Healing-as-World-Building

This article uses a feminist-of-colour disability studies-oriented TikTok critical discourse analysis to attend to the potentialities of intuitive eating (IE) and intuitive movement (IM) for people who identify with dis/ordered eating while being critical of the harms that Health at Every Size® (HAES®)-aligned activism can engender (e.g. co-healthism). It calls for political action as we fight the urge to starve, restrict, or purge and work collectively to heal our relationships with food, our bodyminds, and the world we inhabit. To do this work, the article challenges the psychiatrized language of eating dis/order ‘recovery’ in favour of healing-as-world-building. Under this praxis, disability and fatness are not viewed with a curative imaginary, but rather, are conceptualized as valuable, desirable, and necessary for building a liveable world. This article prototypes a fattening and cripping of IE and IM that culminates in collective intuitive eating/movement, a praxis based in radical solidarity, decolonization, food and movement sovereignty, abolition, and healing-as-world-building. It outlines three main shifts that need to occur for this transformation to take place. This iteration of collective IE/M is not a prescription on how to move and eat that will look the same for every individual or collective, but rather, it is a prototype for a radical shift in how IE and IM practitioners view health, care, ‘recovery,’ healing, and well-being promotion.