Edwina Carla Issac

Edwina Carla Isaacs

Edwina Carla Isaacs

Implicating fat within the eating disorder/distressed eating research assemblage and in relation to people’s other spaces of belonging brings into relief the need to more meaningfully engage with fat embodiment in relation to practices around food. Fat, in relation to other contextual factors, including the spaces of belonging of healthcare providers and those seek- ing care, often tacitly impacts the way that lines are drawn between “normal” and “pathological” behaviours—or, at least, what kind of pathology might be inscribed on bodies (LaMarre & Rice, 2016; Rinaldi et al., 2016a). Participants’ intentionality around food, and their interpretations of their behaviours as more or less disordered, also invites insight into collective awareness of the multi-layered food and bodily contexts in which people live. They were often acutely aware of discourses around eating disorders/disordered eating— and who is “legitimately” disordered—which belies the logic in some texts that presumes clinical expertise over disordered eating with limited insight from those experiencing eating distresses. This “legitimacy” is informed not only by others’ interpretation of body size, but also of their racial, classed, and other identifications in a white Western context.

Thickening research around food and body beyond “eating disorder” research entails moving beyond, for instance, a simplistic perspective on anosognosia— the idea that people with eating distress lack insight into their “condition” and require external intervention for change (Kaye, Frank, Bailer & Henry, 2005). This framing risks ignoring the perspectives and experiential knowledge of those with lived experience as invalid.

Andrea LaMarre, Carla Rice, and Jen Rinaldi, “Tracing Fatness Through the Eating Disorder Assemblage” in Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice.

[emphasis added]

She is sexy