Description
Book SynopsisChallenges prevailing assumptions regarding the notorious difficulty of curing anorexia nervosa. This title reveals how the therapies participate unwittingly in culturally dominant ideals of gender, individualism, physical fitness, and family life that have contributed to the dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia since the 1970s.
Trade Review“Helen Gremillion has presented an intellectual tour de force in this book. She has taken one of the most contentious and resistant expressions of women's and girls' subjectivity, anorexia, and provided us with a dynamic social and political framework by which to understand its perplexing operations.”—Elizabeth Grosz, author of
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism“Many have sensed that anorexia makes visible in some way pathologies that are particular to liberal consumer society, but few have grasped its nature and significance as acutely as Helen Gremillion. Her account is as compelling as it is compassionate.”—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago
“This is a wonderful, beautifully written, intelligent account of anorexia nervosa—and I say that as someone in feminist theory, women’s studies, and medical discourse analysis who had hoped she would go to her grave without ever having to read another word about anorexia nervosa. This really
is a fresh interpretation, and the ethnographic material is stunning, dramatic, and described with precision, sophistication, and telling novelistic detail.”—Paula A. Treichler, author of
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS"Time after time in my conversations with hospital patients I was bewildered when they informed me 'I became more anorexic for the doctors!' and when their mothers told me 'They said I shouldn't love my daughter so much!'
Feeding Anorexia helps us all to comprehend such unintended consequences of mainstream treatments. It should lead to the reconsideration of anorexia itself and its treatment by professionals such as myself."—David Epston, coauthor of
Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia and
Narrative Means to Therapeutic EndsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Prologue xv
Introduction: In Fitness and in Health 1
1. Crafting Resourceful Bodies and Achieving Identities 43
2. Minimal Mothers and Psychiatric Discourse about the Family 73
3. Hierarchy, Power, and Gender in the "Therapeutic Family" 119
4. "Typical Parents Are Not 'Borderline'": Embedded Constructs of Race, Ethnicity, and Class 157
Epilogue: A Narrative Approach to Anorexia 193
Notes 211
Bibliography 247
Index 271
