Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Clinically, she looks well, is a grouping of research-creation projects that explore how common medical treatment of eating disorder (ED) emphasizes a patient’s pathological food and weight related behaviours, despite that these behaviours are responses to sociocultural and medical prescriptions for ideal corporeal health. Appropriating philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories on how bodies are disciplined through technologies within cultural institutions like the clinic to produce docile, normative, and productive subjects, feminist scholars have highlighted the ED patient as embodied contradiction, where a desire to maintain a thin body is both a pathological attitude and social expectation (Bordo, 1993; Saukko, 2006; Weiss, 1999). As stated in “Normal Eating is Counter-cultural”, Andrea Lamarre and Carla Rice (2015), state “[w]hile prescriptions for recovery may keep participants ‘in check’, they may also reinforce problematic relationships with food and control” (Lamarre & Rice, p. 146). Beyond focus on weight-maintenance in treatment, there are also measures of self-monitoring and regulating food intake built into treatment protocols which reinforce self-surveillance and mirror pathologized ED symptoms. This contradiction confounds the possibility of a normal relationship to food and body image, particularly those with ED. The artworks I present express the difficulty in distinguishing between a health-conscious concern about weight and disordered attitudes towards food and body-image, especially for contemporary western women. Through performances in which I embody the roles of artist-as-ED-patient or artist-as-ED-clinician, I consider ways my body and subjectivity have been negated or manipulated in treatment for ED and by sociocultural prescriptions for the thin ideal.