Binge-Restrict-Repeat: The Governmentality of Eating Regimes

This study employs Michel Foucault's conceptualization of governmentality, or dispersed rationalities that seek to calculate and maximize the health of the population, to study how eating regimes of truth influence how individuals relate to their bodies and each other. Importantly, the study of eating regimes elucidates how food rules are portrayed in the discourses, institutions, philosophical and moral propositions, administrative measures, and technologies (what Foucault refers to as societal apparatuses of power, or dispositifs) that address what and how to eat. In this dissertation, I specifically analyze dispositifs that promote certain foodstuffs as devotional objects that can be utilized as forms of pleasure and/or self-control. I conceptualize artificial sweeteners as ingestible stores of self-control and biopower, arguing that they provide a lens through which to view how mealtime rituals, temporalities of eating, and the intersubjective perceptions of the relationship between food consumption and the ideal healthy body have transformed in the face of discourses that emphasize the need to strip food of carbohydrate- and calorie-loaded consequences.

The dissertation analyzes how contemporary dietary discourses in the United States encourage individuals to view freedom of food choice as a binary selection between binge and restrict eating practices. I argue that this notion of dietary balance is part of what I refer to as the neoliberal binge-restrict eating regime. I analyze the binge-restrict eating regime on three different yet supplementary registers: 1) that of neoliberal discourses of dietary balance, which are premised on logics and technologies of rigid, machine-like correction and anticipatory compensation through carefully planned periods of restriction and healthy eating followed by food binges, or periods where an individual indulges in seemingly unhealthy foodstuffs; 2) that of discourses that encourage the individual to consume endlessly but not allow signs of "excessive" consumption to develop in the body; 3) and that of edible instantiations of the binge-restrict eating regime, with a particular emphasis on artificial sweeteners. The dissertation concludes that the contemporary notion of dietary balance as "binge-restrict" is informed by a popular interpretation of food rules as rigid, algorithmic truths and contributes to a loss of embodied knowledge regarding how to eat well.