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s life. I propose to extend this definition to include having your body accurately re-presented within society, as these re-presentations can perpetuate oppressions and colonial dominance further (Kupu Taea, 2014; Nairn et al., 2017).

There have been discussions about body submission, an extension of patriarchy, being the opposite of body sovereignty. Cole (2017) suggests that body submission, as an oppressive enactment of patriarchy, re-frames women and their bodies in negative ways as objects, ‘before’ pictures and possessions ‘available for the input of and control from others’ (2017: 2). While Cole’s definition of body sovereignty acknowledges that it should incorporate the inhabitancy of bodies, and the respect of people’s choices, boundaries and bodies in general, the juxtaposition of submission with sovereignty is problematic. Cole suggests that body submission is the ‘giving up of our physical sovereignty’ (2017: 2). This idea fails to understand the complex ways in which body sovereignty is ignored and disregarded by individuals, by communities, and by systems, much like Indigenous sovereignties more broadly and Hine-Nui-Te-Pō’s own agency by both Tāne and Māui.

This lack of intersectional lens limits understandings of who has access to body sovereignty and how body sovereignty can be understood as a mechanism to address oppression also. Cole (2017) goes on to propose that the privilege of body sovereignty requires advocacy for those who do not have body sovereignty, inferring all bodies. Whilst seeking to address body sovereignty for all bodies is important, this notion fails to re-prioritise those whose oppressions are intersectional, and I suggest that the privilege is having your body sovereignty recognised, and acknowledged on individual, collective, policy and systemic levels.

Within body sovereignty discussions, Troost (2008: 172) comments on the concept of ownership and biopolitics and poses the question ‘how much of our bodies do we truly own, subconsciously, legally, and socially?’ Troost (2008), much like Cole (2017), implies that the focus on body sovereignty allows the acknowledgement of and inclusion of intersectional approaches to resisting and dismantling oppressions. She states that ‘if we organize around body sovereignty, we won’t have only the strength of feminists behind us . . . nor only the strength of the sex-positive, polyamorous, and BDSM communities . . . nor only fat people . . . we’ll have the sum of everyone who wants their body back’ (2008: 172).

While I agree with parts of Troost’s theorising, from a Māori perspective ownership is a contested concept, and the idea of having one’s body returned, much like one’s land, reinforces the implications of property, commodification and possessiveness. Bodily ownership also reiterates discourses of power and that people should possess power over their bodies and ‘biological materials’ (Rao, 2016: 440). Rao suggests that re-claiming ownership can be understood as a measure of self-sovereignty. However, re-clamation discourses can imply that we do not and have not had ‘ownership’ of our bodies. From a Māori perspective, I would suggest that we can have kaitiakitanga, rangatiratanga and mana tinana over our bodies. These notions of guardianship, agency and sovereignty over our bodies align with Māori ways of understanding relationality (Le Grice, 2017). Māori have always had a level of kaitiakitanga, rangatiratanga and mana over our bodies, however, the issue lies in how our authority, autonomy and sovereignty over ourselves, our bodies, and further, our lands, are continuously de-valued, disregarded and not acknowledged by those in power, through policy and the systems that structure and assign access within society (Jackson, 1994; Mikaere, 1994, 1999; Reid, 2011). This continued denial and lack of recognition, like the ways in which racism, sexism and fatism operate, can be personally mediated and internalised, and is illustrated within body positivity movements.

From a Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine viewpoint, body sovereignty can be understood at individual, collective and systemic levels. In terms of individual-level acceptance and enactment of our body sovereignty, body sovereignty is inherently political, and centres informed consent and agency (Le Grice, 2017) and therefore requires an element of criticality, particularly in relation to our personal praxis (Kumagai and Lypson, 2009) as individuals and how we perpetuate, or do not perpetuate systems of oppression, as seen within some body positivity movements. Body sovereignty at an individual level also centres on access to decision-making processes around our bodies as well as access to resources (Ivancic, 2017) in ways that acknowledge our kaitiakitanga and rangatiratanga. However, these issues do not occur in silos; individual-level body sovereignty cannot be enacted fully without the collective and systemic recognition of our (body) sovereignty. At these levels, body sovereignty focuses on identifying the varied ways in which systems of oppression, racism, sexism and fatism can restrict body sovereignty. By recognising how these systems operate, we can attempt to deconstruct them and re-evaluate how access and worthiness are assigned.

While notions of sovereignty have been discussed in contested ways (Berlant, 2007; Foucault, 1976), what I am referring to in relation to body sovereignty is from a Māori worldview, and how we understand sovereignty. Indigenous concepts of power are not synonymous with colonial understandings of power and sovereignty (Matike Mai, 2016). I position a Kaupapa Māori definition of body sovereignty as Kaupapa Māori ‘provides a space where Māori women’s bodies, knowledges surrounding bodies and the spaces they occupy, can be examined without being subjugated by dominant western knowledge’ (August, 2005: 118). Both Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine approaches to body sovereignty emphasise re-visualisations of Māori women (’s bodies) in ways that reflect Māori thinking and being (Smith, 2011), particularly for fat Māori women. These worldviews actively re-prioritise Indigenous women as authentic knowers and beings by contesting how fat Māori women have been and continue to be actively ignored and omitted within society through dominant acts of colonisation and patriarchy (Simmonds, 2009, 2011; Smith, 1992; Yates-Smith,1998). Body sovereignty that comes from a Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine epistemology inherently challenges racist, sexist, fatist discourses that perpetuate the re-presentation of fat Māori women as (un)(re)liable, (un)worthy, and (un)well that lead to denial of access. Body sovereignty from a Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine epistemology reiterates kaitiakitanga and rangatiratanga and acknowledges that the influence of colonisation on fat Māori women has been immense and intersectional, and that the focus needs to be on the systemic biopolitical power that further marginalises us and our bodies, while privileging those who fit into the hegemonic, white, thin, heteronormative categories.

When thinking around the ways in which colonisation, systemic biopolitical power and systems of oppression have altered the lives of fat Māori women I am again reminded of Hine-Nui-Te-Pō: the ways in which she has been re-presented, de-valued and re-positioned as deviant (Yates-Smith, 1998), and her body discussed in relation to male figures and power rather than in relation to her own feminine energy. These re-presentations of Māori women are pervasive and perpetuate re-framings of fat Māori women as un(deserving), (un)well and (un)(re)liable that restrict access within societies. The (over)/(under)surveillance of fat Indigenous bodies through biopolitics and systems of oppression can elicit notions of disembodiment and continue to deny access to goods, services and opportunities, and acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignties. Fat Indigenous bodies are subject to multiple systems of oppression in ways that hyper/(in)visibilise our bodies and classify us as deviant, unworthy and do not reinforce or support our access. Body positivity, as a movement, seeks to re-visualise fat bodies and re-declare our fatness; however, often it can be limited. The need for a body sovereignty approach emphasises who has power and who actively restricts fat Indigenous women from being re-presented accurately within societies. Body sovereignty seeks to re-focus on how systems of oppression and inherent bias restrict access for fat Indigenous women. This re-focusing aligns with Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine approaches to understanding our experiences and how to transform them. Fat Māori women are subject to multiple forms of oppression, while ‘coming out’ as fat and body positivity movements encourage disrupting the space and re-visualising bodies, a body sovereignty focus is required to challenge the racist, sexist, fatist discourses that emphasise inaccessibility.