Scenes of Indigestion: Alimentary Countercommunity as Disorderly Praxis

This paper attends to disordered eating not simply as a socially determined malady but as a form of maladjusted and disorderly embodiment that engenders relations both social and antisocial. While indigestion appears in one respect as an eminently individualized process—playing out as it does, inside the gut—it reveals, when considered as method, a social dimension of disordered eating that has been largely elided in accounts of its causes or cures. Working against conventional feminist and medical conceptualizations of nonnormative eating practices as pathological and in need of extinguishment, the authors draw on insights from trans studies, mad studies, and critical disability studies to counter the notion that food and social life are inextricable and uniformly positive, and to elaborate and offer (anti-)social strategies of restriction, reversal, and rage. Rather than framing eating as an act intrinsically attached to conviviality, the paper presents a range of possibilities for collective corporeal and social indigestion.