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This book explores the ways in which anorexic women use their eating to control their bodies. It argues that the female body in modern Western culture is understood as open and accessible and female appetite as dangerous and voracious. Anorexia attempts to resist both these constructions in the creation of a closed, desireless body. Since anorexic women resist the power of collective ideologies their resistance cannot work - the closed body becomes its own prison.
This book explores the ways in which anorexic women use their eating to control their bodies. It argues that the female body in modern Western culture is understood as open and accessible and female appetite as dangerous and voracious. Anorexia attempts to resist both these constructions in the creation of a closed, desireless body. Since anorexic women resist the power of collective ideologies their resistance cannot work - the closed body becomes its own prison.
Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic—the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine—is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood po...
Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.
Feminist Perspectives on the Body provides an accessible introduction to this extremely popular new area and is aimed at students from a variety of disciplines who are interested in gaining an understanding of the key issues involved. The author explores many important topics including: the Western world's construction of the body as a theoretical, philosophical and political concept; the body and reproduction; medicalisation; cosmetic surgery and eating disorders; the body in performance; the private and the public body; working bodies and new ways of thinking about the body.
Starting with an analysis of these conditions and an exploration of their complex causes, Giordano then proceeds to address legal and ethical dilemmas such as a patient's refusal of life-saving treatment. The book is illustrated with many case-studies.
This book addresses the limits of medicine by examining two mirror-image debates in tandem.
Like hysteria, anorexia is a fin de siècle pathology which fascinates and has reached epidemic proportions at the turn of the millennium. Parallel to the development of the phenomenon, an important body of experiential texts has revealed its presence in various parts of the world. While the medical discourse is still struggling with this conundrum, literature gives way to different interpretations by revealing the interconnectedness between writing and starving. Both signifying practices are experiences of the limit where fluxes of particles - food, words - are in constant interaction. Unlike most contemporary readings of anorexia, this book offers an original insight into the creative proc...
Anorexia tends to be studied within health disciplines, such as medicine, psychoanalysis or psychology. When the condition is discussed in relation to society more broadly, focus is commonly restricted to considerations about the demise of the traditional family meal or the all-pervading obsession with thinness and media representations of ‘size zero’ models. But what can sociology tell us about anorexia and how a person becomes anorexic? This book draws on empirical research – both interviews and observation – conducted in and outside medical settings with anorexic girls, medical staff, teachers and other teenagers of the same age. As such, it offers the first fully sociological tre...
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Ideas of beauty permeate our lives in ways of which we are often unaware, yet they are indicators of identity, transgression, sartorial codes and otherness. While contemporary society sees the dominance of Western hegemonic ideals of beauty, when comparing these to ideals in different cultures at different historical periods, attention is drawn to the instability of ‘beauty’. The work in this volume considers the ways individuals question, respond to, articulate reflect, challenge, modify or accept beauty within their lives, to show it can be powerful, destructive and transformative. They show that beauty is not always what it appears and can challenge common-sense preconceptions as to what is beautiful. The range of topics provide an important contribution to ongoing discussions and are testament to both the diversity and complexity of debate the concept engenders across different disciplines.