Recovering bodies: The production of the recoverable subject in eating disorder treatment regimes

Rinaldi, J., LaMarre, A., & Rice, C. (2016). Recovering bodies: The production of the recoverable subject in eating disorder treatment regimes. In J. Coffey, S., Budgeon, & H. Cahill (Eds.), Learning Bodies. Perspectives on children and young people (Vol. 2, pp. 157-172). Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0306-6_10

Abstract

In this chapter, we critique biopedagogies that inform eating disorder treatment. We employ a body-becoming counter-pedagogy as a theoretical frame in order to explore how youth develop and enact particular subjectivities when treated for eating disorders. Correspondingly, we consider how the failure or the refusal to enact an idealized subjectivity, one shaped by race and class and of particular interest to this chapter, sex and sexual orientation, results in the marking of bodies as unrecovered, even unrecoverable. We provide an account of biopedagogies of eating disorder recovery, against which we develop a body-becoming pedagogy. Using this philosophical framework we demonstrate how eating disorder treatment regimes sex bodies, and by extension how sex is conceptualized within heterosexual matrices.