Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (46 page)

1. Bram Dijkstra,
   Idols of Perversity
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3031.
   

2. Malleus Malificarum
   quoted in Brian Easlea,
   WitchHunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy
   (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 8; Hall and Oates, "ManEater."
   

3. Women were thus warned that "gluttonous habits of life" would degrade their physical appearance and ruin their marriageability. "Gross eaters" could develop thick skin, broken blood vessels on the nose, cracked lips, and an unattractively "superanimal" facial expression (Brumberg,
   Fasting Girls,
   p. 179). Of course, the degree to which actual women were able to enact any part of these idealized and idolized constructions was highly variable (as it always is); but
   all
   women, of all classes and races, felt their effects as the normalizing measuring rods against which their own adequacy was judged (and, usually, found wanting).
   

4. Caroline Walker Bynum,
   Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 191.
   

5. Syracuse HeraldAmerican,
   May 8, 1988, p. D1.
   

6. Charles Butler, The American Lady, quoted in Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 18. Margery Spring Rice noted this same pattern of selfsacrifice among British workingclass housewives in the 1930s. Faced with the task of feeding a family on an inadequate budget and cooking in cramped conditions, the housewife, according to Rice, often "takes one comparatively easy way out by eating much less than any other member of her family." She gives a multitude of examples from social
   

   workers' records, including "'Her food is quite insufficient owing to the claims of the family"'; "'She is a good mother spending most of the housekeeping money on suitable food for the children and often goes without proper food for herself' "; "'Mrs. A . . . gives her family of eight children an excellent diet . . . but cannot eat herself as she is so exhausted by the time she has prepared the family meals'"; and, interestingly, '''the children look well fed and one cannot help believing that Mrs. F. is starving herself unnecessarily"' (WorkingClass Wives: Their Health and Conditions [London: Virago, 1989; orig. pub. 1939], pp. 157, 160, 162, 167).
   

7. Elias Canetti,
   Crowds and Power
   (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 221.
   

8. John Berger,
   Ways of Seeing
   (London: Penguin, 1977).
   

9. bell hooks,
   Yearning
   (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 42.
   

10. Marcia Millman,
    Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America
    (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 106.
    

11. John Schneider and W. Stewart Agras, "Bulimia in Males: A Matched Comparison with Females,"
    International Journal of Eating Disorders
    6, no. 2 (March 1987): 23542.
    

This essay was presented as a public lecture at Le Moyne College, was subsequently presented at D'Youville College and Bennington College, and

was originally published in the
Philosophical Forum
17, no. 2 (Winter 1985). I wish to thank all those in the audiences at Le Moyne, D'Youville, and Bennington who commented on my presentations, and Lynne Arnault, Nancy Fraser, and Mario Moussa for their systematic and penetrating criticisms and suggestions for the
Forum
version. In addition, I owe a large initial debt to my students, particularly Christy Ferguson, Vivian Conger, and Nancy Monaghan, for their observations and insights.

1. Jules Henry,
   Culture Against Man
   (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963).
   

2. When I wrote this piece in 1983, the term
   anorexia
   was commonly used by clinicians to designate a general class of eating disorders within which intake restricting.(or abstinent) anorexia and bulimiaanorexia (characterized by alternating bouts of gorging and starving and/or gorging and vomiting) are distinct subtypes (see Hilde Bruch,
   The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa
   [New York: Vintage, 1979], p. 10; Steven Levenkron,
   Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa
   [New York: Warner Books, 1982], p. 6; R. L. Palmer,
   Anorexia Nervosa
   [Middlesex: Penguin, 1980], pp. 14, 2324; Paul Garfinkel and David Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa: A Multidimensional Perspective
   [New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1982], p. 4). Since then, as the clinical tendency has been increasingly to emphasize the differences rather than the commonalities between the eating disorders, bulimia has come to occupy its own separate classificatory niche. In the present piece I concentrate largely on those images, concerns, and attitudes shared by anorexia and bulimia. Where a difference seems significant for the themes of this essay, I will indicate the relevant difference in a footnote rather than overcomplicate the main argument of the text. This procedure is not to be taken as belittling the importance of such differences, some of which I discuss in "Reading the Slender Body."
   

