This study provides insight into factors that determine whether women in the college population who exhibit eating-disordered behavior during their college years recover during their postcollege years. The study assessed changes in the eating patterns of 21 women across a six-year time period, from sophomore year in college to two years postcollege. Eleven of the women get better during their postcollege year, whereas 10 of the women continue to struggle with disordered eating. The major differences between the two groups revolve (...) around the relationship between autonomy and relation. Women who get better negotiate the tension between autonomy and relatedness and are more likely to have higher selfesteem based on a more positive self-concept; this, in turn, leads to healthier relationships with food and body image. Two factors that appear to influence this negotiation include one's history of chronic physical or sexual abuse and the quality of familial messages about food, body image, relationship, and autonomy. (shrink)

Anorexia can be characterized as a profound transformation in social relations. These transformations occur across a number of overlapping fields, and include a range of institutional and domestic spaces and myriad mundane bodily practices in each. Through an examination of household space and a conventional treatment programme this article demonstrates the ways in which people with anorexia use and transform space. While there are many treatment programmes available for those with a diagnosis of anorexia, the ethnographic focus here is on (...) those who have undergone bed programmes in public hospitals. As a result of the particularities of time and space, these rooms are transformed into intimate spaces that represent domestic bedrooms, thus fundamentally changing the nature of shared space in institutionalized settings. These transformations, however, are not straightforward, for these bedrooms fuse a number of bodily practices (such as eating, sleeping and abluting) that are sharply demarcated in domestic architecture. In these hospital bedrooms, private and public space is conflated, reversed and made ambiguous. Moreover, this article argues that this institutional transformation of space reproduces many of the private practices associated with anorexia, a factor which has been overlooked in the recorded failure of these types of programmes. (shrink)

Mother-blame, the propensity to explain negative outcomes for children by focusing on the failures of mothers, has a long history in the social-scientific study of adolescent deviance. We examine trends in mother-blaming over time by performing a textual analysis of scholarly accounts of the etiology of anorexia nervosa. Our reading of these expert accounts suggests that mother-blaming for child pathology is interconnected with changing ideas about proper social roles for women. Deficient mothering, that is, was often linked to a woman's (...) ambitiousness, willingness to abandon familial duties in favor of careers, or, conversely, her embracement of patriarchal proscriptions for what a woman should be. Poor maternal parenting was a consistent and dominant theme through much of the period we analyzed, however, the structural and cultural explanations appeared to change substance and form in synchrony with prevailing ideas about a woman's rightful relationship to the paid labor market. Other social explanations for changing rhetoric, including the gender composition of published accounts, are also explored. (shrink)

: In this paper, I argue that one of the most intense ways women are encouraged to enjoy sublime experiences is via attempts to control their bodies through excessive dieting. If this is so, then the societal-cultural contributions to the problem of eating disorders exceed the perpetuation of a certain beauty ideal to include the almost universal encouragement women receive to diet, coupled with the relative shortage of opportunities women are afforded to experience the sublime.

This article details the making of community and bodies in online environments, specifically the online pro-anorexia community. Building community among members of these groups is particularly fraught because tensions over claims to authenticity permeate these groups. Because these are embodied practices and online spaces are presumably disembodied, participants constantly grapple with authenticity, largely through the threat of the ‘wannarexic’. Participants manage these tensions through engaging in group rituals and deploying individual tools that attempt to make the body evident online. This (...) article documents the way in which tensions around authenticity and embodied practices are managed through treatment of the wannarexic. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that one of the most intense ways women are encouraged to enjoy sublime experiences is via attempts to control their bodies through excessive dieting. If this is so, then the societal-cultural contributions to the problem of eating disorders exceed the perpetuation of a certain beauty ideal to include the almost universal encouragement women receive to diet, coupled with the relative shortage of opportunities women are afforded to experience the sublime.

Menarche—or a woman's first menstrual period—is a central aspect of body politics. Through explorations of oral and written narratives, I suggest that girls' subjective sense of themselves as maturing women at menarche develops simultaneously with a process of sexualization whereby young women experience themselves as sexualized, and their bodies are produced as sexual objects. While women internalize negative scripts associated with the bleeding female body, they also respond with consciousness and resistance.

