Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders

Helen Malson, Maree Burns, Helen Malson, Maree Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134113781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the past decade there have been significant shifts both in feminist approaches to the field of eating disorders and in the ways in which gender, bodies, body weight, body management and food are understood, represented and regulated within the dominant cultural milieus of the early twenty-first century.

Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders addresses these developments, exploring how eating disordered subjectivities, experiences and body management practices are theorised and researched within postmodern and post-structuralist feminist frameworks.

Bringing together an international range of cutting-edge, contemporary feminist research and theory on eating disorders, this book explores how anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and obesity cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual mental illness and deviation from the norm but are instead continuous with the dominant cultural ideas and values of contemporary cultures.

This book will be essential reading for academic, graduate and post-graduate researchers with an interest in eating disorders and critical feminist scholarship, across a range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies as well as clinicians interested in exploring innovative theory and practice in this field.

1
Re-theorising the slash of dis/order

An introduction to critical feminist approaches to eating dis/orders

Helen Malson and Maree Burns

The trajectory from our initial thoughts to bring together a collection of critical feminist work on ‘eating disorders’ to the completion of this edited volume has been an exciting, though also challenging and sometimes bumpy, journey. Navigating our way through our combined surfeit of frequently major life events whilst bringing the book together was, at times, somewhat daunting but stands, we think, as testimony to our enthusiasm—and the enthusiasm of the contributors—for the project that this book represents and to the value of feminist collaboration. Working together as editors and working with all of the contributors to this volume has been such a personally pleasurable as well as intellectually stimulating experience.

Our commitment to producing this book was inspired by several things. Not least among these is the necessity of adding to the already mobilised challenges to the continued dominance across academic, clinical and popular contexts of objectivist, medical and quasi-medical perspectives whereby ‘eating disorders’—primarily anorexia and bulimia but also more recently binge eating disorder, EDNOS (eating disorders not otherwise specified) and obesity—are viewed as individual (psycho)pathologies originating in the interior, psychologised ‘peculiarities’ of the individual women diagnosed, viewed as categorically separate and deviant from ‘the norm’. And this dominance persists in many quarters—perhaps unsurprisingly and yet at the same time almost incomprehensibly—despite feminist perspectives that have circulated since the 1970s. Susie Orbach’s (1979) Fat Is a Feminist Issue represented a seminal publication in this development, but many other authors, for example Kim Chernin (1983) and Marilyn Lawrence (1984), also elaborated this development in feminist thinking about ‘eating disorders’, arguing in various ways that these distressed experiences and damaging body management practices of girls and women (and much less often boys and men) can only be adequately understood within the context of the oppressive gender ideologies and inequalities in gender power-relations operating in (western/ised) patriarchal cultures.

Within this body of feminist literature, Patricia Fallon, Melanie Katzman and Susan Wooley’s (1994) edited collection Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders marked not only significant developments in thinking about ‘eating disorders’ but was also clearly groundbreaking in bringing together and establishing feminist perspectives in this field. And, as Fallon et al. (1994) forecast, feminist theorising and research into ‘eating disorders’ has burgeoned and developed in significant ways since the publication of Feminist Perspectives over a decade ago. In particular, postmodern and post-structuralist theory and critical qualitative methodologies have become established across the social sciences and feminist scholars have drawn on and elaborated these in developing new critical feminist approaches to understanding ‘eating disorders’. From these more recent perspectives, ‘eating disorders’ are now theorised and researched as discursively constituted and regulated categories of subjectivity, experience and body management practices: they are fictioned into being within and by a plethora of culturally constituted discourses, values, ‘ideals’ and concerns (see e.g. Bordo, 1993; Eckermann, 1997; Hepworth, 1999; Malson, 1998; Probyn, 1987; Riley et al., 2008). The seemingly categorical divide between the normal and the pathological is disrupted and shown to be illusory, such that within critical feminist perspectives ‘eating disorders’ are not so much viewed as individual pathological responses to patriarchal cultures. Rather, eating dis/orders are theorised here as (multiply) constituted within and by the always-gendered discursive contexts in which we live: (individual) ‘disorder’ is re-theorised as part and parcel of the (culturally normative) order of things.

Critical Feminist Approaches To Eating Dis/Orders was inspired in no small part by the enduring seminal value of Fallon et al.’s (1994) edited volume and by the equally impressive extent to which feminist work in this field has grown and evolved since then across a range of academic disciplines and fields of intervention. Since the publication in the late 1980s of Susan Bordo’s (1988) Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture, Elspeth Probyn’s (1987) The Anorexic Body and Joan Brumberg’s (1988) Fasting Girls, critical feminist literature on eating dis/ orders has become a vibrant and well-established body of work, which is at once clearly cohesive and also all the stronger for its transdisciplinarity and diversity. Critical Feminist Approaches brings an international collection of this work together, illustrating the strengths and scope of current work that theorises ‘eating disorders’ as constituted and regulated within the normative orders of contemporary cultures and which thereby problematises and disrupts the commonplace objectivist dichotomisation of (cultural) order and (individualised) disorder (see especially Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of this). Critical Feminist Approaches thus comprises chapters which interrogate the ways in which culture is constitutive, in numerous ways, of girls’ and women’s pathologised bodies, subjectivities, experiences and practices; which analyse these as discursively constituted within normative ‘regimes of truth’ (see especially Chapters 2–13); and which deploy these critical feminist perspectives both in critiquing existing therapeutic interventions (see especially Chapters 14–17 and 21) and in developing and engaging in different, critically informed modes of analytical, political and therapeutic intervention in this field (see especially Chapters 18–21).

