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Striving for liminality : eating disorders and social suffering
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Eli, Karin (2018) Striving for liminality : eating disorders and social suffering. Transcultural Psychiatry, 55 (4). pp. 475-494. doi:10.1177/1363461518757799 ISSN 1363-4615.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363461518757799
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 embodied and structurally mapped. The analysis suggests that policy initiatives for eating disorder prevention must address the social suffering that eating disorders manifest: suffering caused by structures and institutions that reinforce social inequality, violence, and injustice.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School > Health Sciences Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School > Health Sciences > Social Science & Systems in Health (SSSH) Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School |
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Journal or Publication Title: | Transcultural Psychiatry | ||||||||
Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd. | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1363-4615 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 1 August 2018 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 55 | ||||||||
Number: | 4 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 475-494 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/1363461518757799 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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