This article examines the historically embedded relations of three 19th-century phenomena in which the non-consuming body is constituted as a spectacle of admiration. These three phenomena, known as Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists, all emerged and disappeared in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the emergence and disappearance of the three phenomena as embedded in the historical crossroads of pre-modern and modern ethics, the article argues that each of these phenomena corresponds differently to the clash between (...) modern `rationality' and the pre-modern celebration of `miracles'. The article maintains that while Fasting Women epitomized that clash by becoming (a highly contested) spectacle of `the miraculous', the Living Skeletons transcended the clash by portraying a spectacle of liminal corporeality (the `living dead') and the Hunger Artists announced the dissolution of that very clash by performing a spectacle of `the controlled self'. Through a focus on the spectacle of fasting (i.e. the appeared, performed, `gazed at' act of fasting), a phenomenological typology of the three phenomena is outlined. I suggest that while Fasting Women and Living Skeletons embodied a spectacle of a lean body, which does not require suffering, the Hunger Artists embodied a spectacle of hunger centred on suffering and pain. The phenomenological `mapping' of these phenomena is then considered in the context of `performativity theory' and proposed as a frame of reference for a sociological study of anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

The last in a series of examinations, this paper articulates Husserl's mature position on the nature of a phenomenologically informed human science. Falling between the naïve positivity of a naturalistic approach to psychology and the transcendental view of consciousness at the base of phenomenological philosophy, we argue that a human scientific psychology—while not itself transcendental in nature needs to re-arise upon the transcendental ground as an empirical—but no longer transcendentally naïve—discipline through Husserl's notion of the "return to positivity." This notion (...) of the return allows us to avoid "transcendental psychologism," differentiating psychological from transcendental subjectivity but from a transcendental, rather than naïve perspective. In this way, the return to positivity reclaims psychology as a worldly, but no longer naïve, discipline. To facilitate an understanding of the different perspectives in question, and the process of leaving the naturalistic perspective in order to return to it once armed with a transcendental understanding and its associated tools, we continue to develop the illustrative example of anorexia provided in the first part of this series. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this framework for transcendental reforms both of clinical practice and of psychological research. (shrink)

Bodily display and self-awareness are generally mediated by restrictive ideologies of youthful beauty. ‘How do I look?’ is therefore a salient question in terms of personal ageing. Dance makes bodies watchable, while ageing has been claimed to make bodies ‘unwatchable’. Ethnographic research conducted amongst a group of older dancers provides an opportunity to study these ideological tensions empirically, by analysing the discursive representations of older dancers and their teacher. ‘The mirror’ is a productive theme in the data, giving access to (...) understandings of watchability of more and less literal sorts. It proves to be the case that, while dance as a practice for older women remains fitfully tainted by culturally dominant ageist assumptions about the body and ageing, it also opens up far more emancipating ideologies. Older dancers’ articulation of these ideologies are suggestive of how embodied ageing can be reconstrued, well beyond dance contexts. (shrink)

This article engages critically with issues surrounding the theorization of the self and body relation, where the body is interpreted as material increasingly open to human intervention and choice. It is argued that this theorization rests upon a mind/body split that limits an understanding of embodied identity. The significance for feminism of undermining representational practices that rely upon this dualism are outlined and criticized for reproducing the logic of representation they set out to destabilize. An alternative strategy is examined and (...) the argument is made that to understand embodied identity the question must not be what do bodies mean but what can they do. Here feminist approaches that rely upon a radically different ontological position in order to move beyond the mind/body split are utilized. These theoretical debates are made meaningful through the lens of self narratives produced by young women–a context which demands the development of strategies for theorizing lived bodies. (shrink)

In 1960, a relatively new ‘syndrome’ began appearing with growing frequency in psychiatric hospitals and in doctors’ offices. Eventually termed ‘delicate self-cutting’, this new model for typical self-mutilative behavior was developed in conjunction with a description of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator: young (adolescent to just post-adolescent), female, and almost always attractive. This article contends that, despite recent efforts to change the nature of research on self-mutilation, the myth of a typical mutilator, developed from a particular historical bias, continues to work in (...) popular and medical discourses on the subject. I will begin with a detailed discussion of the medical discourse in an effort to ask how the myth was made. Noting that the female body, here, is singled out as pathological at a time when, specifically in the USA, the emergent Women’s Movement was beginning to contest certain gender lines, I would like to examine how the medical discourse and material bodies interrelate and interact with each other and with the cultural narratives around them. Finally, I end with examples from the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, as well as other recent popular and medical accounts, to illustrate not only the perpetuation of the myth of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator but also the inability or refusal to recognize the biased nature of the medical discourse in the instance on self-mutilation. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the complex connections between gender and fatness have not been fully examined, particularly in so far as they relate to men. We consider the role of early feminist literature in establishing the idea that the fear of fatness is fundamentally tied up with patriarchy and the ways this also underwrites more recent examinations of fatness and gender. Moreover, we assert that popular feminist scholarship has actively produced the assumption that weight is not only a (...) women's issue, but that it is tied up with the very construction of femininity. Through an examination of the cultural history of fatness we show that men have also been caught up in the drive to reshape the body over the last century. However, their concerns have remained largely hidden, framed as they often are in the lexicon of ‘fitness’ and ‘muscularity’. An examination of the limited published material on male concerns with fat reveals that for many men fatness is feminizing – and undermines normative forms of masculinity in threatening ways. We call for further research that considers both female and male experiences of fatness, given the limitations of approaches that focus merely on one or the other. (shrink)