Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (11 page)

disorders have for some time been on the rise among
all
socioeconomic groups;
36
within a culture which is continually drawing us into an invented world of attainable

power, actual material restrictions on our lives may not limit the imagination as decisively as they once did.

To give another example of the tension between "difference" and homogenizing culture: it has been argued that certain ethnic and racial conceptions of female beauty, often associated with different cultural attitudes toward female power and sexuality, may provide resistance to normalizing images and ideologies. This has been offered as an explanation, for example, as to why eating disorders have been less common among blacks than whites.
37
Without disputing the significance of such arguments, we should be cautious about assuming too
much
"difference" here. The equation of slenderness and success in this culture continually undermines the preservation of alternative ideals of beauty. A legacy of reverence for the zaftig body has not protected Jewish women from eating disorders; the possibility of greater upward mobility is now having a similar effect on young African American women, as the numerous diet and exercise features appearing in
Essence
magazine make clear. To imagine that African American women are immune to the standards of slenderness that reign today is, moreover, to come very close to the racist notion that the art and glamour—the culture—of femininity belong to the white woman alone. The black woman, by contrast, is woman in her earthy, "natural," state, uncorseted by civilization. "Fat is a black woman's issue, too,'' insisted the author of a 1990
Essence
article, bitterly criticizing the highschool guidance counselor who had told her she did not have to worry about managing her weight because "black women aren't seen as sex objects but as women. So really, you're lucky because you can go beyond the stereotypes of woman as sex object. . . . Also, fat [women] are more acceptable in the black community." Apparently, as the author notes, the guidance counselor had herself not "gone beyond" stereotypes of the maternal, desexualized Mammy as the prototype of black womanhood. Saddled with these projected racial notions, the young woman, who had struggled with compulsive eating and yoyo dieting for years, was left alone to deal with an eating disorder that she wasn't "supposed" to have.
38

The feminist/cultural contribution to the study of eating disorders has, as was said earlier, altered the clinical terrain. Clinicians have

become much more aware of how widespread are women's problems with food, eating, and body image and of how stressful and fragmenting are the contradictory roledemands placed on contemporary women. Family interactions are no longer imagined, as they once were, as consisting solely of relations between the patient and an overcontrolling, overly dependent mother. Studies are beginning to explore the role played by the teasing and criticism of fathers and boyfriends,
39
as well as the disturbing incidence of sexual abuse in the backgrounds of eatingdisordered women.
40
Some clinicians previously hostile to feminism are even beginning to talk about the hypervaluation of masculinist values in our culture.
41

But the deepest implications of the feminist challenge to the concept of pathology are continually resisted. For example, rather than acknowledge how normative the obsession with body weight is in our culture, Michael Strober, editor of the
Journal of Eating Disorders,
suggests that "the intensifying preoccupation with body shape and dieting so common in nonclinical adolescent populations" may be "indicative of a symptomatically milder or partial expression of the illness."
42
The difference, I would suggest, is not merely semantic. Rather, Strober is so intent on retaining the notions of "illness" and "disease" that he is willing to ''medicalize" the majority of adolescent women into the bargain.

Or consider the work of Joan Brumberg. Unlike dominant clinical models, Brumberg's work offers itself as a cultural analysis and is especially notable for its fine, historical account of the medicalization of anorexia nervosa in the nineteenth century, which reconstructed the bizarre behavior of "fasting girls" from miraculous occurrence to pathological condition. "Disease," Brumberg concludes, "is a cultural artifact, defined and redefined over time."
43
But despite the historical detachment Brumberg brings to her discussion of the transformation of the anorectic from sainthood to patienthood, she is full of sanctimonious outrage at what she sees as the attempts of contemporary feminists to "demedicalize" anorexia. Constructing a strawwoman distortion of feminist arguments that anorexia is a voiceless, unconscious, selfdestructive scream of protest, Brumberg charges feminists with "venerating" and "romanticizing" anorectics as "heroic freedom fighters" who "freely choose" a hunger strike as a form of intentional political action.
44
Feminists, she goes on, argue that "merely by speaking up

about sexism and subordination, women with eating disorders can cure themselves and society." Against these fabricated and inaccurate claims Brumberg positions herself, much as the panel of commentators positioned themselves at the 1983 conference on anorexia and bulimia. The anorectic, she insists, is a "helpless and desperate" individual whose voice is not that of "social protest" but expresses only "frustration and fear." Instead of "dignifying'' her disorder, we should acknowledge the "infantile," selfpreoccupied, deluded nature of anorectic behavior (at one point Brumberg compares the pursuit of thinness to "a paranoid schizophrenic's attempts to elude imagined enemies") and recognize that eating disorders will only be "cured" through treatment of the "biomedical component of this destructive illness."
45

All of Brumberg's criticisms might be summed up by the headline of a letter that was published several years ago in
Newsday,
in angry response to a column by Karen DeCrow and Robert Seidenberg (who had articulated a version of the "social protest" thesis). The headline read: "Anorexia Nervosa Is a Disease, Not a Protest."
46
The opposition
(either
"disease"
or
"protest") presupposes a model within which to recognize the debilitating, selfconsuming nature of a disorder is therefore to situate it outside the realm of the political. Within this model, helplessness and desperation, frustration and fear define and exhaust the reality of the disordered body; it is deemed incompatible that the subject be both "helpless and desperate"
and
locked in a struggle that has some meaning, trying to find honor on the ruinous terms of her culture and therefore communicating an excruciating message about the gender politics that regulate our lives. Of course, to acknowledge that a deep and embodied
understanding
of what culture demands might be the
source
of the anorectic's (or hysteric's) suffering is to suppose that the patient might have as much to teach the "experts" as the other way around.

