Eating Like an Ox: Femininity and Dualistic Constructions of Bulimia and Anorexia

Abstract

Using a feminist discursive analytic approach this article investigates descriptions of anorexia and bulimia for the purposes of deconstructing some of the hierarchies implicit in them. Data includes interview accounts of women who practise bulimia and of health professionals, and items from popular culture and psychological literature. Analysis demonstrates how a binary logic and discourses of femininity are involved in the inscription of value to the category of, and practices associated with, anorexia. The practices and category of bulimia are therefore often constituted as the eating disordered ‘other’ to anorexia. Potential implications for women who practise bulimia are examined, as is the destabilizing potential of other ways of describing eating disorders.

‘Blindness to the obvious’? Treatment experiences and feminist approaches to eating disorders

“…My decision to use this sheet was explicitly shaped by a frustration with existing feminist qualitative work on EDs. Such research has often listened carefully, sensitively and reflexively to the voices of those diagnosed with anorexia (McSween, 1995;Malson, 1998;Saukko, 2008), and to a lesser extent bulimia (Burns, 2004). But it has not offered participants a space from which respond to the feminist conceptions of their problem.…”

“…For example, a good deal of feminist work on EDs has explored the cultural conflation between eating and sexual desire, situating eating/body distress in relation to historical discourses on 'appropriate' expressions of female sexuality (Lawrence, 1984, Orbach, 1986, Bordo, 1993, Malson, 1998, Burns 2004. That is not to suggest, however, that critical feminist perspectives have theorised anorexia in particular as simply a repressive form of body discipline.…”

“…Whilst there has been little systemic analysis of the impact of feminist approaches in treatment, qualitative feminist research has demonstrated the centrality of gender to how girls and women talk about the aetiology and experience of an ED (MacSween, 1995;Malson, 1998Malson, , 2009Burns, 2004;Saukko, 2008). In responding to the apparent disconnect between 'patient' and treatment here, this article thus seeks to explore three key questions.…”

“…As the bulimic body may be at a normal weight, it appears to be more 'inscrutable' as a visual text, lending itself less readily to critical approaches that position the body as visualising the symbolic struggles of femininity (Squire, 2003;Burns, 2009). The relative invisibility of bulimia within the feminist literature then contributes to a cultural and medical hierarchy in which anorexia is (further) 'sanctioned as the morally… and socially superior illness' (Squire, 2003: p. 20;Burns, 2004;Walsh and Malson, 2010). Although there have been attempts to think about anorexia and bulimia together as complex embodied, affective and ideological expressions of femininity (Malson and Burns, 2009), such a hierarchy remains worthy of note, and it has shaped the recruitment of my sample (below).…”

Beyond psychopathology: Interrogating (dis)orders of body weight and body management

“…Orbach, 1979;Chernin, 1983;Lawrence, 1984) have illustrated, the cultural prescription of thinness as a key requisite of feminine beauty has been hegemonic in Western cultures since the 1960s. More recently, critical feminists (Bordo, 1993;Eckermann, 1997;Probyn, 1987;Malson, 1998;Burns, 2004) and others (Maisel et al, 2004) have elucidated a host of other ways in which thinness, particularly for women, is positively construed as, for example, signifying self-control, contained identity and individualistic competitiveness as well as 'idealised' femininity. Such work has similarly illustrated how fatness is conversely associated with gluttony, lack of self-control, laziness and unattractiveness.…”