Anorexia nervosa is a paradoxical disorder, regarded across disciplines as a body project and yet also an illness of disembodied subjectivity. This overlooks the role that material environments—including objects and spaces—play in producing embodied experiences of anorexia both within and outside treatment. To address this gap, this paper draws together two ethnographic studies of anorexia to explore the shared themes unearthed by research participants’ engagements with objects that move across boundaries between treatment spaces and everyday lives. Demonstrating how the anorexic body is at once both phenomenologically lived and socio-medically constituted, we argue that an attention to materiality is crucial to understanding lived experiences. A materialist account of anorexia extends the literature on treatment resistance in eating disorders and offers a reconceptualisation of ‘the body in treatment’, showing how objects and spaces shape, maintain, and even ‘trigger’ anorexia. Therefore, against the background of the high rates of relapse in eating disorders, this analysis calls for consideration of how interventions can better take account of eating disordered embodiment as shaped by material environments.

神经性厌食症是一种自相矛盾的疾病，跨学科被视为一种身体项目，但也是一种脱离实体的主观疾病。这忽略了物质环境（包括物体和空间）在治疗内外产生厌食症的具体体验方面所起的作用。为了弥补这一差距，本文汇集了两项关于厌食症的民族志研究，以探索研究参与者与跨越治疗空间和日常生活边界的物体接触所发现的共同主题。我们展示了厌食症身体是如何同时在现象学上生活和社会医学构成的，我们认为对物质性的关注对于理解生活体验至关重要。厌食症的唯物主义解释扩展了关于饮食失调治疗抵抗的文献，并提供了“治疗中的身体”的重新概念化，展示了物体和空间如何塑造、维持甚至“触发”厌食症。因此，在饮食失调复发率高的背景下，该分析要求考虑干预措施如何更好地考虑由物质环境塑造的饮食失调的体现。