Instead of this recognition, we find medical reassertions of expertise. New demarcations of "true" illness and disease are staked out, and as each anomaly has emerged to challenge the dominant paradigms, more rigorous criteria and stiffer definitions are demanded to distinguish between anorexia and "anorexiclike behaviors," "true anorectics" and "me, too, anorectics," "bulimic thinking" and normal female "weightpreoccupation," "true bulimics"

and those women who do not binge and purge frequently enough to threaten their lives, or "vocational bulimics" (for example, ballet dancers) who exhibit the same behaviors but lack the accompanying "pathology."
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It is not that some of these distinctions cannot be made. Distinctions can
always
be made. And because distinctions can always be made, it is crucial that we always ask not merely whether a distinction holds at some level of analysis or description but what purposes it serves and what elements it obscures. What is obscured by the medicalization of eating disorders, whether "fullblown" anorexia and bulimia or "ordinary" weightpreoccupation, is an adequate understanding of the ubiquitous and thoroughly
routine
grip that culture has had and continues to have on the female body, how
commonplace
experiences of depreciation, shame, and selfhatred are, and why this situation has gotten worse, not better, in the culture of the eighties.
48
In this historical era, when the parameters defining women's "place" have indeed been challenged, it is disturbing that we are spending so much of our time and energy obsessed, depressed, and engaging in attempts at anxious transformation (most frequently, reduction) of our bodies. It is hard to escape the recognition, as is suggested throughout the essays in this volume, that a political battle is being waged over the energies and resources of the female body, a battle in which at least some feminist agendas for women's empowerment are being defeated (or, at a minimum, assaulted by backlash).

Since the seventeenth century, science has "owned" the study of the body and its disorders. This proprietorship has required that the body's meanings be utterly transparent and accessible to the qualified specialist (aided by the appropriate methodology and technology) and utterly opaque to the patient herself. It has required, too, the exorcising of all premodern notions that the body might obey a spiritual, emotional, or associational rather than a purely mechanical logic. In the context of such requirements, hysteria and anorexia have challenged modern science, not only with their seeming insistence on the power of the body to behave irrationally and inexplicably (Weir Mitchell once called hysteria "Mysteria"; anorexia

was an "enigma" to Hilde Bruch),
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but also because of the spectacle each presents of the
patient
(however unconsciously or selfdestructively) creating and bestowing meaning on her own body, in a form that is opaque and baffling to the Cartesian mind of the scientist. Ultimately, Freud enabled psychoanalysis to rationalize and make clear the meanings of hysteria and to bring the hysterical body under the proprietorship of the scientist/analyst. Today the same sort of struggle is being waged over the body of the eatingdisordered woman.

In the medical model, the body of the subject is the passive tablet on which disorder is inscribed. Deciphering that inscription is usually seen as a matter of determining the "cause" of the disorder; sometimes (as with psychoanalysis)
interpretation
of symptoms will be involved. But always the process requires a trained—that is to say, highly specialized—professional whose expertise alone can unlock the secrets of the disordered body. For the feminist analyst, by contrast, the disordered body, like all bodies, is engaged in a process of making meaning, of "labor on the body." From this perspective, anorexia (for example) is never
merely
regressive, never
merely
a fall into illness and chaos. Nor is it facilitated simply by bedazzlement by cultural images, "indoctrination" by what happens, arbitrarily, to be in fashion at this time. Rather, the "relentless pursuit of excessive thinness''
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is an attempt to embody certain values, to create a body that will speak for the self in a meaningful and powerful way.

The tools of this labor are supplied: the vocabulary and the syntax of the body, like those of all languages, are culturally given. The anorectic cannot simply decide to make slenderness mean whatever she wishes it to. This is not to say, however, that the meaning of slenderness is univocal or fixed or clear. On the contrary, the fact that slenderness is so compelling in the contemporary context (and not only to anorectics, of course) suggests that in our culture slenderness is, rather,
overdetermined,
freighted with multiple significances. As such, it is capable of being used as a vehicle for the expression of a range of (sometimes contradictory) anxieties, aspirations, dilemmas. Within such a framework, interpreting anorexia requires, not technical or professional expertise, but awareness of the many layers of cultural signification that are crystallized in the disorder.

Among such significations, which I explore in detail in other essays in this volume, are: (1) the promise of transcendence of domestic femininity and admission to the privileged public world, a world in which admiration is granted not to softness but to will, autonomy, and rigor; (2) the symbolic and practical control of female hunger (read: desire), continually constructed as a problem in patriarchal cultures (particularly in times when gender relations have become unsettled) and internalized in women's shame over their own needs and appetites; (3) the symbolic recircumscription of woman's limited "place" in the world; and (4) the tantalizing (and mystifying) ideal of a perfectly managed and regulated self, within a consumer culture which has made the actual management of hunger and desire intensely problematic. In this last context, food refusal, weight loss, commitment to exercise, and ability to tolerate bodily pain and exhaustion have become cultural metaphors for self determination, will, and moral fortitude.

The decoding of slenderness to reveal deep associations with autonomy, will, discipline, conquest of desire, enhanced spirituality, purity, and transcendence of the female body suggests that the continuities proposed by Rudolph Bell between contemporary anorexia and the selfstarvation of medieval saints are not so farfetched as such critics as Brumberg have claimed.
51
Brumberg argues that attempts to find common psychological or political features in the anorexia of medieval saints and that of contemporary women founder on the fact that anorexia mirabilia was centered on a quest for spiritual perfection, "while the modern anorectic strives for perfection in terms of society's ideal of physical rather than spiritual beauty."
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But Brumberg here operates on the assumption—an assumption challenged by the essays in this volume—that there
is
such a thing as purely "physical" beauty.