Heike Bartel

Masculinities and Mental Health explores literary texts, images, and performances which engage with the under-explored topic of eating disorders in men. Eating reflects prevailing cultural norms that prescribe or condemn who eats when, what and how much. Underpinning these norms are highly gendered ideas regarding which body weight, shape and size is deemed appropriate for men and women, boys and girls. Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses commonly associated with females only and expressed through extreme eating behaviour, excessive exercise or food avoidance. The fact that men can suffer from anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and other types of eating disorders too, presents a challenge not only to healthcare disciplines but also to public and cultural perceptions. Exploring these thematic and formal themes, this volume scrutinizes standardised concepts of masculinity and male mental health in contemporary discourse. This book includes literary writings, graphic novels, art, photography, performance, film, and ego-documents on social-media from North America and central Europe from the 1970s to the present, as well as textual and non-textual sources from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. Masculinities and Mental Health also explores a global dimension of the topic by examining eating disorders and broader concepts of masculinity as Western cultural imports.

Eating disorders are situated at the complex interface of biology, medicine, culture, society, and politics, and are seen differently from each perspective. This book brings together discussions of eating, food, gender, sexuality and mental health through analysis of published autobiographical narratives authored by men with experience of living with one of the main eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder) as well as associated mental health problems such as body dysmorphic disorder and depression. Written by a literary scholar, the book speaks with authority on the value of literary narratives for much-needed qualitative research and training on the lived experience of eating disorders in men. With its transnational and comparative focus on texts from the US, UK, Germany, and Austria, Men Writing Eating Disorders will appeal to readers working across the arts and humanities and science disciplines. Its interdisciplinary approach offers new insights for readers interested in autobiography, illness narratives, Gender Studies and Critical Masculinity Studies; for scholars keen to explore the nexus of the arts, humanities and sciences within the emerging disciplines of Health Humanities and Medical Humanities; and for healthcare professionals and clinical researchers who recognize the importance of personal narratives in training and practice.

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary parameters of engagement.

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary parameters of engagement.