Eating Disorders and the Challenge of Representation

Eating Disorders and the Challenge of Representation is the first in a series of eight online seminars, which together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Wednesday 11 November 2026, 5:00-6:30 PM GMT/ 4:00-5:30 PM CET
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Ruth Cruickshank (Royal Holloway, University of London): "Not About Eating: Deconstructing Eating Disorder Science with Annie Ernaux's Mémoire de fille/A Girl's Story (2016)"

Abstract: Derrida's 'eating well' is not about eating. Instead, his figure raises the question of how subjects may reject patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption. It asks how to embrace the irreducible alterity of both self and other in an effort to consume others well. And how to be open, likewise, to being consumed well, without setting up binaries or boundaries. For the author and critics alike, Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille is not about an eating disorder. Critical and narrative focus are on the challenges of revealing and re-telling the enduringly traumatic experiences and consequences of a young girl being consumed by sexual, social and class shame. This includes a self-misdiagnosis of bulimia, represented as a symptomatic response contained within a two-year temporal and bodily boundary, an obsession which ends on resolving to become a writer. 

Although described as a quest to 'deconstruct the girl', Ernaux's text constructs binaries and boundaries that risk perpetuating myths of eating disorders as about skinny white adolescent girls seeking control. Yet, as far as we know (and science still does not know what causes them)  eating disorders are experienced right across identities, communities, ages, genders, ethnicities and body shapes. They are not just about control, or about (not) eating. 

Ernaux’s affecting representations of disordered eating and her narrative’s reflections on itself with its ‘perpetually missing piece, always postponed. The unqualifiable hole’ are read by entangling the question of ‘eating well’ and the questioning of constructs from the scientific literature of eating disorders. The paper identifies boundaries and binaries resonating with Ernaux’s text: thin/fat; young/later life; focussing on minority diagnoses like anorexia and bulimia and overlooking majority diagnoses like OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorder); privileging  blunt diagnostic thresholds of BMI and behavioural patterns over emotional and functional impacts. Disrupting patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption in Mémoire de fille and in examples of the biomedical constructs that fail the girl and the writer (and the growing number of folks experiencing eating disorders) the paper suggests that reading scientific and creative literatures can open up questions of construction, diagnosis and prevalence - and of the unqualifiedness - of eating disorder.

Biography: Dr Ruth Cruickshank is an Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her background is in contemporary French literature exploring constructs of crisis and  leftover meanings in representations of food and drink in fiction and thought. From that springboard, she now draws on expertise in Comparative Literature,  Food Studies, Critical Medical Humanities and her own lived experience of eating disorders - notably OSFED (other specified eating or feeding disorder) - to bring unique interdisciplinary perspectives into  eating disorder research and understanding. As the only academic in the Humanities working on OSFED Ruth reads scientific eating disorder research, reports and diagnostic criteria as constructs, showing how what might look like scientific truths overlook gaps in evidence and experiences of folks who do not fit into diagnostic criteria  enduring stereotypes or what we think we know about eating disorders. She works with major UK eating disorder charity Beat and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to explore - and crucially, to challenge - why OSFED, despite being the most common eating disorder, is systemically overlooked, and why  BMI and behavioural thresholds overshadow the severe emotional and daily-life impacts experienced right across the eating disorder spectrum.

Vanja Qvardfordt, Independent artist and researcher: "Bulimic Filmmaking as Feminist Methodology: Reimagining Eating Disorders Through Experimental Film Practice"

Abstract: This paper proposes bulimic filmmaking as a feminist artistic methodology emerging from my ongoing film project DiS. Rather than illustrating eating disorders through psychological explanation or narrative resolution, bulimic filmmaking approaches bulimia as compositional form itself. By articulating bulimia as method rather than metaphor, this presentation argues that embodied conditions can generate formal innovation in contemporary art–transforming stigmatised experience into critical filmic strategy.

Through screening excerpts of How Would You Like Your Bulimic Film Served?–a trilogy comprising chapters 32: Rare, 33: Medium, and 34: Well Done–I examine how bulimia functions not only as subject matter but as a structuring principle within experimental film practice. Repetition, rupture, concealment, excess, rehearsal, and obsessive self-observation become compositional strategies shaping image, sound, editing, and duration. Specific formal techniques include: superimposition of archival Super-8 footage creating temporal layering that mirrors binge-purge cycles; live reflection during filming exposing explicit content and reliving provoked episodes; deliberate re-editing sequences that resist linear narrative progression; and durational choices that embody the disorder's affective temporality. These strategies ensure the films are not merely representational but actively enact the disorder's temporal, psychological, and material logic from within. The camera was directed toward spaces of bulimic episodes, while sound recordings captured both lived experience and critical reflection. Filmed without predetermined structure, the process responds directly to embodied experience.

I will situate bulimic filmmaking within feminist experimental film traditions that engage the body as both material and site of knowledge and resistance. This work problematises compulsory wellness paradigms by proposing an alternative visual regime grounded in vulnerability rather than coherence. The presentation addresses ethics of working with intergenerational archives shaped by stigma and silence, asking how a method grounded in disorder can challenge dominant visual regimes demanding coherence, productivity, and linear recovery narratives. My work addresses how eating is gendered and policed as we are being watched and judged constantly. Bulimic filmmaking leans into the disordered stategies that others want to hide or fix. In doing so, it resists the idea that food choices are simply about personal responsibility or health.

Biography: Stockholm-based artist, MFA Fine Art, HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. My ongoing artist film project, Discovery in Silence (DiS) 2022–, interrogates decades of Super-8 films to examine an history of bulimia nervosa affecting three generations of women in my family. Structured as an evolving artistic research in 36 chapters, each chapter marks a moment of discovery. Individual films, screenings, discussions, and workshops function as conceptual gateways within the project’s broader development. Methodological questions include: how can bulimia function as an artistic method, address how to life write for the screen, and how can experimental fine art film generate knowledge on bulimia nervosa by innovating methods that make visible the disorder's colonisation of the carrier? The project has catalysed funding; screenings; exhibitions; seminars and public clinician dialogues; peer-reviewed papers (Journal of Feminist Art and Research: Cosmos, 2026) and conference papers (EDRS, Vienna, 2026).

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by Clipoemsart, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.