BR Admin. (2011). Beauty Whitewashed: How White Ideals Exclude Women of Color. Beauty Redefined.
This article suggests that the media plays no small role in women of color internalizing beauty ideals. It points out that women of color make up one third of women in the US, and the media not reflecting their lives, bodies, and stories contributes to problems like eating disorders. We also need to look further at the women of color in media who are depicted as smart, positive, and beautiful, and not as stereotypes and sidekicks. They also remind the reader that what we are seeing is not real: “Even when women of color do appear in beauty magazines, editors use photoshop to lighten their faces and thin their bodies.” The article also back up that, it’s not just speculation, media images do have a significant effect on the body image of teens, and this is a recipe for young women of color feeling poorly about their bodies, as they don’t get to see bodies that look like their bodies, even when that’s what they think they’re seeing. The article points out that many black women in the media who are heralded for their beauty often are lighter skinned and exhibit European-looking features, like thin noses and straight hair, with examples including Zoe Saldana, Alicia Keys, Tyra Banks, Halle Barry, etc. The article also debunks the myth that the ideals for women of color are more relaxed, and instead proposes that they are often difficult to achieve, idealizing a thick thighs, a tiny waist, large round hips, butt, and breasts, an even skin tone with no cellulite, bumps, body hair, or other anomalies of the body and none of these curves or things in the “wrong” place. Basically, just because many Western women of color aren’t held to (or hold themselves) to white beauty ideals, doesn’t mean that they’re not held to other rigid, dangerous standards.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
This is the first work I read, several years ago, that introduced me to looking at what are called “eating disorders” through a feminist lens. This book is entirely full of accessible language about the social production of femaleness through body manipulation, and the medical pathologization and othering through practice and discourse of those who end up with what are called eating disorders. She also sees these issues through a distinctly reproductive justice framework, because when it comes down to it, there is no way around eating disorders as issues of social and physical reproduction. She takes the ideas of systemic gender oppression through regulation of the female body and explains how these principles are deployed through the medical world, law, pop culture, and other realms.
C. (2015) An Open Letter To Insurance Companies. Project HEAL.
The writer of this open letter is a survivor of an eating disorder she had to pay for on her own, and is now a mental health care provider for those with eating disorders. From this point of view, the letter comprehensively goes through the ways insurance companies directly harm and ignore eating disorder sufferers. If insurance coverage is granted at all, inpatient caps are described as up to or around 5 days, as the letter says, and this is something I can attest to, as well. This reflects the non-serious perception of eating disorders from the medical community out, as an eating disorder cannot be eliminated or even well-treated in 5 days. Insurance coverage does not exist per the excuse that most lifesaving ED treatments are not “medically necessary”, and weight is a defining factor for if one gets coverage. This leads me to think about all of the ways women who are already quite literally killing themselves slowly in order to obtain a different body shape and size are then denied actually medically necessary treatment for not being that shape and size, and this often leaves them completely unable to receive care. The author criticizes these holes in the logic of insurance companies, but falls short on calling out why these holes exist for these diseases, but not others.
Edut, Ophira. (2010). Eating Disorders: A Sane Response to Systemic Oppression. Adios Barbie.
This is an interview with Becky Thompson, author of “A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women’s Eating Problems” (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Her participants are Latino, African American, Jewish, white, and bi/multiracial with a variety of intersectional identities outside of race. She uses “eating problems” instead of “eating disorders” because she sees disordered relationships with food and one’s body as a sane response to what she considers “disorders”: things like homophobia, stress of immigration acculturation, and more. She considers the ways that womens’ issues of embodiment are larger than the way they see their bodies, as many women with eating problems don’t feel or experience themselves in their bodies. She also talks about the levels of trauma in the lives of women of color dealing with eating problems, and examines the violence of marginalized women as an additional risk of or complicating factor of eating problems. The stigma is also often much greater for women of color. She uses body consciousness instead of body image, as “body image” is a concept that came out of the fashion industry and is too limited to weight. She sees a dissatisfaction with one’s body as a result of a simultaneity of oppressions-not just gender, and not ranked in levels of “importance”. She also addresses the ways sexuality, race, and class can make us feel like we don’t “fit the profile”, and before even ever being misdiagnosed or treated poorly in the medical world, we stop ourselves from seeing ourselves as someone going through something serious and deserving of specialized helping resources. The multiple levels at which women are halted from getting better is a huge part of what I want to address, as well as her statement that the nature of these disorders (or “problems”) makes it really hard to get reliable statistical analysis on who has these problems. I also am set on suing this wonderful quote: “The women in this book talk about healing as part of the body politic: If eating problems are a consequence of racism, sexism and homophobia, nothing less than revolution will do.” This essay and its author captures the tone and background for what I want to more broadly address, and I find this essay extremely effective, informational, and inspiring, the last adjective of which I think is often lacking and really important for this kind of writing and research.
