ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews undertaken during anthropological fieldwork in both the English inpatient eating disorders unit (EDU) and on pro-anorexia websites, it is on subjectivities and lived experiences of eating amongst anorexic informants. This chapter explores that eating not only as absent to anorexia, the lack of which produces a disappearing body. An attention to eating reveals complexity and nuance to informants' many and various food-centred practices; these engender active relationships of absence with food through which anorexia is maintained. Anorexia's agency underpins friendship by coming out and stepping in for informants but it also renders the balance between anorexia and personhood precarious. Tracing the ways in which agency perpetually slips and slides along the threads between informants and their illness as anorexia continually shifts between helping and engulfing has illuminated the entanglement of these subjectivities with food and eating.
