Paper short abstract:

This paper explores interactions between bodies and foods as they are imagined and mobilised by eating disorders treatment and anorexic individuals. It thereby interrogates how diverging conceptualisations of anorexia(s) and selves differently frame the materiality of foods and the act of eating.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an English eating disorders unit this paper explores how eating disorders treatment and individuals affected by anorexia conceptualise eating. It interrogates what is made material through the enforced eating of treatment and what matters in the day-to-day starvation practices of anorexics. The rationale underpinning treatment praxis is a conceptualisation of anorexia as an addendum to an individual's self. A 'food-as-medicine' paradigm frames eating - ingesting weighable portions and quantifiable calories - as the modality of (re)materialising this previous self. Bodily perimeters become markers of illness or health, yet intimate trajectories of food through corporeal spaces are paradoxically 'immaterial.' In contrast, to many anorexic informants, anorexia is self. Eating is not experienced as (re)producing, but as threatening, informants' sense of themselves; it materialises an absence. Food is conceptualised less in terms of the effects of its material properties on bodily perimeters and more in terms of its agency. Through eating, food becomes body by creeping, agential but hidden, through its corporeal spaces; it is intangibly, as well as tangibly, material. Food also 'sneaks into' the body through smells or skin contact. Ingesting and digesting are thereby mapped beyond the body's depths as eating is negotiated across its surfaces, and the perimeters of both body and self are threateningly open. Thus, by tracing divergences and convergences between clinical rationale and anorexics' subjectivities as they coalesce around eating, this paper interrogates uncertain boundaries and food's materiality. In so doing, it engages with informants' disquiet to explore what eating is.