Esquibel, C. R.; & Calvo, L. (2013). Decolonize Your Diet. nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal, 2(1).
This piece is a rich, information and artistic piece on reclaiming what food is and how it is eaten for especially indigenous people. “Starting with colonization and continuing through the capitalist expansion, our collective ability to sustain ourselves and live in harmony with the cycles of nature is being destroyed” Literal colonialism that destroys life-sustaining resources (or access to it) and the Western tradition of forcing others to adhere to an assigned role in modern capitalism has similar effects to mental and identificational colonization that robs the colonized Other from cultural values and beliefs that allow people of all genders to live in harmony with their bodies. Western food and body politics have affect us all in both the literal food we are allowed and consume, and the ideology behind the way we must see ourselves in relation to our consumption. As the authors see preparing food as an act of resistance, my argument embraces that especially women of color might see consuming food without oppressive Western, gendered and racialized ideals as an act of resistance as well. This article urges the rejection of the “Standard American Diet”, and I completely agree and wish to expand upon what is meant by the “Standard American Diet”, which for many is also filled with feelings and connotations of fear, restriction, competition, overindulgence, guilt, and shame. In a more general sense, I agree with and want to use this article’s stance on validating and promoting ideas and practices around food and consuming it that are connected to our identities and our values.
Gabriel, B. A. (1998, Dec 31). Shades of difference: A new look at women of color and eating disorders. Hues, 27.
Right from the beginning of this article, the author claims that these “Western, White, waif” beauty standards would harm women of color even more than they harm white women. I find this argument troubling, but it is based on the assumption that eating disorders are built solely on “standards of beauty”, and while I think this is a part of the etiology, I think it lets too many people and things and structures off the hook. I do think this piece raises a lot of great questions, for example: Does our Western society hold women of color to to the same unnatural standards were aware of for white women? Do women of color resist these ideals? How do, specifically gender and racialized stereotypes dictate what our bodies are supposed to look like and how we resist or become trapped by these standards and the gendered and racialized pressure around them? Unfortunately, this study solidifies my fears that most psychiatric and psychological studies are studied on nearly all white middle-class female samples, which is one of the research bias factors that actually creates false eating disorder narratives in the first place. This article does help us look at the body relationships with Black adolescent girls, of which we do have some research.
Gordan H. K., Brattole M. M., Wingate R. L., Joiner Jr. E. T. The Impact of Client Race on Clinician Detection of Eating Disorders. Behavior Therapy.Volume 37, Issue 4, December 2006, Pages 319–325.
While many studies on eating disorders plainly state that white women are statistically more likely to have eating disorders or eating disorder behaviors than women of other ethnic and racial groups, this study comes from the basis that some studies have found that symptoms are similar in white women and women of color, and that no study has found an absence of eating disorders in any ethnic group. The article works with the assumption that many clinicians will be less likely to identify and diagnose eating disorders in women of color, and prescribe appropriate treatment from there. I really like the aspect of the study that follows and notes the cognition of women of non-white ethnic or racial groups differentially due to and surrounding her assimilation to white cultural and internalized racial and gendered oppression. That is to say, the more that a Black girl internalizes mainstream American culture, the more susceptible she is to body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem, which are significantly linked to eating disorders. The researchers identify more key reasons why women of color have been missing from this analysis, such as: WOC are missing from clinical samples, there are significant differences between health seeking behaviors of white women and WOC, and physicians are severely less likely to ask clients of color about eating disorder symptoms and refer them out. This psychology paper runs an experiment to see if mental health practitioners identify and diagnose eating disorders in a fictitious woman with an eating disorder with different racial identities.
