Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (8 page)

Dualism thus cannot be deconstructed in culture the way it can be on paper. To be concretely—that is, culturally—accomplished requires that we bring the "margins" to the "center," that we legitimate and nurture, in those institutions from which they have been excluded, marginalized ways of knowing, speaking, being. Because relocations of this sort are always concrete, historical events, enacted by real, historical people, they
cannot
challenge every insidious duality in one fell swoop, but neither can they reproduce

exactly the same conditions as before, "in reverse." Rather, when we bring marginalized aspects of our identities (racial, gendered, ethnic, sexual) into the central arenas of culture they are themselves transformed, and
transforming.
Bell hooks (see "Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance" in this volume) provides the example of the African American philosopher Cornel West, who—by presenting a theoretical, academic talk in a passionate, dramatic sermon mode popular in black communities—concretely deconstructed, on that occasion and for that audience, the oppositions between intellect and passion, substance and style. Did he also deconstruct the gendered duality which has dominantly reserved the sermon mode for men? No.
That
challenge requires other occasions, other players.

If we do not struggle to force our work and workplaces to be informed by our histories of embodied experience, we participate in the cultural reproduction of dualism, both practically and representationally. The continuing masculinism of our public institutions (manifest not only in the styles of professionalism that they require but in their continued failure to accommodate and integrate the private—for instance, parenting—into the public sphere) has been exploited, clearly, in what Susan Faludi describes as the media concocted fiction of a massive "flight" of unhappy women
from
those institutions and back to the home—the only place we can truly realize our feminine nature and completely fulfill our maternal responsibilities.
43
Most women, of course, could not afford to leave their job even if they wanted to. And whatever actual flight there has been, Faludi argues, is largely the result of panic caused by the media campaign rather than the other way around. But whatever the causality, the old dualities are clearly being culturally reinscribed. Glossy magazines and commercials are currently filled with images of domestic, reproductive bliss, of home as a cozy, plant filled haven of babies, warmth, and light, skillfully managed and lovingly tended by women. The realm of the material, the care and reproduction of the

body, we are reminded, is appropriately woman's. Only men, as Hegel said, are designed for the "stress" and ''technical exertions" of the public domain.

By the 1983 meetings of the New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, palpable dissatisfaction was evident—largely among female clinicians—over the absence of any theoretical focus on gender issues. In 1973, when Hilde Bruch published her landmark work
Eating Disorders,
she made little use of the concept of gender in her interpretation of anorexia. Kim Chernin, in
The Obsession,
was the first to note that the vivid descriptions Bruch provides of the anorectic's "battle" against the adult development of her body consistently lack one crucial element: recognition of the significance of the fact that this is a
female
body whose development is being resisted
1
Following Bruch, the etiological models that dominated over the next decade emphasized developmental issues, family problems, and

perceptual and/or cognitive "dysfunction." In each, the understanding of the role played by the construction of gender and other social factors was, at best, shallow and unsystematic.

Developmental and family approaches conceptualized interactions between mother and child as occurring outside cultural time and space; the father's role was simply ignored. Perceptual/cognitive models theorized the role of "sociocultural factors" solely in terms of "the pressure toward thinness," "indoctrination by the thin ethic''; what passed for cultural analysis were statistical studies demonstrating the dwindling proportions of
Playboy
centerfolds and Miss America winners throughout the 1980s. And, in all of this, transactions were imagined as occurring only between media images and females, or females and other females (peer pressure to

conform; criticisms from the mother); the vulnerability of men and boys to popular imagery, the contribution of their desires and anxieties, the pressures thus brought to bear on girls and women, remained—as father/daughter incest was for Freud—a hidden and somehow unspeakable secret in the prevailing narratives.

In no place was the
meaning
of the ideal of slenderness explored, either in the context of the anorectic's experience or as a cultural formation that expresses ideals, anxieties, and social changes (some related to gender, some not) much deeper than the merely aesthetic. Rather, "the media," "Madison Avenue," and "the fashion industry'' typically were collectively constructed as the sole enemy—a whimsical and capricious enemy, capable of indoctrinating and tyrannizing passive and impressionable young girls by means of whatever imagery it arbitrarily decided to promote that season.
Why
thinness should have become such a dominant cultural ideal in the twentieth century remained unaddressed; the interpretation of representations was viewed as outside the domain of clinical investigation.

The one clinical model for which gender
was
a key analytical category, the psychoanalytic, theorized the anorectic's resistance to developing a female body in the terms of traditional Freudianism, as expressing anxieties and fantasies of a purely psychosexual nature, such as fear of pregnancy or of attracting the sexual attention of men. Traditional Freudianism has been far more attuned than other models to the symbolic nature of the anorectic's symptoms, recognizing, for example, that the

fear of fat on stomachs and breasts has gender associations that demand interpretation and is not merely indicative of compulsive slavery to the latest fashion trend. But Freudian theory nonetheless (and characteristically) has failed to situate the categories of its analysis in a sociocultural setting—to appreciate, for example, that fear of pregnancy may have more to do with fear of domestic entrapment than with suppressed Electra fantasies, or that anxieties about the dangers of sexual involvement might be a realistic response to the disclosure of the abusive and violent patterns that are all too common within domestic relationships. (Research has disclosed, too, that just as many of Freud's hysterics were very likely
actually
sexually abused, as he had originally hypothesized, so incidents of sexual abuse lie in the background of the socalled flight from sexuality of many anorectics, and in the histories of bulimics as well.)
2

Thus, in 1983, gender either was absent or was theorized in essentialist terms by the leading authorities on eating disorders—a situation that organizers of the conference on anorexia and bulimia sought to rectify. To do so, they had to call on feminists who had been working at the margins of the official establishment: writing for audiences other than medical professionals, practicing therapy outside the framework of thendominant models, and developing, over the preceding ten years, a very different approach to the understanding of eating disorders. The theme chosen for the 1983 conference was "Eating Disorders and the Psychology of Women," and Carol Gilligan and Susie Orbach were invited to be keynote speakers.

