Eating Disorder Recovery in Context
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- ItemRecovering Uncertainty: Exploring Eating Disorder Recovery in Context(Springer, 2021-01-02) LaMarre, Andrea; Rice, CarlaAttending to the shades of grey in eating disorder recovery may help to illuminate possibilities for navigating recoveries in their full complexity and diversity. There is a need for more complexity and flexibility in understandings of the timelines, processes, endpoints, and versions of eating disorder recoveries. In this article, we explore eating disorder recovery as a dynamic, intercorporeal, and non-linear process. Drawing on interviews with 20 people doing significantly better than they were during a time of acute distress around food and body, we articulate “recoveries” in relation to four themes: Fuzzy Logics of Time, Not Only Recovered, Recovery is Not All Sunshine and Rainbows, and The Life of Recovery. These themes speak to the ways in which participants struggled to articulate the temporalities of their recoveries, situated recovery as one among many events and processes that shaped their being in the world, resisted “too perfect” articulations of recovery journeys/ endpoints, and described preferred versions of and open-ended guidelines for recovery. We argue that eating disorder recoveries are as complicated and messy as lives themselves and are equally entangled in social contexts. We suggest that articulations of recovery be attuned to power dynamics as they operate in dictating which performances of eating disorders and recovery will be honoured as “legitimate” and whose pathways to recovery will be respected.
- ItemThe Eating Disorder Recovery Assemblage: Collectively Generating Possibilities for Eating Disorder Recovery(Sage Journals, 2020-07-27) LaMarre, Andrea; Rice, CarlaIn this paper, we explore the affective-discursive-material aspects of the supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage. We approach recovery as an “assemblage” to facilitate an understanding of how human (people, systems of care, etc.) and nonhuman (affect, discourses, etc.) forces generate possibilities or impossibilities for recovery. Moving away from framings of recovery as an individual achievement, we consider the relationality and dynamism of eating disorder recovery in interviews with 20 people in recovery and 14 supporters of people in recovery. We draw from experiential accounts to theorize a supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage in relation to trust and love mobilized in interactions and relationships. This supportive eating disorder recovery assemblage can scaffold new understandings of recoveries as multiple and co-produced. Supportive eating disorder recovery assemblages generate improvisational spaces, albeit loosely contained and bounded, for different pathways to and manifestations of “recoveries”. This work builds on a body of feminist scholarship on eating disorders/disorder eating that takes up gendered relationships of power in treatment settings, extending toward and analysing material, affective, embodied, and potentially affirming dimensions of care and emotion in participants’ lives.
- ItemHealthcare providers’ engagement with eating disorder recovery narratives: Opening to complexity and diversity(BMJ Journals, 2020-03-02) LaMarre, Andrea; Rice, CarlaInterdisciplinary healthcare providers (HCPs) receive only minimal training in identifying, referring for, and treating eating disorders and may feel ill-prepared to manage them. There is a need for brief interventions that prepare HCPs for work with people with eating disorders, particularly when they do not fit stereotypes about who might experience an eating disorder. One method for enacting brief interventions that make change in this realm is using digital stories (short films) to generate awareness and knowledge. In this article, we discuss the results of a pilot study exploring the impact of viewing digital stories created by people in eating disorder recovery and their supporters on an interdisciplinary group of HCPs. We showed five stories to 22 HCPs who filled out qualitative pre and post questionnaires about their experiences of viewing the films and how they conceptualized recovery. Providers found the stories evocative; the stories appear to have complexified their perspectives on recovery. HCPs desired more diverse, detailed, and lengthy stories, indicating that pursuing digital storytelling for healthcare provider education and awareness may hold promise. Through centring the voices of people with eating disorders and in recovery, digital stories may also provide new ways of talking about recovery that open up possibilities for embracing difference.
- ItemNormal eating is counter‐cultural: embodied experiences of eating disorder recovery(Wiley, 2015) LaMarre, Andrea; Rice, CarlaStandards for eating disorder recovery, although they originate in life- saving methods, may be unattainable for certain individuals. We used narrative thematic analysis to explore the stories of 10 young women in eating disorder recovery. Participants’ narratives highlight the complexity and counter-cultural nature of navigating prescriptions for recovery in a sociocultural context that privileges some bodies and food-related behaviours over others. Our main themes were materiality of eating disorders recovery, beyond biometrics, embodying counter-culture, embodying recovery and authenticity/invisibility. Our analysis reveals a biopedagogy of eating disorder recovery, which offers individuals in recovery sets of instructions for how to be healthy that run in opposition to dominant prescriptions for health. These findings help us better understand the lived experience of eating disorder recovery, highlighting difficulties of recovering in a culture that moralizes food and bodies. Further investigating how standards for recovery intersect with dominant discourses for healthy living could help to support individuals in recovery.
- ItemEating disorder prevention as biopedagogy(Taylor & Francis, 2017-03-01) LaMarre, Andrea; Rice, Carla; Jankowski, GlenThe authors describe eating disorder prevention as biopedagogy: that is, as a set of expectations for how to manage one’s body and self to be a healthy productive citizen. This biopedagogy lands differently on different “bodies of risk”—those of people coded as at risk for eating disorders and those coded as at risk for “obesity” in a social milieu that marks certain bodies, such as those of different sizes, sexualities, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, genders, and abilities—as unacceptable. In theorizing eating disorder prevention as biopedagogy, the authors consider not only the content of prevention messages, but also conventional notions of the normative self that underpin these messages and hence the form that they take, and how this form conflicts with critical perspectives that view subjectivities as dynamic and in flux. The authors argue for a shift to body becoming pedagogies grounded in social justice and intersectional perspectives, suggesting that systemic changes are needed to make diverse bodies welcome.