Language
English (en)
Date of Award
4-2026
Author's Department
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Unrestricted = Publicly available
Abstract
Scholarship on eating disorders has long been dominated by quantitative social science research that shapes clinical understandings of these illnesses, despite growing humanistic interventions. My thesis places eating disorders, through an “archive” of psychological studies, in conversation with queer and crip of color theory to uncover the co-constitutive relationship between queerness, disability, and race/ethnicity that centers on queer people of color with eating disorders as a necessary site of theoretical inquiry. Drawing on Sabrina Strings’ analysis of racialized body ideals, I trace how genealogies of bodily legibility (driven by discourses on whiteness, weight, and citizenship) created systems of “categorical oppression,” which then migrated to academic and clinical discourse. I demonstrate how this categorical logic persists in “queer-focused” eating disorder studies, where language both recycles these structures of erasure and informs clinical legitimacy. Engaging queer and crip theories of invisibility, “overcoming,” and debility, I argue that existence and recovery are often framed through productivity, legibility, and normative gender performance. Such framings reproduce displacement, reinscribing queer people of color within the very structures that marginalize them. In response, I propose a framework of recovery grounded in memoir, kinship, and care, positioning survival and community-building as forms of resistance to this categorical violence and oppression. By situating eating disorders within queer and crip of color critique, this thesis opens an interdisciplinary conversation for reimagining recovery, legitimacy, and queer life-building.
Mentor
Cynthia Barounis
Additional Advisors
Amy Cislo
Recommended Citation
Parra-Garcia, Emilia, "Navigating Displacement: Queer and Crip of Color Reframings of Eating Disorder Discourse" (2026). Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Papers. 10.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wgss_honors/10