Harris, D. J., & Kuba, S. A. (1997). Ethnocultural identity and eating disorders in women of color. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice,28(4), 341-347.
This article has a great comprehensive breakdown on the incidence of eating disorders and what they look like. It does completely lack the description and analysis of EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified), which is the most frequently diagnosed kind of ED. The purpose of this article is to provide a cultural backbone of an understanding of eating disorders, one that clinicians often operate without. The authors propose that eating disorders may be a result of internalized oppression of many intersecting kinds. A literature review on ethnocultural identity and eating disorders show us that there is a relationship between conflicted identity and eating disturbances. It is then not surprising that eating disorders appear in people of layered oppressed identities. The article explains that, until recently, eating disorders were something that occur only in middle and upper class European and European American cultures, but international studies are not researching why we think that and the ways in which we are wrong. Symptomatology looks different in other ethnocultural groups, so in many ways, we need to decenter what we think eating disorders are. Authors in Britain noted Black women and Asian women who had many symptoms of anorexia nervosa, but did not have distorted body image. This article goes into detail about whether or not eating disorders present in non-Western and non-wealthy settings occur because of the identity clashing of one’s country of origin and host culture. Women acclimating to new cultures often exhibit symptoms or signs of eating disorders, such as immigrant Latina women newly arrived in Washington D.C. One study showed that exchange students from Japan in America may learn and form maladaptive eating behaviors and patterns during the period of exchange. Another study examined the incidence of Native American women inclined toward social conformity engaging in and developing eating disordered patterns. Middle class Afro-Caribbean women who adopted a Eurocentric view of beauty were found to be at greater risk of AN. This all shows that problems may rise and create significant risk for eating disorders in a clash of ethonocultural identity and strict definitions and standards of attractiveness put forth by another culture that a woman may experience in one way or another.
Malson, H. Clarke, S. Finn, M. (2008). ‘I Don’t Think That’s Normal’: A Reflection on Accounts of Experiences of Treatment for Eating Disorders. Feminism & Psychology. 18-3.
This paper talks about what is, was, constructed as in society, and treated in recovery as “normal” in current, changing Western society. The recently waged war against obesity, and the negative construction of fat bodies, and how recent public health priorities have shifted to reflect these changes. The authors argue that criterion for eating disorders have now also seem to describe health care priority and policy through these shifts (for example, the fear of fat gain and avoidance of fatty foods may be seen as both an eating disordered trait or a public health victory”. This explores the way these values remain “pathologized and feminized” but are re-articulated under neoliberalist health concerns for an ideal “individualistic responsibility for health”. Essentially, the paper argues that while eating disorders remain odd and anomalic in the public eye, the behaviors and cognitions paradoxically have become seemingly identical to the normative discussions and hegemonic values on weight and the body. This critique on the neoliberalistic idealization of the individual struggle for thinness in the fat, unhealthy world is one that has been missing from my understanding. This takes a critical feminist viewpoint.
Malson, H., Ryan, V. (2008). Tracing a Matrix of Gender: An Analysis of the Feminine in Hospital-Based Treatment for Eating Disorders. Feminism & Psychology. 18-1
This paper focuses in on the stereotypical “feminine” in and surrounding eating disorders, and the way that gender plays a part the discursive regulation and production of women’s and girls’ eating practices. This piece also focuses in on the multiplicity of often contradictory values, concerns, and practices of “body management” that comes with “being a woman” in Western society, and how these concepts and practices are often reinforced and applied in eating disorder treatment. The nurses who treat over-feminized patients are said to speak in a way that makes the Other out of patients because of their pathology, with her difference constructed as a lacking. This is an interesting point. I would like theoretically to delve into the relationships that patients and sufferers have with their treatment team or support people, and this frame makes sense to me. This paper does, however, use Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and brings in other theory from Cixous, Derrida, and so on, and I would have preferred to use this all as a cultural background, but not as lenses to see this experiment through.
