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When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.
Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections,
Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It's also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful,
Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.
List of contents
Prologue
Preface
SECTION ONE • PROVOCATIONS
1 • Introduction
Roller-Skating
2 • Rethinking Eating Disorders
Little Debbie
3 • Eating Disorders as Technologies of Presence
For the Ladies
SECTION TWO • FRAMEWORKS
4 • Identifying the Problem: When Is an Eating Disorder
(Not) an Eating Disorder?
Spinning
5 • A Hell That Saves You: Cedar Grove’s
Staff and Programs
Lettuce Sandwich
6 • Fixing Time: Chronicity, Recovery, and Trajectories
of Care at Cedar Grove
Liquidated
7 • Loosening the Ties That Bind: Unmooring
Mortifications
8 • Me, Myself, and Ed: Recalibrating
Calculated Risks
9 • “Fat” Is Not a Feeling: Developing New Ways of Presencing
Looking for the Exit
SECTION FOUR• RECURSIONS
10 • Running on Empty: Relationships of Care in a Culture of Deprivation
Breaking
11 • Capitalizing on Care: Precarity, Vulnerability, and Failed Subjects
Spark
12 • Conclusions: Where Do We Go from Here?
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Rebecca J. Lester is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and a licensed clinical social worker. She is the author of numerous academic articles and the award-winning book
Jesus in Our Wombs.
Summary
When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old—and again when she was eighteen—she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders—their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.
Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It’s also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.
Additional text
“This is psychological anthropology at its best.”
