“Metabolic Personhood: Disorder, Decapacitation, Debility” examines how "health" as a normative and empirical distinction functions as an authorizing effect for modern expressions of Western imperialism. Through readings of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Carmen Maria Machado's "Eight Bites," and J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, I maintain that the metabolism and its attendant functions of incorporation and digestion materially, viscerally constitute the narrative creation of what the critic Joseph Slaughter defines as a “person.” I argue that this person must be healthy in order to access that plot of incorporation, and therefore must be fed in prescriptive terms. Building on Jasbir Puar's theorization of debility and Ann Laura Stoler's conceptualization of "duress," I maintain that the metabolic as an analytical principle expands the conceptual parameters of the person and personhood beyond a legal/juridical framework. I position the metabolic as an under-theorized but important constitutive factor in maintaining mutated forms of imperialism. Each chapter follows a medical “plot” consisting of etiology, diagnosis, treatment, and cure. I argue that the project/process of Western medicine is functionally dependent on this plot, which in turn targets individual ailments, impairments, or other differences adequately captured by the pathological for intervention—and thus for surveillance, management, and control. This plot is endemic to our understanding of what medicine is and what it seeks to accomplish. It is also the means by which medicalization and the pathologization of difference/deficiency is itself a form of debility. Each chapter shows that, as a matter of this plot, responses to debility-as-structural-violence are dependent on an impairing or disabling of the body. Each text suggests that medicine and medicalization are constitutive of debility, and produce the pathology they seek to eradicate. All three texts, I demonstrate, encounter the global circulation of debility within similar historical and structural registers as debility is also duress; these texts also emphasize the metabolic inflection of these encounters and use purposeful changes to metabolic capacity, reordered metabolisms, and deficient/purposefully disabled metabolisms to show how the presence of difference demands a medical response as a matter of pathologization, as expressed via these disordered metabolisms.