the fetishization of anorexia

Yet another thing I’d posted, taken down and am now putting back up. For those of you who’ve been reading along, this re-posting is the final version of “The Fetishization of Anorexia” section of my thesis, although the changes from the late-draft I posted back in March are fairly minimal. For new folks, this is a short section from the first chapter of my thesis, also known as the “everything you need to know about eating disorders to understand the rest of my thesis” chapter. My thesis topic, loosely, looked at embodied practice and narrative construction as selving technologies, in the context of women in recovery from anorexia, bulimia, ed-nos, or similar eating problems, who also identify as working class, queer and/or of color.

omg y’all

I FINISHED MY THESIS.

emerging

So the few of you who read this may have noticed that I made all my old entries disappear a while back. I got self conscious. And started feeling unsure about what I wanted this blog to be, if I wanted it at all.

My jury is still out. I put back some of the more substantive posts. I’ll go back through the archive later, and may bring back a few more. I might start writing again. Knee deep in the academic side of things, I’m wanting a place to make more personal connections to the work, which I suppose are always there, but better veiled in the pages I turn in to my adviser. At the same time, I’ve been feeling lukewarm about blogging, acutely aware that privacy and anonymity are illusions when it comes to the internet.

Which is to say, we’ll see.

Protected: some thoughts on embodiment

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: the weight

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

tangible measures, revisited

The first woman I interviewed talked about touchstones. About the comfort of walls, the comfort of always knowing where you are, the parameters of the space, familiar and contained. Even if it’s not much space, even as it limits you, at least you know if you reach your arm out, there will be something solid you can touch and rely on. She imagined herself within a body of water, starting in a pond, then realizing she actually had a lake, then realizing she could have the ocean, and how terrifying that was, to be boundless, to have endless possibilities. Beautiful, but terrifying. How it was incredible, realizing how big her world could be, to realize her power, her talent, how much she had to give– but also how hard, how painful.

She talked about how she was not surprised that she relapsed just before the artistic breakthrough that turned her lake into the ocean; her eating disorder was a touchstone, a familiar wall, an out she could rely on. That it was almost as if she had to remind herself that the option was still there before she could accept moving into something greater.

Here we come back to eating disorders– old coping skills– as tangible measures, the inner and outer markings on the body, and I’ve been finding it useful lately to think of these markings, these measures as touchstones. Reassuring walls always within an arms reach when you need them.

braver than i’ve been

Sometimes all I want is a static moment, something I can put in my pocket and pull out as needed, to offer as evidence, explanation, truth–

here, see, this is what it is,
was,
it’s real,
you can see it right here.

Desperate sometimes for that static moment I can’t have, the next best thing is to be static myself, hold myself still through time, so I can still point and say, see, here, look at me, it’s real.

This is where the numbers come in. The counting, the rituals, this is why we are sometimes confused with ocd. We makes lists, patterns, pictures, we are precise, calculating, calculated. In some ways, I have always defied the stereotype–and I always mention this, it seemed important, how I didn’t do those things the other girls did–but in the end, I wasn’t that different. My rituals were limited, but I still counted. Added and subtracted and the outcome mattered.

And sometimes, it came out just right. And for a minute, everything was okay.

And sometimes, it comes out all wrong, and you cling to that too, as though it explains everything.

tangible measures

I have been thinking about eating disorders a lot lately. It’s been murkily academic and mostly personal, and I still have an uneasy, uncertain relationship about how personal I want to get on this thing. Anonymity is never a sure thing on the internet after all, and I go back and forth on how comfortable I am exposing myself, on how exposed I feel.

I have mostly shied away from the medical, numbered aspect of eating disorders for a number of years now. Calorie counts, lowest weights, the examples of body failings to prove just how bad it was. First it was a trigger thing, the risk of sounding competitive; later it’s come to feel… trite? politically incorrect? Like I’m focusing on the wrong thing. But it’s not quite that either– though I don’t think it should be at the forefront of the discussion, as it so often is, that the emphasis on numbers alienates and obscures way more than it helps– there is an embarrassment attached to it, too. I’m not supposed to care about these things anymore, there’s a taboo associated with knowing things like calorie counts. A kind of tackiness linked to both casual and confessional retellings of the physical deteriorations. There is a self-consciousness there even when there’s good reason to recall those details, even when the listener asked. And I think it’s dangerous to rely on these tangible markers as a legitimizing force. It makes it way too easy to say, my body is holding up just fine, on paper at least, my weight isn’t that low. So it can’t be that bad. Too easy to create a situation where the problem isn’t real enough–and thus isn’t serious enough to merit help–until you hit the danger point.

