“Why Hadn't I Come Across This Sooner?”: Exploring the Relationships between “Feminism(s)” and “Eating Disorders”

Abstract

Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 371 Su Holmes “Why Hadn’t I Come Across This Sooner?”: Exploring the Relationships between “Feminism(s)” and “Eating Disorders” It appears that feminism is currently enjoying a “new luminosity,” but this visibility is both complex and uneven.1 Feminism’s relationship to domains of institutional expertise is a fraught one. Medicine, for example, has historically been understood in feminist circles as a lynchpin of patriarchal culture that has regulated women’s minds and bodies in oppressive ways—especially through “disorders” that it has associated with women.2 In this regard, it is difficult to reconcile feminist ideas with contemporary medical treatments in the UK for what are known as “eating disorders” (EDs). While there is a rich history of feminist writing that gives “voice” to the gendered experiences and politics of eating/body distress, there have been few attempts to offer those living with EDs an opportunity to respond to feminist discourses.3 But such 1. Rosalind Gill, “Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–30. 2. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). 3. Desiree Boughtwood and Christine Halse, “Other than Obedient: Girls’ Constructions of Doctors and Treatment Regimes for Anorexia Nervosa,” Journal of Community and Applied Psychology 20, no. 2 (2010): 83–94; Maree Burns, “Eating Like an Ox: Femininity and Dualistic Constructions of Bulimia and Anorexia,” Feminism and Psychology 14, no. 2 (2004): 269–95; Helen Malson, The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (London: Routledge, 1998); Paula Saukko, The 372 Su Holmes dialogue is crucial if we are to understand the power and uses of feminist paradigms in practice and thus bridge existing gaps between academic and “popular” feminism. My research on those living with EDs revealed to me the urgent need for such dialogue. One of my research participants put it this way when she came across feminist work on eating problems as a student at university: I felt frustrated because I was like, “Why hadn’t I come across this sooner? . . . I felt like it had been deliberately withheld from me. . . . I think [feminist perspectives are] . . . such a threat to the medical establishment. . . . It threatens their power over you. . . . If they were to willingly acknowledge that perhaps treatment centers recreate some of the very kinds of structures that anorexia fights against, they would suddenly realize that they are part of the problem rather than . . . the solution (P1, 1).4 This impassioned comment confirms Susan Bordo’s suggestion that the biomedical model of EDs has “a deep professional, economic, and philosophical stake in preserving the integrity of what it has demarcated as its domain, and the result has been a frequent blindness to the obvious .”5 The “obvious” refers to the fact that cisgender females make up the overwhelming majority of ED “patients,” although there is also a rise in EDs among male and transgender individuals.6 I will explain ahead Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Holmes, “Blindness to the Obvious ?”: 464–84. 4. Each informant is referred to by the participant number they were assigned in my initial studies, followed by a (1) or a (2) to indicate which study the data is from. Study 1 refers to Su Holmes, “Blindness to the Obvious? Treatment Experiences and Feminist Approaches to Eating Disorders,” Feminism and Psychology 26, no. 4 (2016): 464–84; study 2 refers to Su Holmes, Sarah Drake, Kelsey Odgers, and Jon Wilson, “Feminist Approaches to Anorexia: A Qualitative Study of a Treatment Group,” Journal of Eating Disorders 5, no. 36 (2017), https://jeatdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186 /s40337-017-0166-y. 5. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 53. 6. “Statistics for Journalists,” Beat, https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk /media-centre/eating-disorder-statistics (accessed October 30, 2018). For example, see Becky W. Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Su Holmes 373 that the stereotype of EDs being the sole province...