Exploration de la culture alimentaire biomédicalisée québécoise : de l'alimentation « saine » à la production de corps différenciés

This PhD thesis presents, from a cultural studies perspective, a critical and situated (Haraway, 1988) exploration of Quebec’s contemporary food culture and of the various definitions of “healthy” food it produces and renders effective. More precisely, I analyse the power relationships that inform its development as well as those taking form and effectivity through the knowledge and practices constitutive of healthy food (and its multiple forms and modes of existence). Through critical analysis of the current Quebec food culture, I question the bodies, human and more-than-human ones, that are produced therein, and are differentiated by unequal power relationships. The analysis presented is the result of an embodied and dialogic ethnography following the methods of materials gathering and analysis suggested by Probyn (2016). The thesis is separated into three distinct, but interrelated, parts. The first part explores Quebec’s food culture, in which I am fully immersed. This part presents the food culture and the knowledge, practices, and events that it contributes to creating, as well as the multiplicity of healthy food definitions that emerge within it, according to their various contexts of emergence. Throughout this part, I highlight how particular kinds of knowledge are produced, articulated and legitimated, as well as how relationships involving and linking humans and more-than-humans are produced and conveyed. I demonstrate how all of these processes participate in the multiple modes of emergence of healthy food in Quebec. In the current food culture, healthy food is regularly thought and problematized in relationship to human bodies. The second part of the thesis presents my analysis of what I have called the biomedicalized food culture, attending especially to the relationships between bodies, food, and health it contributes to creating. I put at the forefront how the current food culture cannot be analysed without taking into account the contemporary “healthist” (Crawford, 1980) discourses that inform the manners by which bodies are put in relation to food, under health-oriented considerations. I mobilize the conceptual tools proposed by Clarke et al. (2010) on the biomedicalization of the social field to question how food and bodies are put in relation and problematized, in a context where health is a moral and individual objective to reach (Crawford, 1980; Lupton, 1997; Metzl et Kirkland, 2010). I criticize how the biomedicalized food culture limits the type of relationships that can take form and be considered between food and bodies, as well as the types of bodies that are produced and authorized.  The third part of the thesis is concerned with the bodies, human and more-than-human ones, that are produced within the biomedicalized food culture, as much as by the power relationships that participate in their production and differentiation. By “produce”, I mean among other things how bodies are discursively defined, framed, controlled, etc.; evaluated, characterized, discriminated, excluded, stigmatized; materially produced (their corporeal materialities, their biology, etc.). I navigate between different manners of analysing their production as much as I explore the different types of bodies that are produced, drawing on reflections (and literatures) that apprehend and question them from various epistemologies.

Keyphrases: Relations, “Healthy” food, Cultural studies, Critical food studies, Bodies, Food culture, Biomedicalization, Feminist epistemology, Materialities, Relationships, Power relationships