So Much Wasted

“So Much Wasted is… a philosophically informed meditation on the embodied subject when subjected to extreme hunger, and on how such a theoretically reconfigured sense of identity might interact with sites of sanctioned authority such as the gallery, the clinic and the prison…. As a primer in the diverse approaches taken, the book must be considered a success.”
- David Tucker and Daniël Ploeger, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“Through a detailed flow of writing the book folds the reader into the ethical gap between what it is to have life and what it is to live life. It sets out a challenge for the reader that addresses the tactics of occupation that impact on agency through a series of well-observed examples that draw on structured and sustained refusals to perform eating and to face the threat of death as life comes to be questioned as a matter of law. Through this Anderson questions the balance of power that allows the ‘benefit tube’ to disguise the external surface of the body as a shroud for internal decomposition.” - Fiona Bannon, New Theatre Quarterly

“In this brilliant and important book, Patrick Anderson dramatically expands our understanding of anorexia by foregrounding its theatricality and reflexivity, and linking it to prison hunger strikes and certain kinds of endurance art. He shows us how central the self is to all of these practices, both as object and as agent. Self-starvation is often the theater of last resort, the stage on which a person performs when all others have been removed. It can also be a way of spitting out the poisonous images that one has been forced to incorporate. And even a well-balanced meal is not psychically nourishing when you are compelled to eat it, Anderson argues in the last and most compelling chapter of this book. Force-feeding does not support life; it promotes, rather, a living death.” - Kaja Silverman, author of Flesh of My Flesh

“Patrick Anderson has written a wonderful book, one that will have a real impact on the field of performance studies. The topic that he has chosen is important and timely: the forced feeding of prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo, the anorexia epidemic among young women (and now men), and the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube are only some of the most recent and urgent questions that have surfaced around the practice and politics of starvation and who, ultimately, has the power over the individual body.” - Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas

“Suitable for numerous audiences—graduate courses in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and performance; scholarly audiences interested in bioethics, fatness studies, prisons, and the philosophy of selfhood; and those practitioners who work with self-starving or self-mutilating clients—this book carefully outlines a politics of resistance through dying, near-death, and ‘wasting away’. . . . Anderson has written a book worthy of attention and study. By imagining rebellion as a refusal to consume, he forges new and powerful links between gender, sexuality, the body, and the ideological apparatus of the state as it faces the many rebellions of its subjects.” - Breanne Fahs, Elevate Difference

“So Much Wasted deals with sensitive subject matters in a way that neither trivializes nor aggrandizes them. . . . [A] stimulating and valuable contribution. . . .” - Sarah Egan, Anthropological Quarterly