Whilst all working within and amply illustrating the academic, socio-cultural and political significances of this broadly defined critical feminist framework for understanding eating dis/ordered bodies, subjectivities, experiences and practices, the chapters in Critical Feminist Approaches also illustrate much of the diversity within this body of critical feminist work. Perhaps, most obviously, this diversity is apparent in the chapters’ different objects of analysis, focusing variously on ‘eating disorders’ as a combined general category; taking ‘anorexia’ and/or ‘bulimia’ as their primary focus and/or concentrating on pathologised fatness. The inclusion of ‘obesity’ in a book on dis/ordered eating no longer appears unusual given that mainstream psychology and medicine now stake this territory as a medical condition indicative of a form of disordered eating alongside the individual(ised) pathologies of ‘anorexia’ and ‘bulimia’. However, our inclusion of chapters on ‘obesity’ and fatness in this volume (see Chapters 4, 9, 10, 13 and 16) is informed by a radically different conceptualisation of the issues entailed. Commensurate with critical feminist commitments to theorising the ways in which dis/ordered bodies and pathologised embodiment are constituted within and by socio-cultural discourses, and given the ubiquity of healthism and moral panics about large bodies, we considered it imperative to include chapters examining the discourses, practices and subjectivities of fat embodiment. Indeed, as this newly prominent category of ‘disorder’ becomes further sedimented within academic, clinical and popular contexts, critical feminist analyses will have a valuable role to play in deconstructing those medicalised and pathologised constructions of fatness as much as thinness.

Whilst the coverage in this volume is broad, there are inevitably some lacunae in the collection that require acknowledgement and which await, perhaps, a further volume! These important areas for critical feminist research include—but are not limited to—the ways in which sexual orientation, masculinities, heteronormativity, different abilities (although see Chapter 9), and socio-economic status (although see Chapter 3) are imbricated in the experiences, practices and constructions of pathologised embodiment and dis/ordered eating. Finally, with regard to coverage, it is interesting to note that this volume was more readily populated with chapters on ‘anorexia’ or ‘eating disorders’ than with those dealing specifically with ‘bulimia’. This is despite the probability that the latter is, statistically, the more common category of pathologised eating.

In addition to the diverse topics of analysis outlined above, the chapters here also differ from each other in their foci variously on theoretical discussion, on analysing data and/or on mobilising critical feminist approaches in critiquing and/or developing interventions. Rather than taking the broader remit of eating and body weight issues, our intention in Critical Feminist Approaches is to take a more sharply defined focus, staking the book’s parameters as being those delineated by the violences of pathologisation—a delineation which each chapter then tears down—and to illustrate the sheer range of critical feminist work in this field of pathologised bodies, subjectivities and practices. Alongside deconstructing the binarised assembly of order and disorder this volume also troubles conceptualisations of women’s pathologised eating/embodiment as either resistance or conformity to ‘cultural norms’, imagining instead that these distressed experiences and practices simultaneously express a multiplicity of potentially contradictory positions and effects. Rather than utilising pathologised eating/embodiment as a synecdoche of women’s struggles in oppressive cultures (as either protest or capitulation), many of the chapters in this volume (e.g. Chapters 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 and 14) undermine this distinction and offer analyses that deal with the complex, shifting and varied meanings embedded in these experiences, bodies and practices.

Equally importantly, in terms of diversity, the chapters of Critical Feminist Approaches span various disciplines including Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry, Sports and Education, Social Work and Social Policy, Communication, and Critical Anthropology, as well as including contributions from nurses, counsellors, narrative therapists, community agency workers, parents and a sufferer/ survivor. Indeed, one of the ways in which the process of bringing this book together has been so exciting has been in the re-realisation of the political/ theoretical congruencies and resonances—as well as the divergences between work of scholars, activists and practitioners from such a range of otherwise dispersed backgrounds. And inevitably, then, but no doubt only in part because of disciplinary diversity, whilst all taking up a critical feminist perspective in one way or another, these chapters also differ from each other in some important respects: in terms of their engagements with different critical theories, for example, with Foucauldian theory, social constructionism or, less often, psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology and dialogics. They differ in the terminologies (such as ‘scare quotes’ and slashes) used to denote the problematics of the pathologised categories with which we are concerned. And they differ in the ways in wh...