Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses which can have devastating effects within people’s lives. However, the perspectives and narratives of people living with eating disorders are often absent from clinical and theoretical investigations. In this thesis, I demonstrate how strategies of literary criticism provide valuable methodologies for interrogating how knowledges about eating disorders emerge and function within people’s lives. Through close analysis of literary texts including Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Maria Stavrou’s Bulimics on Bulimia, graphic narratives of eating disorders, and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, I observe the impossibility of producing universal theories of eating disorders, and assert that eating disorders cannot be understood independently from the lives of those they affect. Throughout my thesis, I develop interpretive strategies which are attentive to the idiosyncrasies of the particular texts under examination.

The theoretical tools which are deployed to examine eating disorders often privilege the insights of researchers, leaving those living with eating disorders privy to varying degrees of voicelessness. By reading literary texts from a range of geographical, sociocultural, and personal contexts, I interrogate the politics of knowing eating disorders, and suggest methods for knowing eating disorders differently. Instead of seeking to determine what, precisely, eating disorders are, I examine what eating disorders do: what forms of relatedness they engender; how they enable or disable certain interactions; and – through analysis of a range of literary modalities – how they shape the literary forms within which they are represented. By dwelling with the moments of discomfort which these texts provoke, I nurture an interpretive practice which witnesses (but does not seek to resolve) the ambiguities and unease which eating disorders prompt. I argue that learning to ethically attend to gaps, silences, and absences within representations of eating disorders enables novel strategies for (not) understanding the illnesses.