Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders

by Helen Malson (Editor), Maree Burns (Editor)

Over the past decade there have been significant shifts both in feminist approaches to the field of eating disorders and in the ways in which gender, bodies, body weight, body management and food are understood, represented and regulated within the dominant cultural milieus of the early twenty-first century. Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders addresses these developments, exploring how eating disordered subjectivities, experiences and body management practices are theorised and researched within postmodern and post-structuralist feminist frameworks. Bringing together an international range of cutting-edge, contemporary feminist research and theory on eating disorders, this book explores how anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and obesity cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual mental illness and deviation from the norm but are instead continuous with the dominant cultural ideas and values of contemporary cultures. This book will be essential reading for academic, graduate and post-graduate researchers with an interest in eating disorders and critical feminist scholarship, across a range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies as well as clinicians interested in exploring innovative theory and practice in this field.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Psychology

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders edited by Helen Malson and Maree Burns is a must read for anyone wishing to conceptualise and understand the experience and meaning of disordered eating.

The editors bring together a range of innovative feminist theoretical and research perspectives to explore the relationship/connections between what is usually considered an ‘individual’ experience of ‘suffering,’ a diagnosable DSM psychiatric illness and the dominant cultural paradigms within which this ‘psychiatric’ illness occurs.

The book is invaluable because it seeks to question the simplistic notion that it is the media and the promotion of thinness that inform/drives an individual’s experience of illness. The contributors including Liz Eckerman, Susan Bordo and Paula Saukko question the notion the condition is just ‘a white girl’s thing.’ And in doing so highlight the importance of understanding how it is context, how it is only by analyzing the interplay between an individual’s experience of an eating disorder and the dominant (and not so dominant) cultural paradigms that surround/suffocate them that you can begin to understand what drives that particular individual to starve, binge or purge. Understand the context of the disordered eating and what is causing their inner sense of chaos. Conflict.

Each of the contributors argue eating disorders are not static or fixed conditions – but rather their presentation and form constantly change in response to the wider range of cultural changes. What does remain the same is the significant distress and disruption they cause to the lives of individual’s who experience them.

This book will be of interest to anyone wanting to refine and rethink how to create effective and useful ‘on-going’ treatment and preventation programs by equipping them to see the illness in its wider cultural context.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great (CANADIAN) reference. There are some really great essays in this book that relate to all sorts of different treatment environments and methods. This book is one of the few I've read that had more than a few paragraphs addressing ethnicity and how this effects eating disorders (as well as their treatment).

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful.