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Does Your Approach to Treating Eating Disorders Aim at Prison Abolition?
Thought Prisons and Eating Disorders
Does your approach to eating disorder recovery aim at abolition? was their first question. Wow. That’s like … searching, definitely not something I get asked every day. In fact, ever before. Abolition means working towards a society where prisons are no longer needed. So the question links individual eating distress to social injustice via the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex is ‘a collection of social structures, systems, and policies — especially institutional racism, the war on drugs and mass incarceration… [that] imprison and dehumanize convicted individuals in the United States’. It’s the sort of scrutiny that pushes us to reconsider what we mean by accountability. And health.
And yes, it does. My approach to food and bodies, called Well Now, is a social action approach. A shaping assumption in Well Now is that health will emerge in a world where no-one is starved of food, dignity, connection or security, one that’s on the way to making prisons redundant. Getting rid of the need for prisons means dismantling the inter-related drivers of neoliberalism, racism, patriarchy and their many other cheerleaders. We’d have a decolonized, gender-equitable, compassionate society, where prisons are no longer relevant…
