“I Would Prefer Not To” Eat: A Literacy Narrative of My Mad Self

Growing up as a queer child in a lower-middle-class family in a small town in India in the late 1990s and early 2000s, violence — physical, structural, emotional, psychological, sexual, and epistemological — has been an intrinsic part of my coming-of-age. Unable to comprehend the violence then, I responded to it by withdrawing from food, among other forms of active self-harm/survival. Until literature entered my life like a saviour! This write-up is part autoethnography and part survivor memoir in the form of a literacy narrative of how I came to understand my mad self through the humane lens of literature. The literacy narrative focuses on my journey with a range of literary texts that have come to shape my understanding of my madness and eating habits. In doing so, the narrative keeps the clinical gaze of psychiatry at bay and develops a literary and “lived-experience framework” to understand eating habits. Such a framework contains the potential to conceptualize eating (dis)orders beyond the hegemony of psychiatric discourses; and seeks to share how they are situated in contexts of loneliness, alienation, gender violence, sexuality, and suicide.