Download - Normal Eating is Counter Cultural
NORMAL EATING IS
COUNTER-CULTURAL
Exploring Young Women's Lived, Embodied
Experience of Eating Disorder Recovery
Andrea LaMarre, MSc.
Vanier Doctoral Scholar
PhD Student
Department of Family
Relations & Applied Nutrition
University of Guelph
Dr. Carla Rice
Canada Research Chair, Tier II-
Care, Gender & Relationships
Department of Family Relations &
Applied Nutrition
University of Guelph
@andrealala89
BACKGROUND
Eating disorder recovery: a complex &
multifaceted experience
Physical
Psychological
Affective?
What assumptions underlie the term
“recovery”?
BACKGROUND
Eating disorder treatment outcomes:
Nutrition and/or weight restoration, restoration of
“normal eating” (Bardone-Cone et al., 2010; Gremillion, 2003; Rance, Clarke & Moller, 2014)
“Recovery”?
Recognition that recovery is more than
weight restoration- but what comprises
“more”?
BACKGROUND
Moralized bodies in contemporary Western
societies:
“Healthy-thin” bodies seen as morally, medically,
aesthetically desirable (Saguay & Ward, 2011)
Moral panic & fear around “obesity epidemic”
Bodies under surveillance:
Bodies are political spaces
Body management taken up as social affair
BACKGROUND
Biopedagogies: “assemblages” of
information, instructions, directives (Leahy, 2009)
How to live
How to be embodied
What “health” is
How to be healthy & happy (e.g. Harwood, 2010)
How to avoid risk (Fullagar, 2009, p. 124)
How to achieve recovery, wellness (LaMarre, Rice & Bear)
BACKGROUND
Do these broader societal messages
(biopedagogies) impact possibility of
achieving or imagining eating disorder
recovery?
METHODOLOGY
Narrative interviews (10) (Riessman, 2007)
Digital stories (3)
Participatory, arts-based methods
Centralizing participants’ voices
Narrative thematic analysis on both sources
of data for common themes & particularities
PARTICIPANTS
10 women, 20-31 (average age: 25)
All university educated
Diagnoses (not mutually exclusive):
8 anorexia nervosa
3 bulimia nervosa
2 non-diagnosed (1 identified BN, 1 ED-NOS)
Complicating categories of race, ethnicity,
and sexuality
RESULTS
Biopedagogy of recovery
Materiality of Eating Disorders & Recovery
Beyond Biometrics
Embodying Counter-Culture
Authenticity and Invisibility
Recovery is an (Embodied) Place
DISCUSSION
State/label of “recovered”: potentially
problematic expectations & standards
“Overwhelmingness” of full recovery
Lack of space for vulnerability
Prescriptions for recovery helpful to a certain
extent; then may contravene dominant
biopedagogies
DISCUSSION
Recovery biopedagogies may be read as
counter-cultural
Especially post weight-gain, participants
encountered ambiguous prescriptions for health
“Readings” of participants’ bodies & behaviours
differed based on others’ knowledge of their
histories
IMPLICATIONS
Working closely with participants:
Co-creating art
Delving deeply into recovery stories
Uncovering complexity
“Recovery” as potentially alienating
Not settling for less; envisioning differently
IMPLICATIONS
Making space for multiple perspectives on
recovery, multiple routes to recovery
Not assuming all patients will identify with
the language of recovery
Understanding the counter-cultural quality of
recovery in a society that moralizes bodies
REFERENCES
Bardone-Cone, A., Harney, M.B., Maldonado, C.R., Lawson, M.A., Robinson, P., Smith, R. & Tosh, A. (2010). Defining recovery from an eating disorder: Conceptualization, validation, and examination of psychosocial functioning and psychiatric comorbidity. Behavioural Research and Therapy, 48,194-202.
Fullagar, S. (2009). Governing healthy family lifestyles through discourses of risk and responsibility. In J. Wright & V. Harwood (Eds.), Biopolitics and the “obesity epidemic”: Governing bodies (pp. 108–126). New York, NY: Routledge.
Gremillion, H. (2003). Feeding anorexia: Gender and power at a treatment centre. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harwood, V. (2010). Mobile asylums: Psychopathologisation as a personal, portable psychiatric prison. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31(4), 437-451.
LaMarre, A., Rice, C. & Bear, M. (Forthcoming) Unrecoverable? Prescriptions and possibilities for eating disorder recovery. In Khanlou, N. & Pilkington, B. (eds). Women's mental health: International perspectives on resistance and resilience in community and society.
Leahy, D. (2009). Disgusting pedagogies. In J. Wright & V. Harwood (Eds.), Biopolitics and the “obesity epidemic”: Governing bodies (pp. 172–182). New York, NY: Routledge.
Rance, N.M., Clarke, V. & Moller, N.P. (2014). “If I see somebody… I’ll immediately scope them out”: Anorexia nervosa clients’ perceptions of their therapists’ body. Eating Disorders, 22, 111-120.
Riessman, C.K. (2007) Narrative methods for the human sciences. Newbury Park, CA, Sage.
Saguy, A.C. & Ward, A. (2011). Coming out as fat: Rethinking stigma. Social Psychology Quarterly, 74(1), 53.