Karma Eaters: The Politics of Food and Fat in Women's Land Communities in the United States

Abstract

Why is thinness so important among women who have largely rejected mainstream definitions of femininity? The idea of health has great cultural power and has come to symbolize not simply bodily but also spiritual, social, and moral well-being. These ideas permeate U.S. culture, and in women's land communities, the virtue of hunger and the morality of health take on differently inflected but no less potent meanings. Ironically, in a context where women reject many gender restrictions—restrictions increasingly, as Sandra Bartky notes, focused on the female body—the importance of the thin (and thus properly feminine) body persists through the symbolism of health and virtue.