3. Although throughout history scattered references can be found to patients who sound as though they may have been suffering from self starvation, the first medical description of anorexia as a discrete syndrome was made by W. W. Gull in an 1868 address at Oxford (at the time he called the syndrome, in keeping with the medical taxonomy of the time,
   hysteric apepsia).
   Six years later, Gull began to use the term
   anorexia nervosa;
   at the same time, E. D. Lesegue independently described the disorder (Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   pp. 5859). Evidence points to a minor "outbreak" of anorexia nervosa around this time (see Joan Jacobs Brumberg,
   Fasting Girls
   [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988]), a historical occurrence that went unnoticed by twentiethcentury clinicians until renewed interest in the disorder was prompted by its reemergence and striking increase over the past twenty years (see note 11 of "Whose Body Is This?" for sources that document this increase). At the time I wrote the present piece, I was not aware of the extent of anorexia nervosa in the second half of the nineteenth century.
   

4. Ludwig Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," in Rollo May, ed.,
   Existence
   (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 288. He was wrong, of course. The symptom was not new, and we now know that Ellen West was
   

not the only young woman of her era to suffer from anorexia. But the fact that Binswanger was unaware of other cases is certainly suggestive of its infrequency, especially relative to our own time.

1. Hilde Bruch,
   Eating Disorders
   (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 4.
   

2. Levenkron,
   Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa,
   p. 1; Susan Squire, "Is the BingePurge Cycle Catching?"
   Ms.
   (Oct. 1983).
   

3. Dinitia Smith, "The New Puritans,"
   New York Magazine
   (June 11, 1984): 28.
   

4. Kim Chernin,
   The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 63, 62.
   

5. Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   p. xi. Anorectics characteristically suffer from a number of physiological disturbances, including amenorrhea (cessation of menstruation) and abnormal hypothalamic function (see Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   pp. 5889, for an extensive discussion of these and other physiological disorders associated with anorexia; also Eugene Garfield, "Anorexia Nervosa: The Enigma of Self Starvation,"
   Current Contents
   [Aug. 6, 1984]: 89). Researchers are divided, with arguments on both sides, as to whether hypothalamic dysfunction may be a primary cause of the disease or whether these characteristic neuroendocrine disorders are the result of weight loss, caloric deprivation, and emotional stress. The same debate rages over abnormal vasopressin levels discovered in anorectics, touted in tabloids all over the United States as the "explanation" for anorexia and key to its cure. Apart from such debates over a biochemical predisposition to anorexia, research continues to explore the possible role of biochemistry in the selfperpetuating nature of the disease, and the relation of the physiological effects of starvation to particular experiential symptoms such as the anorectic's preoccupation with food (see Bruch,
   The Golden Cage,
   pp. 712; Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   pp. 1014).
   

6. Initially, anorexia was found to predominate among upperclass white families. There is, however, widespread evidence that this is now rapidly changing (as we might expect; no one in America is immune from the power of popular imagery). The disorder, it has been found, is becoming more equally distributed, touching populations (e.g., blacks and East Indians) previously unaffected, and all socioeconomic levels (Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   pp. 1023). There remains, however, an overwhelming disproportion of women to men (Garfinkel and Garner,
   Anorexia Nervosa,
   pp. 11213).
   

7. Chernin's
   The Obsession,
   whose remarkable insights inspired my interest in anorexia, remains
   the
   outstanding exception to the lack of cultural understanding of eating disorders.
   

8. Chernin,
   The Obsession,
   pp. 3637. My use of the expression "our culture" may seem overly homogenizing here, disrespectful of differences among ethnic groups, socioeconomic groups, subcultures within American society, and so forth. It must be stressed here that I am discussing ideology and images whose power is
   precisely
   the power to homogenize culture. Even
   

in premassmedia cultures we see this phenomenon: the nineteenthcentury ideal of the "perfect lady" tyrannized even those classes who could not afford to realize it. With television, of course, a massive deployment of images becomes possible, and there is no escape from the mass shaping of our fantasy lives. Although they may start among the wealthy elite ("A woman can never be too rich or too thin"), mediapromoted ideas of femininity and masculinity quickly and perniciously spread their influence over everyone who owns a TV or can afford a junk magazine or is aware of billboards. Changes in the incidence of anorexia among lower income groups (see note 10, above) bear out this point.

