Thinness as the object of happiness: mimetic desire and eating disorder in Carmen Machado’s “Eight Bites”

This paper offers a nuanced reading of Machado’s “Eight Bites” by examining how happiness is socially constructed and how mimetic desire drives the protagonist’s disordered eating. Drawing on Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, Gill’s post-feminism, and Ahmed’s affect theory, this study explores how desires stick to culturally valued objects of thinness and how this stickiness shapes power, emotion, and subjectivity. This article claims that the protagonist’s disordered eating emerges not from autonomous choice but from an unconscious mimetic imitation of her sisters’ desires, which reflect broader post-feminist media culture presenting bodily transformation as empowerment. This study highlights the dangers of universalizing happiness when thinness becomes a marker of personal worth reinforced by familial competition and cultural ideals equating discipline with freedom. Finally, this paper shows that Machado’s narrative critiques the destructive nature of happiness defined by external expectations and reveals how post-feminist promises of personal choice conceal anti-feminist control.