Degrees of voicelessness: epistemic injustice and eating disorder narratives

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Subjects with eating disorders are vulnerable to voicelessness; this project will use literature, criticism, and postcolonial theory to first identify and address the degrees of voicelessness to which subjects with eating disorders are privy. Postcolonial theory and its interventions in the medical humanities provide insight into how Othering practices manifest biomedically; in eating disorder discourse this produces a normative sufferer who is white, female, young, self-starving, and Western. Sufferers who exist beyond this fabricated archetypal model 'become invisible, yet these patients are nevertheless subject to the same abiding social stigma that assaults all anorexia patients' (Seaber, 2016: 3). Second, I propose that literature can function as a heuristic lens through which to modify discourses on disordered eating, and that processes of reading and writing can be central in developing ethical practices of relating to subjects with eating disorders.