Feeding Anorexia - Gender and Power at a Treatment Center

"Many have sensed that anorexia makes visible in some way pathologies that are particular to liberal consumer society, but few have grasped its nature and significance as acutely as Helen Gremillion. Her account is as compelling as it is compassionate."--Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

List of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue xv

Introduction: In Fitness and in Health 1

1. Crafting Resourceful Bodies and Achieving Identities 43

2. Minimal Mothers and Psychiatric Discourse about the Family 73

3. Hierarchy, Power, and Gender in the "Therapeutic Family" 119

4. "Typical Parents Are Not 'Borderline'": Embedded Constructs of Race, Ethnicity, and Class 157

Epilogue: A Narrative Approach to Anorexia 193

Notes 211

Bibliography 247

Index 271

About the author

Helen Gremillion is Assistant Professor and Peg Zeglin Brand Chair in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Summary

Challenges prevailing assumptions regarding the notorious difficulty of curing anorexia nervosa. This title reveals how the therapies participate unwittingly in culturally dominant ideals of gender, individualism, physical fitness, and family life that have contributed to the dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia since the 1970s.

Product details

• Authors: Gremillion, Helen Gremillion, Helen Gremillion
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.08.2003
• EAN: 9780822331209
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-3120-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 145 mm x 236 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 413 g
• Series: Body, Commodity, Text; Body, Commodity, Text: Studies; Body, Commodity, Text; Body, Commodity, Text: Studies
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Theoretical psychology; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Psychology, PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Eating Disorders