Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine

Developing an understanding of eating disorders beyond the biological/medical framework has become a necessity in present times, especially when eating disorders are swiftly spreading deep roots across the world. In view of the multidimensional etiology of eating disorders, there are increased efforts towards understanding its phenomenological, cultural, and other related non-medical aspects, and Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine leaps past the prevalent notions on eating disorder, and contributes to the developing corpus of affective knowledge on eating disorders among women through comics and graphic medicine. Taking cues from select graphic narratives on eating disorders, this book attempts to posit graphic medicine as one of the most befitting modes of life writing. This book is distinctive in that it is an attempt not only to explore the multi-dimensional etiology of eating disorders in women using graphic medicine narratives but also to understand how graphic medicine humanizes eating disorders by offering a unique ingress into women’s phenomenological experience of eating disorders.

Anu Mary Peter was a Jawaharlal Nehru doctoral research fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (India). She is currently an independent health humanities researcher. Her research articles have appeared in various Web of Science/Scopus indexed journals such as Health: An International Journal for Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, among others. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is an Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Trichy (India). His research concentrates on illness narratives, graphic medicine, and literature and medicine. He is the author of four books and more than eighty research articles. His most recent volume of co-edited essays is titled The Idea and Practice of Reading (2018).