Gilligan's talk introduced the audience to Catherine SteinerAdair's provocative study of highschool women, which revealed a striking association between problems with food and body image and emulation of the beautiful, independent, cool superwoman of media imagery
3
Susie Orbach's talk was a moving argument, grounded in objectrelations theory and situated in the sociocultural context of the construction of femininity, that the anorectic embodies, in an extreme and painfully debilitating way, a psychological struggle characteristic of the contemporary situation of women. That situation is one in which a constellation of social, economic, and psychological factors have combined to produce a generation of women who feel deeply flawed, ashamed of their needs, and not entitled to exist unless they transform themselves into worthy new selves (read: without need, without want, without
body).
4
The motherdaughter relation is an important medium of this process. But it is not mothers who are to blame, stressed Orbach, for they too are children of their culture, deeply anxious over their own appetites and appearance and aware of the fact—communicated in a multitude of ways throughout our culture—that their daughters' ability to "catch a man" will depend largely on physical appearance, and that satisfaction in the role of wife and mother will hinge on learning to feed others rather than the self—metaphorically
and
literally.

For Orbach, anorexia represents one extreme on a continuum on which all women today find themselves, insofar as they are vulnerable, to one degree or another, to the requirements of the cultural construction of femininity. This notion provoked heated criticism from the (allmale) panel of commentators, two psychiatrists and

one clinical psychologist. The political implications of Gilligan's talk had been missed by her respondents (and by Orbach's), all of whom chose to hear the paper solely as a lament for our culture's lack of esteem for the "female" values of connectedness, empathy, and otherdirectedness. Gilligan's talk was (mis)interpreted (as her

work frequently is) as a simple celebration of traditional femininity rather than as a critique of the sexual division of labor that assigns "female" values to a separate domestic sphere while keeping the public, male space (and "masculinity") a bastion of autonomous selves.

Orbach's talk, unambiguous in its indictment of the normative construction of femininity in our culture, was much more troubling to the panelists. It elicited from them a passionate defense of "traditional women," with Orbach the feminist portrayed as unsisterly and unmotherly and the panelists cast as sympathetic protectors of those groups that Orbach had abused. So, for example, David Garner, coauthor of
Anorexia Nervosa: A Multidimensional Perspective,
felt obliged to defend mothers against the "blame" Orbach had attributed to them and the "guilt" she had inflicted on them for ''choosing traditional values" and being fulfilled by "nurturing." Steven Levenkron, author of
The Best Little Girl in the World,
came to the rescue of the anorectic herself—that "skinny kid in your office," as he called her, whose suffering Orbach had failed to appreciate adequately (in suggesting that her pain could be understood on a continuum with normative female suffering). Here, the feminist critique was charged with sacrificing the care of "helpless, chaotic, and floundering" children in the interests of a "rational" political agenda. The panelists thus represented themselves both as better feminists than Orbach (that is, more concerned with actual women's lives), better "women" (more empathic, more caring), and
at the same time
dazzlingly masculine Prince Charmings, rescuing women from the abstract and uncaring politics of feminism.

Even more provocative than Orbach's critique of the construction of femininity, however, was her questioning of the designation of eating disorders as "pathology." All the panelists, while remarking on how perfectly her interpretation tallied with and illuminated their own clinical experience, were uniform in criticizing her analysis for (as William Davis put it) its "[lack of] specific explanatory conceptions" and "indistinct and unconvincing" theorizing. How

can it be that her analysis both explained and failed to explain? This apparent contradiction in the estimation of the panel can be accounted for only by the hidden stipulation that theory, no matter how well it illuminates a given phenomenon, is inadequate unless it also sets down general criteria to enable clear and precise distinguishing between "normal" and "pathological" members of a population. This, of course, is what Orbach's theory lacked—or, rather, contested. As such, it issued a profound challenge to one of the most basic and most thoroughly entrenched premises of the medical model.

In the clinical literature on eating disorders, the task of description, classification, and elaboration of "pathology" has driven virtually all research. In the leading journals, attempts to link eating disorders to one or another specific pathogenic situation (biological, psychological, familial) proliferate, along with studies purporting to demonstrate that eating disorders are members of some established category of disorder (depressive, affective, perceptual, hypothalamic ). Anorexia and bulimia are appearing in increasingly diverse populations of women, reducing the likelihood of describing a distinctive profile for each.
5
Yet the search for common pathologies still fuels much research.
6
As each proposed model is undermined by the actual diversity of the phenomena, ever more effort is put into precise classification of distinctive subtypes, and new "multidimensional" categories emerge (for instance, bulimia as a ''biopsychosocial" illness)
7
that satisfy fantasies of precision and unification of phenomena that have become less and less amenable to scientific clarity and distinctness.

Where a unifying element
does
clearly exist—in the cultural context, and especially in the ideology and imagery that mediate the construction of gender—the etiological significance is described as merely contributory, facilitating, or a "modulating factor."
8
The prevailing understanding is that culture provokes, exacerbates, and gives distinctive form to an existing pathological condition. Such an understanding fails to come to grips with two striking facts about eating disorders. First, like hysteria in the nineteenth century, the incidence of eating disorders has always been disproportionately