Description
Inited talk at Héritages international online seminar: Supported by Cergy; CNRS; Ministère de la CultureEating Well in Women’s Creative Arts: Bodies, Politics, Ecologies
Not About Eating: Deconstructing Eating Disorder Science with Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille/A Girl’s Story (2016)
Derrida’s ‘eating well’ is not about eating. Instead, his figure raises the question of how subjects may reject patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption. It asks how to embrace the irreducible alterity of both self and other in an effort to consume others well. And how to be open, likewise, to being consumed well, without setting up binaries or boundaries. For the author and critics alike, Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille is not about an eating disorder. Critical and narrative focus are on the challenges of revealing and re-telling the enduringly traumatic experiences and consequences of a young girl being consumed by sexual, social and class shame. This includes a self-misdiagnosis of bulimia, represented as a symptomatic response contained within a two-year temporal and bodily boundary, an obsession which ends on resolving to become a writer.
Although described as a quest to ‘deconstruct the girl’, Ernaux’s text constructs binaries and boundaries that risk perpetuating myths of eating disorders as about skinny white adolescent girls seeking control. Yet, as far as we know (and science still does not know what causes them) eating disorders are experienced right across identities, communities, ages, genders, ethnicities and body shapes. They are not just about control, or about (not) eating.
Ernaux’s affecting representations of disordered eating and her narrative’s reflections on itself with its ‘perpetually missing piece, always postponed. The unqualifiable hole’ are read by entangling the question of ‘eating well’ and the questioning of constructs from the scientific literature of eating disorders. The paper identifies boundaries and binaries resonating with Ernaux’s text: thin/fat; young/later life; focussing on minority diagnoses like anorexia and bulimia and overlooking majority diagnoses like OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorder); privileging blunt diagnostic thresholds of BMI and behavioural patterns over emotional and functional impacts. Disrupting patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption in Mémoire de fille and in examples of the biomedical constructs that fail the girl and the writer (and the growing number of folks experiencing eating disorders) the paper suggests that reading scientific and creative literatures can open up questions of construction, diagnosis and prevalence - and of the unqualifiedness - of eating disorder.
| Period | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Cergy CY Paris Université, France |
| Degree of Recognition | International |