How can male eating disorders become otherwise?

Male eating disorders are becoming a vital topic of public health concern. Yet despite increasing attention in media, science and policy, including in Australia, eating disorders among men remain little understood. In this dissertation, I take ‘male eating disorders’ as a set of emergent practices that are ‘in-the-making’. Drawing on ideas in Science and Technology Studies (STS), I focus specifically on how male eating disorders come to be enacted in clinical practices, health communication materials and clinical measurement tools. The overarching aim of this thesis is to critically examine how maleness is performed in the context of eating disorders, to generate new insights which can contribute to how care in relation to male eating disorders can be done otherwise. To address my research aim I employed qualitative methods, including: visual analyses of health promotion infographics; qualitative interviews (n=25) with Australian health care professionals involved in clinical care; and reflection on a situated embodied experiment with clinical assessment measures. My analysis is informed by STS and feminist technoscience scholarship on concepts of ‘care’, ‘becoming’, ‘multiplicity’, and ‘event'. These approaches allow me to attend to MEDs as an ‘enactment’ that is ‘in-the-making’, that is, a site of emergent and uncertain knowledge, in which the situated realities of male eating disorders become produced and stabilised in clinical practices. This dissertation demonstrates the limits of predominant biomedical frameworks of care that tend reproduce and stabilise an assumed dichotomy between the ‘female’ and ‘male’ in relation to the problem of eating disorders. Treating MEDs as a matter of ‘becoming’ shows that care around them is locally situated in particular clinical moments. In these moments, bodies, clinicians, and patients become together constituting a material-semiotic network of care. The analysis points to the need to trouble the imagined fixed female/male dichotomy embedded in clinical practices in order to open up a more sensitive and flexible model of care. It is argued that there is a need for a new language, a new set of practices, which hold open the possibility for the field to attend to (male) eating disorders.