Marital Distress and the Failure to Eat: The Expressive Dimensions of Feeding, Eating, and Self-care in Urban South Asia

Abstract

This article examines appetite loss among married women living in a Delhi slum. Research has shown that through feeding, women in South Asia gain domestic authority and become part of the families into which they marry. I use observations and interviews collected over 14 months in one poor urban community to explore the social dimensions of feeding and abstaining from eating in a context of marital and food insecurity. Results show that women report appetite loss in response to domestic violence, the stress of marital fights, and fears about the dissolution of their marriages. In other instances, women report that they forget to eat because of dedication to caregiving or refuse to eat because of their husbands' failure to attend to their needs. In the context of this research, I show that food insecurity research would benefit from considering the kinship and gender politics involved in feeding and eating behaviors.

Keywords: South Asia; domestic; feeding; food insecurity; marriage; violence.