Unlearning Discipline: Barriers to Treatment in Eating Disorder Recovery for Veteran Women
Open AccessThis project investigates U.S. veteran women’s experience seeking and undergoing treatmentfor eating disorders (EDs). The incidence of EDs in the military has increased dramatically over the last thirty years, particularly in women (Antczak, Brininger 2008). Furthermore, EDs have a relapse rate of 36% and the highest mortality rate of any mental illness (Khalsa, et al 2017). Recovery narratives from veterans reveal the impact of a neoliberal and biopolitical framework for the body where a soldier’s physique is surveilled, ordered, maintained, and disciplined. The encouragement of appetite and weight control under military purview may be a hindrance to recovery if such an ideology is fundamental to military subjectivity. This is compounded during the transition to civilian life; letting go of such an ideology may be a source of existential fear that one is ‘letting go of being a soldier.’ This study 1) discusses technologies of power within the veteran healthcare network acting as barriers to treatment, 2) reveals how ED recovery is a process of unlearning specific forms of body discipline that may have been glorified and/or enforced during service, and 3) considers the body a symbol of three conflicting subjectivities—soldier, veteran, woman—during the recovery process.
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