Stephanie Houston Grey, Louisiana State University
This is more true of my experience with anorexia and bulimia than the standard narrative of girls and women trying to conform to beauty standards and taking it too far. Because of that myth, you hear assholes making comments that they don’t like super thin women or you hear other women talking about how men like women with curves. Anorexics and bulimics know this. At no point have I thought starving myself would make men more attracted to me. On the contrary, I wanted to have less of a body, as well as to express my pain.
Perhaps most interesting about the appropriation of eating disorders is the extent to which they have become the “women’s disease,” conditions that are so universal to women’s experience that, even if individual women do not develop full-blown pathologies, all suffer the negative consequences of weight neuroses. Notice how seamlessly Orbach (1986) makes this connection:
There are those women who are constantly dieting and consistently limiting their food intakes, there are those women who diet during the week then let themselves go at weekends, there are those women who do not eat until suppertime…there are those women who consistently plan to diet but end up over eating every time they start to eat something (compulsive eaters); and there are those women who try to avoid food at all costs (anorectics). The adaptations are endless and women vary in their responses (61).
She then suggests that for millions of women “food is a combat zone, a source of incredible tension, the object of the most fevered desire, the engenderer of tremendous fear, and the recipient of a medley of projections centering round notions of good and bad” (62). As they have lost control over the ways that their bodies are represented, women must now constantly battle to meet normative standards that are both unrealistic and beyond their ability to set.
It is not surprising that, for many early authors who write in this vein, confession is a powerful discourse for marking female bodies as political subjects, since as a narrative form it is deeply tied to the assumption that the personal is political. These assumptions about commonalities in experience moved away from biological essentialism to support the notion that women shared the same problems and conditions, a unity that had been denied by the patriarchy’s fragmentation and reduction of gender. Sheila Collins writes, “We came to learn that the problems we thought were purely personal—that we thought were due to our own peculiar upbringing or to our own inabilities or neuroses were in fact, shared by every other woman” (363). The experience of the eating disorder or related issues dealing with food was one arena where these commonalities could be located and to some extent exploited, as the patriarchal enemy galvanized women’s experience into a general theory of sexual politics and shared interests. This focus on the private sphere as extension of the political had a profound impact on the ways that eating disorders came to be recognized within the feminist community. Sandy Friedman asserted that male-based language “forces women either to deny their own experiences or to reframe them in male-defined language. Reinforcing only the male perspective makes women feel that the very way that they speak is wrong and that the stories they tell are trivial” (290). The feminist strategy of inserting narratives from the private sphere into the political realm to establish authenticity has translated quite easily into the realm of food disturbances. In fact, both discussions emerged concurrently in the late 1960s. The link between individual trauma and commonality in experience represented by eating disturbances became a natural conduit for this discourse of the personal made public, legitimating the anorexic/bulimic experience as symbolic of women’s experience in general and illustrative of the challenges that they had to overcome.
Growing from the dramatic linkage between food consumption and female emancipation within feminism has been a culture of confession in which individuals find entry into the “women’s community” by discussing the pressures levied against them by the diet industry. The most vivid moments of oppression and subsequent awakening for many white, middle class women often center upon issues of weight and appearance. Gloria Steinem (1983) notes that the most powerful moment in her young adulthood was her recognition that she possessed an eating disorder, a realization that led to an interrogation of her own internalization of sexist values. An eating disorder, from this standpoint, becomes a rite of passage or admission into a community—an experience that signifies that you have suffered as your sisters have and can purify yourself through confession. It is not surprising that Wolf, who made manifest “the beauty myth,” would also share similar occurrences in her life:
It is dead easy to become Anorexic. At 13, I was taking the caloric equivalent of the food energy available to the famine victims in the siege of Paris. My doctor put his hands on my stomach and said he could feel my spine. I turned a cold eye of loathing on women who evidently lacked the mettle to suffer as I was suffering. Adolescent starvation was, for me, a prolonged reluctance to be born into womanhood if that meant assuming a station of beauty (102-103).
Containing most of the commonplaces of the female experience of anorexia, Wolf’s account is very instructive because it presumes a commonality of experience among all women. Like many accounts of religious conversion, a deluded existence is replaced by a higher level of consciousness—in this case, rejecting the anorexic/bulimic identity for a more authentic mode of political awareness.
