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.

The Fetishization of Anorexia

The vast majority of research and work dealing with eating disorders has focused primarily, if not exclusively, on anorexia nervosa. Most relevant to this thesis, there are no major anthropological texts that address bulimia in more than a cursory way. Although there are some ethnographies and articles that mention bulimia within a larger discussion of eating disorders more generally (Gremillion 2003; Lester 2007; Shohet 2007), I have found only one unpublished source that focuses specifically on bulimia nervosa.[1] A quick survey of some of the most notable anthropological research on eating disorders, such as Rebecca Lester’s “The (Dis)Embodied Self in Anorexia Nervosa,” Helen Gremillion’s Feeding Anorexia and Sigal Gooldin’s Being Anorexic, immediately reveals the specific focus on and interest in anorexia nervosa. A more generalized search for work on eating disorders further displays the dominance of research on anorexia over any other disorder. Consider some of the leading, best-known voices on eating disorders, like Steven Levenkron, Hilde Bruch and Kim Chernin. Examine next their most influential published works. For Steven Levenkron, there is The Best Little Girl in the World (1978), the fictionalized account of a young woman with anorexia nervosa based on Levenkron’s former patients; Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa (1982), whose title is self-explanatory; and The Anatomy of Anorexia (2000), a book which presents itself as a comprehensive primer on the disease, its causes and its treatments. The same trend continues in the work of the latter authors: Hilde Bruch is best known for the groundbreaking, though deeply problematic[2], The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (1978), Kim Chernin for The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981). As their titles suggest, these works also privilege anorexia and its accompanying images of emaciation. Moving into the realm of pop psychology and self-help, we are bombarded with titles such as Dying to be Thin (Grahame 2009), Next to Nothing (Arnold and Walsh 2007), and Stick Figure (Gottlieb 2001), memoirs whose titles are littered with allusions to bones, emptiness, frailty, disappearance and perfection. From the most academic work to the most personal, the trend is consistent: anorexia and its accordant images are prioritized in our studies. We are fascinated and captivated.

Although some of these authors do address bulimia, I wish to point out the prioritization of anorexia, and how it has become the main frame through which eating disorders are imagined in general. The prioritization of anorexia and emphasis on imagery associated with emaciation, which is primarily associated with anorexia, rather than bulimia, is significant. Why this fascination with anorexia? But more importantly, why do we not have the same fascination when it comes to bulimia? What motivates academics and sensational popular media alike to choose anorexia and ignore bulimia over and over again?

Susan Bordo’s essay, “Reading the Slender Body,” offers useful insight to the discussion of these questions. In her essay, Bordo connects food and diet practices to consumer capitalism.

In advanced consumer capitalism … an unstable, agonistic construction of personality is produced by the contradictory structure of economic life. On the one hand, as producers of goods and services we must sublimate, delay, repress desires for immediate gratification; we must cultivate the work ethic. On the other hand, as consumers we must display a boundless capacity to capitulate to desire and indulge in impulse; we must hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction. The regulation of desire thus becomes an ongoing problem, as we find ourselves continually besieged by temptation, while socially condemned for overindulgence.

Bordo goes on to argue that food and diet practices become a means through which to express, negotiate and attempt to resolve these contradictions. Presented with two irreconcilable imperatives, Bordo diagnoses America’s consumer culture as bulimic:

For bulimia, precisely and explicitly expresses the extreme development of hunger for unrestrained consumption (exhibited in the bulimic’s uncontrollable food binges) existing in unstable tension alongside the requirement that we sober up, “clean up our act,” get back in firm control … (the necessity for purge—exhibited in the bulimic’s vomiting, compulsive exercising and laxative purges). (Bordo 1993, 201)

Within this framework, the respective “epidemics” of anorexic and obese individuals are simply the tangible manifestation of the capitalist imperatives to produce and consume; anorexia as “an extreme development of the capacity for self-denial and repression of desire (the work ethic in absolute control)” and “obesity, as an extreme capacity to capitulate to desire (consumerism in control)” (Bordo 1993, 201). Neither can be acceptable within the culture, as the crux of the capitalist imperative is the requirement to enact both simultaneously. However, the social responses to each extreme—the anorexic and the obese individual—are markedly different. Where anorexics are met with a mixture of awe, admiration and horror, obese individuals are reviled and vilified.

Bordo characterizes the typical sociocultural response to anorexics as one of ambivalence; I would argue the response is far more positive than anyone cares to admit. As a public, we “Other” anorexics but even as we do so, our tone is mixed. Though clearly marked as deviant, they display culturally valued traits—willpower, discipline, self control—and because of this, our treatment of them most often contains admiration, awe, and even some degree of approval, amidst our shock and dismay. As such, they are also seen as deserving of our sympathy.

Much of this comes from the perception that anorexic behaviors—food restriction; the ability to lose and maintain abnormally low body weights; the capacity for rigidity and deprivation; the perceived dislike or lack of want for food, despite imposed self-starvation—are outside of a normal person’s capabilities. The idea of being able to not want food is culturally and socially presented as a super human power. And while we may criticize the extremes to which anorexics take their endeavors, in viewing them as super-human, we cannot help but admire them even as we condemn them.

