27 Apr 2018
The Economy of the Body
Venue
ICI Berlin(Click for further documentation)
Organized by
Clio NicastroNadine Hartmann
In English
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/susie-orbach/Rights: © ICI Berlin
Part of the Symposium
Dis-Ordered Eating: Temporality, Normativity, Representability
The one-day symposium will examine the discursive and aesthetic challenges that arise with respect to both the definition and representation of eating disorders, taking into account cinematic, literary, and artistic depictions of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’, keeping in mind that these diagnoses always raise the question of what constitutes ‘normal’, ‘ordered eating’, socially accepted habits and ‘aberrant’ ones – such as diets and obsessive ‘healthy’ or ‘clean’ eating.
Since ED can be structured by imitation and concealment rather than a clear manifestation of symptoms, they seem to resist the clinical gaze also in their temporal aspects. Foucault has described modern symptomatology as emerging in conjunction with ideas about a defining course or progression of identifiable diseases (a typical Krankheitsverlauf). Yet ED temporalities are difficult to classify in accordance with the medical language of chronic vs. acute, episodic, sporadic, but also compulsion, addiction, or relapse. As a result, for example, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic Manual, DSM-5, lowered the frequency threshold for ED symptoms required for a diagnosis. The symposium, thus, will focus on the errant temporalities bundled into ED and fraying quotidian rhythms.
Social time is structured around ‘ordinary’ mealtimes and collectively prepared festive occasions, both of which collide with the obsessional temporality characteristic of ED. Disordered eating obeys different rhythms, a time radically stretched or violently compressed. In all this, but even after a supposed ‘recovery’ from an ED, disordered eating remains paradoxically linked to the most elementary, by definition ‘chronic’ condition of an organism dependent on food intake. Can narrative time articulate these temporal complexities; can it absorb the intensely repetitive structures of ED or the questionable notions of recovery and relapse?
The still very much uneven gender distribution of ED attests to the perniciously patriarchal structures of social life, yet ED also exhibit the overdetermined nature of consumption in capitalist societies. For many decades, ED have been a focal point of feminist attention and activism. But can the resilience, endurance, and refusal encountered in ED become modes of political resistance?
Venue
ICI Berlin(Click for further documentation)
With
Beate AbsalonAlice Blackhurst
Nadine Hartmann
Evangelia Kindinger
Laila Melchior
Theresa Parstorfer
Claudia Peppel
Franziska Pierwoss
Corinna Schmechel
Susie Orbach
Organized by
Clio NicastroNadine Hartmann