Womæn under erasure

Anorexic Bodies in Postmodern Context

Bibliographic Data

ID8067944
AuthorsHelen Malson (0000-0001-5176-9387, University of East London, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume9
Issue2
Pages137-153
Publication date1999-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Community & Applied Social Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1052-9284 • E-ISSN: 1099-1298
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/(sici)1099-1298(199903/04)9:2<137::aid-casp506>3.0.co;2-i
OpenAlexW1998098201
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited30

This paper explores how ‘anorexia nervosa’ can be understood not so much as individual psychopathology than as a plural collectivity of embodied subjectivities, experiences and body-management practices, embedded in and constituted by the contemporary discourses and discursive practices of late twentieth-century ‘postmodern’ culture and in the gender power-relations that cut across this socio-historically specific discursive context. Specifically, the paper uses extracts from a series of interviews conducted with 23 women diagnosed and self-diagnosed as ‘anorexic’. It deploys a feminist post-structuralist form of discourse analysis to analyse the interview transcripts so as to elucidate a recurrent discursive construction of women's ‘anorexic’ bodies as disappearing bodies that signify a (feminine) ‘anorexic’ identity constructed as an identity-put-under-erasure. This construction of ‘anorexic’ embodied subjectivity is located within a gendered ‘postmodern’ cultural context in which, it has been argued, the body qua body has been displaced by the body-as-image and in which identity has been deconstructed. The paper thus seeks to move beyond a concept of ‘anorexia nervosa’ as individual pathology, towards a re-conceptualization of ‘anorexia’ as discursively constituted within the complex contexts of late capitalist ‘postmodern’ culture. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Aesthetics · Anorexia nervosa · Conceptualization · Context (archaeology · Eating disorders · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Identity (music · Late capitalism · Linguistics · Politics · Postmodernism · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subjectivity · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Eating Disorders and Behaviors · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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