Abstract
AbstractAnorexia nervosa is a paradoxical disorder, regarded across disciplines as a body project and yet also an illness of disembodied subjectivity. This overlooks the role that material environments—including objects and spaces—play in producing embodied experiences of anorexia both within and outside treatment. To address this gap, this paper draws together two ethnographic studies of anorexia to explore the shared themes unearthed by research participants’ engagements with objects that move across boundaries between treatment spaces and everyday lives. Demonstrating how the anorexic body is at once both phenomenologically lived and socio-medically constituted, we argue that an attention to materiality is crucial to understanding lived experiences. A materialist account of anorexia extends the literature on treatment resistance in eating disorders and offers a reconceptualisation of ‘the body in treatment’, showing how objects and spaces shape, maintain, and even ‘trigger’ anorexia. Therefore, against the background of the high rates of relapse in eating disorders, this analysis calls for consideration of how interventions can better take account of eating disordered embodiment as shaped by material environments.
Funder
Economic and Social Research Council
John Fell Fund, University of Oxford
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Psychiatry and Mental health,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Anthropology,General Medicine,Health (social science)
Reference61 articles.
1. Abbots, E-J and Lavis, A. (2013) “Contours of Eating: Mapping the Terrain of Body/Food Encounters.” In Abbots, E-J. and Lavis, A. (Eds.) Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Food and Bodies. Ashgate.
2. Arcelus J., Mitchell AJ., Wales J., Nielsen S. (2011) Mortality rates in patients with anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders A meta-analysis of 36 studies. Archives of Gen Psychiatry, 68(7):724-731.
3. American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5®). American Psychiatric Pub, Washington
4. Bardone‐Cone, A., Thompson, K., Miller, A. (2020) The self and eating disorders. Journal of Personality, 88 (1): 59-75
5. Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press.
Cited by
4 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献