Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Tom Hey, Lancaster University.
Tom Hey 'A Phenomenological Approach to Bulimia'
Abstract: Bulimia has been medically and socially constructed as an illness afflicting affluent, young, white women, which is to be cured through weight gain and the resumption of a ‘normal' relationship with food. This myopic depiction of bulimia represents a predilection to ‘make sense' of illness experiences in medically- and/or culturally-intelligible terms, and constitutes epistemic violence towards sufferers through its erasure of diverse forms of suffering and its disavowal of the subjective complexities of recovery. The pervasiveness of the eating disorder memoir, which dominates written representations of bulimia and positions linear recovery (expressed in narrative terms) as an experiential norm, further marginalises ongoing experiences of suffering; as Angela Woods argues, ‘[n]arrative does not have a monopoly on expressivity' (Woods, 2013: 124). In this paper I will use a phenomenological approach informed by affect theories, specifically Sara Ahmed's work on orientations and attachments, to engage with embodied experiences of bulimia. I will read Bulimics on Bulimia (2009), a collection of fragmented, first-person, present-tense accounts of bulimia edited by Maria Stavrou, to propose that living with bulimia can engender individualised, affectively-charged attachments between selves, objects, and spaces through which each is destabilised and redrawn. Aiming to ‘provide a sample of insight into what life is like living with bulimia' (Stavrou, 2009: 7), Bulimics on Bulimia seeks to address the privileged articulacy of narrativized accounts of bulimia through its representation of moments of intensity situated within social worlds from a polyphony of voices. Using an engaged phenomenological methodology which provides new ways of listening to written accounts of living with bulimia, I will seek to rearticulate bulimia as an object around which surges illogical, ambivalent feelings and emotions.
Bio: Tom Hey is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Lancaster University, researching representations of eating disorders in contemporary literature through the intersecting frameworks of the medical humanities, postcolonial theories, and affect theories.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
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Bence Marosan - 'Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Animal Emotions. A Husserlian Perspective'
Joe MacDonagh - 'Daseinic elements of the ethicality of nursing practice'
Tristan Hedges - 'Towards a phenomenology of discrimination'
Knowles & Melo Lopes - 'How to Dress Like a Feminist'
Pritchard & Tovey - 'Ecophenomenological Perspectives on Human Augmentation'
Maxim Miroshnichenko - 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'
Liesbeth Schoonheim - 'Posters, protests, and reclaiming the streets'
Eugenia Stefanello - 'Empathy, Narrative Medicine, and (Mis)Representation of Illness: A Phenomenological Perspective'
Joshua Bergamin - 'When is ‘my truth' true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews'
Ida Djursaa - 'Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic'
Kira Meyer - 'Ecophenomenology as a Contribution to Transformation'
Dr Ullrich Haase - ‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’
Prof. Giovanna Colombetti - ‘Varieties of incorporation: beyond the blind man’s cane’
Prof. Alia Al-Saji - 'Fanon and an Engaged Phenomenology of Affect: Touching the wounds of colonial duration'
Marieke Borren - ‘The Spatial Phenomenology of White Embodiment’
Ondra Kvapil - ‘Thought-provoking Death’
Sam McAuliffe - ‘The Improvisational Encounter: What is Common to Music and Hermeneutic-Phenomenology’
Adriano Lotito - ‘Tran Duc Thao between Phenomenology and Marxism’
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