Mouthing Disgust and Pleasure in Eating Disorders

Abstract

a Bronwyn Platten is an artist-researcher whose work intersects the disciplines of arts and health with specific interests in co-creative and multisensory art, gender, phenomenology, and embodiment. b Megan Warin is a social anthropologist whose research interests coalesce around the gendering of health and illness (including anorexia), sensuous scholarship, and public understanding of scientific paradigms of obesity. c Sarah Coggrave is final-year BA visual arts student at the University of Salford, Manchester. She previously obtained an MA in international criminology from the University of Sheffield.ABSTRACT This article explores the complex sensorial encounters that people with eating disorders have in response to their mouths, food, eating, and embodiment. We argue that relationships to food, perceived primarily in clinical and psychological terms of control and discipline, ignore sensorial and generative dimensions of embodiment and the associated affective agency of hungers, pleasures, and disgust. Through analysis of the filmed performance of Untitled (The Party), we examine how the mouth for people with eating disorders embodies a metaphorical space of disgust, but also pleasure. As a soft, moist bodily opening, Bronwyn Platten is an artist-researcher whose work intersects the disciplines of arts and health with specific interests in co-creative and multisensory art, gender, phenomenology, and embodiment. info@bronwynplatten.com Megan Warin is a social anthropologist whose research interests coalesce around the gendering of health and illness (including anorexia), sensuous scholarship, and public understanding of scientific paradigms of obesity. megan.warin@adelaide.edu.au Sarah Coggrave is final-year BA visual arts student at the University of Salford, Manchester. She previously obtained an MA in international criminology from the University of Sheffield.

Exploring Vaccine Hesitancy Through an Artist–Scientist Collaboration

“…Research conducted in the ABHR field combines traditional qualitative strategies such as interviews with methods informed by the arts and uses them to explore new forms of knowledge translation (Boydell et al 2016). Next to inviting patients to express themselves through art, arts-based health research typically includes projects in which artistresearchers explore their personal illness experiences (Platten, Warin, and Coggrave 2014) or projects in which medical and healthcare practitioners or students are stimulated to use artistic methods to develop awareness of the patients' perspective (De la Croix et al 2011) and to consider the whole person of both the patient and the clinician (Bolton 2008).…”