Striving for liminality: Eating disorders and social suffering

Transcultural Psychiatry
Karin Eli

Abstract

In this article, I argue that eating disorders constitute a form of social suffering, in which sufferers embody liminality as a response to, and a reflection of, oppressive sociality, structural violence, and institutional constraints. Based on the illness narratives of people with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and their subclinical variants in Israel, the analysis draws the experiential, the social, and the structural into critical focus. These narratives, which delineate lived experiences of self-starving, bingeing, and purging, and the attendant viscerality of hunger, fullness, and emptiness, reveal how participants developed an embodied drawing inward and away, being at once within and without society for extended periods of time, through eating disordered practices. This liminal positioning, I argue, was a mode through which participants cultivated alternative (if temporary) personal spaces, negotiated identities, and anesthetized pain: processes many deemed essential to survival. Embedding the participants' narratives of eating disordered experiences within familial, societal, and political-economic forces that shaped their individual lives, I examine the participants' striving for liminality as at once intimately em...Continue Reading

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Aug 24, 2017·Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry·Karin Eli

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Citations

Jul 31, 2018·Transcultural Psychiatry·Anne E Becker
Jul 31, 2018·Transcultural Psychiatry·Kathleen M Pike
Jul 31, 2018·Transcultural Psychiatry·Karin Eli, Megan Warin
Jul 1, 2020·Frontiers in Psychiatry·Connie Marguerite MusolinoPeter Gilchrist
Mar 6, 2021·Eating and Weight Disorders : EWD·Thomas Fuchs
May 4, 2021·Australasian Psychiatry : Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists·Stephen AllisonMattias Strand

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