And yet. These physical deteriorations, the inner and outer markings on the body, they matter. I’m just not sure why. The Cartesian duality separating mind and body strikes me as increasingly inaccurate, but I am lacking the language to elucidate the point of connection. I keep grasping for words I’m still not sure how to define, phenomenology, embodiment.

Because no matter what’s going on up top, eating disorders are so firmly grounded in the body; the mess in your head and your experience in your body are inextricably intertwined. The choice of medium is significant. After all, there are an array of maladaptive coping skills at one’s disposal– self-harm and substances are the first to come to mind, but there are plenty of others. Whether the gravitation toward an eating disorder is conscious or not, there are so many possible routes; there are reasons we pick particular poisons.

what we’ve got

If you are diagnosed with an eating disorder and have access to the health care system, you will find yourself attending more medical appointments per month than most people have per year. If your insurance is really good and/or if you are very ill, you’ll find yourself with a treatment team: a doctor, a dietician, a therapist and probably a psychiatrist. You will see nearly all of them weekly for the first few months. If your health does not improve or worsens, you may find yourself in an intensive outpatient program, a residential treatment program or in a hospital of some kind, which will add a whole new series of medical and therapeutic personnel to your dance card, then back to the treatment team for maintenance when you’re discharged.

And every time you meet someone new, you’ll do an intake. If you’re in a more bureaucratic system, like a treatment center, you’ll do pre-intake intakes–  an intake with the intake coordinator for admission, followed by an intake with the person on-call when you arrive, until you are assigned a therapist, who will do yet another.

So you learn to condense your life into bullet points. It does not take long to figure out what information they’re looking for, what counts as “the important stuff” and your story turns out something like this: how and when your eating disorder started, major influences at the time– a cause, if at all possible– how the disorder progressed, lists of behaviors,  lowest weights, major health problems. Periods of recovery, if you have any, followed by causal factors surrounding relapses (because if you’re telling this story, you probably relapsed), any new developments in your disorder. Include a summary of any other self destructive habits you might have– self injury, substance abuse, promiscuity (I wish I was kidding about that one); any history of trauma or abuse, mental illness and previous diagnoses. Tell it in as chronological an order as possible. If you are being cooperative, you will also tell them things like the tricks you use, that you are good at talking circles around therapists because you are smart and sound more together than you are.

If you’re me, you will tell them that you promise to tell the truth and follow the rules (because it’s not like you can’t leave if you want to, and you are paying them), but that so long as you are doing those two things, they can’t say shit about your attitude, which will be crappy.

more on “that girl”

I’ve been thinking some more about that girl. And though that girl can encapsulate just about anything, lately that girl is white girl. And my eating disorder becomes one more layer of not okay, because isn’t this just proof of how you’re an assimilated might-as-well-be-white girl?

This is hard for me to write about, because my identity as a woman of color is so important to me, and I spent a long time half waiting for “real” women of color to revoke my membership. I’m a mixed kid– my dad is white, my mother is first-generation Iranian-American– and generally perceived as white. My mother’s parents were determined to assimilate, and did. The combination of family attitudes and privilege– class, education, light skin– worked together so that I never really had to examine my ethnicity or how I identified; it wasn’t until I started getting involved in anti-oppression activism and really educating myself about racism that the questions came up. And then, it seemed almost like appropriation to suddenly claim myself as a woman of color, especially because I do get white privilege.

Talking about this process– about how I grew up disconnected from Iranian culture & community, about how I by default identified as white for a long time because I was generally treated as white and my family told me that I was, about the privileges I have– there’s a part of me that is always afraid it’s going to invalidate me as a WOC, that I’ll get kicked out of these communities that mean so much to me. (Ironically enough, the only people who’ve ever invalidated my identity as a woman of color–besides my family, anyway–have been white folks, but that’s another story.) Talking about anorexia, there’s the same fear. I mean, there’s a white girl disease if there ever was one, right?

Add in the ways my disorder was kind of textbook, at least in aspects, at least early on.

Add in the icon of the strong, tough woman of color. Strong enough to deal with all the bullshit, strong enough not to succumb to self-destruction.

An image that is also fucked up and damaging, but at least she’s not that girl.

I did an interview yesterday, with a woman who is mixed, part Chicana, part white, and light skinned. She talked about how strongly she had identified with her Mexican heritage and how it felt like that had been taken away from her, as she was told that she wasn’t really Chicana. So she figured out how to be the white girl who was down, how to be a homegirl, how to not be the white girl, that girl. How to negotiate her place.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, only that it’s important. Only that I want to be able to claim these pieces of myself as real, that I want to complicate the story we know so that eventually it won’t seem so damn complicated.

I want this to be a story we tell.