So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (review)

Abstract

Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 208 pp. In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson turns performative lens on practitioners of self-starvation as they remake subjectivities using similar acts on different stages. From case studies of anorectics and starv ing girls of late 19th century, through artists of 1970s and 1980s, and contemporary hunger strikers in Turkish prisons and at Guantanamo Bay, Anderson demonstrates convincingly that refusal to eat is a productive act, one which he claims has potential to remake subjectivity of actor and circumscribe power of state. Part of what makes this book so compelling is that ability to choose not to eat is almost universally accessible (in afterword he addresses case of Terry Schiavo who was unable to choose whether to continue receiving sustenance or not). Choosing not to eat is potentially a radically subversive act that any of us could perform. Yet we do not usually choose everyday to eat or not-for most of us, we may choose what to eat but choice to eat is unmarked. This is not case for anorectics for whom choice is real and urgent. The first substantive chapter of Anderson's book deals with what he calls the archive of anorexia. He explores history of disease, feminist concerns, and more recent attention to in men and boys. Of his cases, is probably most familiar to a general audience-both because of its representation in popular culture and its prevalence. Anderson's reading of texts about is strongly influenced by Foucauldian notions of subject and he sees as emblematic of subjectivation (36), claiming that anorexia derives, concentrates, and facilitates its clinical and cultural power as a performance (38). He claims this is so because it is: a) durational-the refusal to eat must be continuously reproduced, b) it stages effects of ideological normativity on human body, c) it is mediated through representational forms-clinical and medical records, as well as journalistic accounts and pop cultural artifacts, d) it is defined by specularity-the body is subject to gaze of anorectic self and others. This disrupts commodity culture, both because of refusal to consume and because effects of make both men and women (men are important in Anderson's account) less capable of reproducing human subjects. Ultimately, anorexic bodies stop performing (51). Yet this does mean that is entirely destructive-it is also, in Anderson's account, a becoming. The second chapter of book Enduring Performance introduces Dr. Henry Tanner, who in 1880 staged a widely publicized 40 day fast in order to demonstrate restorative properties of abstaining from food. Anderson compares this with Chris Burden's endurance performances a century later. Both required active audience participants as witnesses to their emaciation. Tanner's fast was an empirical and experiential intervention in debates between practitioners of conventional and homeopathic medicine. Tanner's body, and witnessing of its emaciation, was a spectacle that in Anderson's words revealed these functions- seeing and being seen, consuming and being consumed-to be profoundly interwoven (73). Burden's first work involving fasting was staged while he was still a graduate student. Though he apparently expected Five Day Locker Piece to be an exercise in isolation (he lived in his campus locker for five days and nights), people were compelled to come and watch his performance, and his inputs and outtakes were measured, much as Tanner's had been. In this and in some of his later works, artist fasts, but audience is complicit in his starvation and ethical dilemmas-to intervene or to simply observe-trouble spectators and curators alike. …