Although it is uncomfortable to consider, I argue that bulimia feels too close to us. Its physicality is a vile one, at least in the dominant image of vomiting. The experience of binging and purging—in whatever form it takes—is a fundamentally tangible one; it involves interaction with physical substances outside of the self, the sensory and tactile experiences of tasting, smelling, chewing, swallowing, the beginnings of digestion. The process of purging is equally grounded in the body, whether it is enacted through vomiting, compulsive exercise or laxative abuse. Most obviously in the case of vomiting, the individual comes into contact again with the physical substance of the binge (the partially digested food and bile); the actions are felt in the muscles, the organs, on the skin. Where anorexics can be portrayed as almost ethereal, outside of our material, embodied world, bulimics are very much of and in this world.

Socially, the notion of being able to eat whatever you want without guilt or consequence is the dream and wish of every dieter. How different is severe yo-yo dieting in actuality from bulimia, especially in its nonpurging form? Bulimia simply crosses the line from absolutely normative behavior to pathology, but the line is a fine one and hard to demark clearly. Looking at bulimia means looking at how near our culture is, and by proximity, how close we are, to illness and self-destruction.

As mentioned above, the words that always come up when we talk about anorexia are discipline, willpower, self-control. It is our cultural reverence of these characteristics that allows us to engage in the cognitive dissonance necessary to admire self-starvation—it is not the starvation we admire but the “skill” required to achieve and endure it. However, within that framework, one could just as easily argue that bulimia requires a kind of discipline as well. After all, it takes a certain strength of will to continually and habitually force your body to undergo the strain of an “inappropriate compensatory measure” such as purging, diuretic abuse, compulsive exercise or fasting, every time you transgress “appropriate” or “normative” eating behaviors.[3] To be bulimic is to regularly endure painful, often violent, physical experiences in order to compensate and atone for our real or perceived excesses in consumption—and yet culturally and socially, we do not recognize this as discipline or willpower. What is our resistance to recognizing the discipline in bulimia, and what are the cultural stakes in not doing so?

The fundamental difference between our perceptions of anorexia and bulimia comes down to desire: we perceive anorexics as having conquered the desire for food, where bulimics have simply mitigated its consequences. Culturally, our relationship with desire is complicated, at best. Desire is constantly problematized just as it is simultaneously encouraged. The result is mass confusion: we are pretty sure wanting is not always bad, but when is it okay? In what ways, at which times, for what things, and how much? We are relentlessly bombarded with contradicting, irreconcilable messages. Thus, while desire is rarely wholly vilified, we must constantly negotiate which of our desires are acceptable and which are unacceptable. However, what is always valued is the ability to master desire, to transcend it. Even more elusive and coveted, the ability to stop wanting the things we ought not want, or cannot have.

To admire bulimia, as I have suggested anorexia is admired, would mean to embrace desire, to sanction the desire for sensual pleasure. This conception of bulimia is of course as much about desire as it is about guilt; obviously the bulimic has no more acceptance of her desire than the culture as a whole, or purging would be unnecessary. But the same way that one might imagine a kind of “almost anorexia” as desirable—a wistful, delusional version of the illness in which the dreamer is able to control their consumption and weight with ease, or at least success—it is not so hard to picture a similarly rosy distortion of bulimia, perhaps one in which the binge is not so large, and the “compensatory measure” more benign. The fact that we do not has everything to do with our culture’s contentious relationship with desire. Unable to make up our minds about when it is acceptable for us to want food at all—let alone which foods, in what quantities, at which times—the cognitive dissonance required to separate out the discipline and willpower in bulimia from the cultural ideologies imbued in its behaviors is too great. The mental gymnastics necessary to put our confusion around desire to rest is harder to achieve, and ultimately, not worth the effort.

It is much easier to idolize a (perceived) lack of desire, a version of the self that is no longer entangled in the messy business of evaluating and regulating wanting. And there is a cultural pay-off in our treatment of anorexics as well: for all that there may be an underlying admiration (and perhaps even jealousy) of the anorexic’s capacity of self-denial and self-control, anorexics remain unambiguously deviant. So while they may have seemingly super human powers that feel unattainable to the average person, in taking it “too far” and letting things get “so out of hand,” they give us the ammunition to put them back in their place. We don’t have to feel bad about our own failures of willpower because we’re not sick like those girls. We’re sensible, reasonable people, we don’t go to such extremes. In effect, by admiring but then tearing down the anorexic, we can almost resolve the conflict of desire without actually addressing the subject at all.

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[1] Cynthia Rudolph’s unpublished dissertation, “Searching for a ‘true, clear self:’ Culture and Subjectivity in Experiences of Bulimia” is the only anthropological study I have been able to find that takes bulimia specifically as its object of study. Her analysis and research have been incredibly valuable to my own work.

[2] Although Bruch’s work was essential to making anorexia a known and serious object of study and psychiatric treatment, her scholarship set a precedent of pathologizing eating disordered women, discounting their subjective experiences in favor of psychoanalytic theories and professional expertise. Thus while Bruch’s scholarship has been crucial to the formation of the bio-medical model conceptions of eating disorders and treatment protocols, it has also served as the foundation for some of its most problematic and harmful elements.

[3] My use of quotations around appropriate and normative here is not to suggest that the binge eating involved in bulimia is actually appropriate or normative, but to point out that we have a difficult time clearly defining what it appropriate, and that what we consider appropriate may or may not be what is actually normative.

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