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This paper works towards a social geography of eating disorders through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. Through an empirical engagement with experience-centred knowledge, I couple nine in-depth interviews with autoethnographic material, drawing out the spatial (real and virtual) and temporal (habit, routine, anticipation, non-linearity) dimensions of eating disorder experience, management and recovery; highlighting principally how pandemic lockdown conditions intensified space-time, mind/body and social relations across various micro-domestic and macro-governmental scales. I engage 'lightly' with Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary and biopolitical power to draw out broad-brush themes around matters of containment, control and surveillance; taking feminist inspiration to think through Foucault critically as I explore a nexus of gendered pandemic power relations. In doing so, I contribute towards new feminist understandings of the disciplinary gaze, emphasizing the ongoingness of surveillance through both physical body-checking and what I term psychological 'guising'. Through such (in)voluntary disordered bodily practices, and an engagement with the feminist mind/body dualism, I emphasize the complexity of EDs as embodied mental illnesses, further complicating feminist understandings of control. I close by discussing the ethical-methodological importance of 'empathy' while emphasizing the overall imperative of critical qualitative inquiry for socio-cultural geographies and beyond.
Ellys Feather (Tue,) studied this question.