ABSTRACT
We are two white, thin, queer people, a community organizer and a radical dietitian, who met through a shared commitment to fat rights and deep justice. Over a vegetarian Chinese meal, we soon discovered we shared an unpopular subjugated opinion on mindful and intuitive eating theory and practice (hereafter “intuitive eating”). Both of us have experience of living with eating disorders. We know the unrelenting misery, shame, preoccupation, confusion, loneliness, pain, and exhaustion that this can entail. We are heartened when anyone finds relief from food and body issues and other suffering. To which end, there are plenty of studies, books, and online testimonials attesting to the role of intuitive eating as a force for good. But ours is a different story. In that first conversation, we learnt that we were both deeply troubled by intuitive eating. It offers healing for some, but the model of healing stabilizes the troubled eater as an individual well enough to function in the neoliberal matrix of a racialized capitalist society. In other words, it’s not an agenda that configures healing as involving collective eruption and the wholesale upheaval of the world as we know it. Here, as we continue that initial conversation, we theorize this upheaval mainly as a queering.
