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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After severe illness, there are stories: narrative strands to suture discontinuities of identities, practices, and lives. But within these narratives of illness and recovery, the body's discontinuities stand apart, striking in the materiality of change, in the tangible multiplicity of bodies – healthy, ill, recovering, recovered – that a person can call one's own. Based on longitudinal research interviews with Israeli women who identified as recovered from long-term eating disorders (fieldwork conducted in 2005–2006 and in 2011), this paper explores how these bodily discontinuities are expressed, drawing particular attention to the narrative role of embodied memory in linking past and present-tense bodies and selves. Embodied memory, as narrated by the participants, is deeply, sometimes surprisingly, embedded in lived experience, imbuing recovered bodies with moments of sensory continuity, the past coming into presence through forms of sensation and perception learned at the height of disorder. Examining narrative moments of sensory remembrance, this paper analyses how participants narrate embodied memory as a mode of reflection, self-protection, and dynamic integration, wherein the experience of disorder informs practices of recovery, and the body becomes a site for the reconciliation of past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Clinical studies describe binge eating as a reaction to hunger, negative affect, or the need to dissociate. However, little is known about the meanings that women with bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa associate with binge eating. Aims: To examine how women with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa interpret their experiences of binge eating. Methods: Sixteen women who engaged in binge eating and had been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or their subclinical variants were interviewed about their experiences of eating disorder. Interview data were analyzed using phenomenologically-informed thematic analysis. Results: Participants described binge eating as a practice through which the self experiences a sense of release, and existential emptiness is replaced by overwhelming fullness. Conclusion: Meaningful experiences of release and fullness are central to binge eating in bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa, and may contribute to the long-term maintenance of this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dedicated inpatient care for eating disorders has profound impact on patients' embodied practices and lived realities. Analyses of inpatients' accounts have shown that participants endorse complex and conflicting attitudes toward their experiences in eating disorders wards, yet the apparent ambivalence that characterizes inpatient experiences has not been subject to critical examination. This paper examines the narrated experiences of 13 participants (12 women and one man; age 18–38 years at first interview) with past or present anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or eating disorder not otherwise specified, who had been hospitalized in an inpatient eating disorders ward for adults in central Israel. The interviews, which took place in 2005–2006, and again in 2011, were part of a larger longitudinal study exploring the subjective experiences of eating disorders and recovery among Israeli adults. Employing qualitative analysis, this study finds that the participants' accounts were concerned with dynamics of difference and belonging, as they played out in various aspects of inpatient care, including diagnosis, treatment, relationships with fellow patients and staff, and everyday life in hospital. Notably, participants simultaneously defined themselves as connected to, but also distinct from, the eating disordered others who formed their reference group at the ward. Through negotiating a protectively ambivalent positioning, participants recognized their eating disordered identities and connected with others on the ward, while also asserting their non-disordered individuality and distancing themselves from the potential dangers posed by ‘excessive’ belonging. The paper suggests that this ambivalent positioning can usefully be understood through the anthropological concept of liminality: being both a part of and apart from one's community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]