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This book takes up the challenge of examining women's understandings of eating disorders and child sexual abuse away from a framework focused on pathology. The central argument is that women's distress is an enactment of their engagement with certain discourses and practices, rather than a reaction triggered by child sexual abuse. Guided by a contemporary feminist framework and Mikhail Bakhtin's sociological linguistics, to substantiate the argument, women's own poetry and drawings are used as evidence to develop, support and supplement research findings. The book establishes that an eating disorder is 'an understandable response' to sexual trauma and shifts the focus away from 'a damaged personality'. Even more importantly, it demonstrates that women with eating disorders are using their bodies as a form of resistance to express silenced traumas that remain in the silenced female body. This is an active way of making sense of experiences of child sexual abuse.
Sommario
Part I. Examining Child Sexual Abuse and Eating Disorders.- 1. Capturing the Research Journey: An Introduction.- 2. A Story of Language, Meaning and Power.- Part II. The Women's Stories.- 3. The Female Body as a Site of Opposition.- 4. Masking the Self.- 5. Cleanliness and Purification.- 6. Beauty Politics in Eating Disorders.- 7. Situating Silence in Child Sexual Abuse.- 8. Conclusion: Beyond Illness and Pathology.
Info autore
Lisa Hodge PhD, is a research fellow in the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University, Australia