1. Christopher Lasch,
   The Culture of Narcissism
   (New York: Warner Books, 1979), p. 88.
   

2. I choose these three primarily because they are where my exploration of the imagery, language, and metaphor produced by anorexic women led me. Delivering earlier versions of this essay at colleges and conferences, I discovered that one of the commonest responses of members of the audiences was the proffering of further axes; the paper presented itself less as a statement about the ultimate meaning or causes of a phenomenon than as an invitation to continue my "unpacking" of anorexia as a crystallizing formation. Yet the particular axes chosen have more than a purely autobiographical rationale. The dualist axes serve to identify and articulate the basic body imagery of anorexia. The control axis is an exploration of the question "Why now?" The gender/power axis continues this exploration but focuses on the question "Why women?" The sequence of axes takes us from the most general, most historically diffuse structure of continuity—the dualist experience of self—to ever
   

   narrower, more specified arenas of comparison and connection. At first the connections are made without regard to historical context, drawing on diverse historical sources to exploit their familiar coherence in an effort to sculpt the shape of the anorexic experience. In this section, too, I want to suggest that the GrecoChristian tradition provides a particularly fertile soil for the development of anorexia. Then I turn to the much more specific context of American fads and fantasies in the 1980s, considering the contemporary scene largely in terms of popular culture (and therefore through the "fiction" of homogeneity), without regard for gender difference. In this section the connections drawn point to a historical experience of self common to both men and women. Finally, my focus shifts to consider, not what connects anorexia to other general cultural phenomena, but what presents itself as a rupture from them, and what forces us to confront how ultimately opaque the current epidemic of eating disorders remains unless it is linked to the particular situation of women. The reader will notice that the axes are linked thematically as well as through their convergence in anorexia: the obsession with control is linked with dualism, and the gender/power dynamics discussed implicitly deal with the issue of control (of the feminine) as well.
   

3. Michel Foucault,
   The History of Sexuality.
   Vol. 1:
   An Introduction
   (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 155.
   

1. Foucault,
   History of Sexuality,
   pp. 4748.
   

2. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
   Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 112
   .
   

3. Foucault,
   History of Sexuality, p.
   95.
   

4. Michel Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish
   (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 26.
   

5. Plato,
   Phaedo,
   in
   The Dialogues of Plato,
   ed. and trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4th ed., rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 83d.
   

6. St. Augustine,
   The Confessions,
   trans. R. S. PineCoffin (Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), p. 164.
   

7. Phaedo
   81d.
   

8. Phaedo
   66c. For Descartes on the body as a hindrance to knowledge, see
   Conversations with Burman
   (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 8, and
   Passions of the Soul
   in
   Philosophical Works of Descartes,
   2 vols., trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 353.
   

9. Phaedo
   80a.
   

10. Indeed, the Cartesian "Rules for the Direction of the Mind," as carried out in the
    Meditations
    especially, are actually rules for the transcendence of the bodyits passions, its senses, the residue of "infantile prejudices" of judgment lingering from that earlier time when we were "immersed" in body and bodily sensations.
    

11. Alan Watts,
    Nature, Man, and Woman
    (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 145.
    

12. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 84.
    

13. Chernin,
    The Obsession, p.
    8.
    

14. Entry in student journal, 1984.
    

15. Bruch,
    The Golden Cage, p. 4.
    

16. Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 253.
    

17. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 253.
    

18. Levenkron,
    Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa,
    p. 6.
    

19. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 270; Augustine,
    Confessions,
    p. 164.
    

20. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 50.
    

21. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 254.
    

22. Entry in student journal, 1984.
    

23. Bruch,
    Eating Disorders,
    p. 279.
    

24. Aimee Liu,
    Solitaire
    (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 141.
    

25. Jennifer Woods, "I Was Starving Myself to Death,"
    Mademoiselle
    (May 1981): 200.
    

26. Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 251 (emphasis added).
    

27. Why they should emerge with such clarity in the twentieth century and through the voice of the anorectic is a question answered, in part, by the following two axes.
    

28. Augustine,
    Confessions,
    p. 165; Liu,
    Solitaire,
    p. 109.
    

29. Binswanger, "The Case of Ellen West," p. 343.