As this drama evolved, it spawned a body of scholarship that interrogated the obsession with the control and management of the female body in popular culture. After critiquing Victorian assumptions about feminine hysteria, among the next goals of many contemporary feminist thinkers was to disengage eating-disordered individuals from the realm of individual psychopathology and discuss them as socio-political phenomena, particularly as casualties of the consumer culture obsessed with the shape and size of women (Hepworth & Griffin 1990). For the past thirty years, media critics have examined the roles that fashion magazines, the beauty industry, and icons such as Barbie Dolls, play in creating unrealistic body expectations in young women and, by extension, eating disorders (i.e. Spitzack 1993; Kilbourne 1995; Wolf 1991). This abundance of research is designed to demonstrate that the recent increase in the occurrences of eating disorders is a predictable outcome of media campaigns that imprison women in their own bodies, thus exposing the negative impacts that such representations have on self-perceptions (Botta 2000; Harrison 2000) as well as revising therapeutic approaches to the treatment of women who display consumptive pathologies (Gremillion 2002). Robin Morgan laments, “We have no bodies either because they are defined, posed, abused, veiled, air-brushed or metaphorized by men” (53). The eating-disordered person and her treatment became a projected template upon which to ritually contest this oppression.
Burke notes that frameworks of acceptance and rejection emerge from particular political contexts. During key points in history, he notes, “Our philosophers, poets, and scientists act in the code of names by which they simplify or interpret reality. These names shape our relations with our fellows. They prepare us for some functions and against others, for or against the persons representing these functions” (ATH 4). The cultural revolution that defined feminism in the 1960s and 70s revolved around the idea that personal enlightenment was the first step toward challenging the destructive policies and perceptions of patriarchal false-consciousness. In the case of food, Kim Chernin (1981) described a prison constructed from “our culture’s tendency to encourage women to retreat from strength and physical abundance into a sinister self-reduction” (182). It is important to note that this appropriation locates the eating disorder as a site of conflict, translating these conditions into the critical agon of an ongoing quest for perfection ultimately realized by political empowerment and self-determination. While this pathway could be understood as a personal journey, these journeys shared certain key elements. To understand the personal as political meant to apply shared political frameworks to the subjective lifeworld.
Most important to this historical appropriation, eating disorders became a projected site for the enactment of women’s struggle for independence. Since eating disorders present a false consciousness that must be corrected, a patient’s reticence to alter her behaviors is often viewed as a resistance to appropriate gender identity. This frustration is illustrated in Orbach’s work where she suggests that anorexia expresses ambivalence toward gender identity. She writes, “Sexual identity is an aspect of gender identity so that in rejecting models of sexuality one is simultaneously rejecting models of femininity” (183). The anorexic’s resistance to her own femininity was graphically illustrated in the popular literature of the late 1970s surrounding this topic. Lui, for example, describes her disgust with her gender in the most visceral terms: “I grab my breasts, pinching them until they hurt. If I could only eliminate them, cut them off if need be to flat chested like a child again” (79). What emerges is a type of opposition between feminism as the acceptance of femininity and the eating disorder as a pathological rejection of femininity. Along with descriptions of the way the female body is appropriated by the beauty culture, a discourse for reclaiming the body as a site for authentic feminine experience also emerged.
Through these key texts, eating disorders were projected as a sphere against which the empowerment of the feminine could be enacted. Anorexia can thus be seen as a form of protest by turning the body into a creative palimpsest on which pain can be inscribed and represented. One key to using the eating-disorder body as a site for critique is finding ways to heal the fractures between self and representation that define it. This notion plays a significant role in feminist understandings and responses to eating disturbances. Miriam Greenspan (1983) asserts, “As long as woman is essentially defined by her body and as long as her body is appropriated by men, she will always have the problem of female identity” (181). Yet it is important to note that even as these authors appropriated the eating disorder as a political issue, they also maintained a humane, empathetic relationship to these conditions. Orbach (1986) noted that politicizing the eating disorder might have therapeutic value since, if “we begin to see the anorexia as an attempt at empowering, and food refusal as the action of one whose cause has been derogated, dismissed or denied,” then, “there is an urgency and a strength in the refusal to eat.” She continued, “To see the anorectic’s food refusal as a hunger strike is to begin the process of humanizing her actions” (102). Thus, almost as soon has she had appeared on the public stage, the eating-disordered subject became one of the primary actors in the drama to empower women and legitimate their experience. One sees in Orbach’s work a reverence for the anorexic even as she labored to turn her patients’ energies toward more productive forms of protest and resistance. While Orbach suggested that the eating-disordered subject possessed a certain agency through her refusal to eat, a new generation of scholars would largely desert this position as they explored the philosophical and socio-historical significance of the eating disorder for women. After the anorexic’s appropriation into the body-politic of the feminist community, the stage was set for her to become the subject of ritual purgation as this developing political entity embraced lexical strategies to perfect itself.
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
gummygunk
annaxmalina
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
kaledo-art
dededos
