ABSTRACT
Anorexia is often described as an aversion to eating, as a way to kill off hunger altogether. Rather than a way to negate hunger, this chapter explores how hunger hovers on the borders of abjection, as both sickening and irresistible. Based on extensive cross-cultural fieldwork in Canada, Scotland and Australia with people diagnosed with anorexia, the chapter locates hunger within Kristeva’s theory of abjection, revealing how the embodiment of hunger is a constant process of becoming empty and full (of disgust and power). Hunger turns on multiple registers of desire and disgust at the same time – beckoning and calling to bodily pleasures of ingestion and expulsion, and engulfing or erasing visceral disgust and shame. In framing hunger as abject and a process of abjection, hunger is a self-making process that feeds on and off itself, operating in complex socio-cultural modes of desire and disgust, care and violence.
