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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Anorexia and Abjection
T2 - A Review Essay
AU - Ferreday, Debra
PY - 2012/6
Y1 - 2012/6
N2 - This article draws on a review of Megan Warin’s 2010 book, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, to discuss the ways in which a feminist ethnographic approach might disrupt dominant cultural narratives of eating disorders and embodiment. My argument draws on feminist work on figuration and ‘body image’ to discuss how the anorexic body becomes a figure of abjection, both in media images and in popular feminist discourse. I examine how cultural narratives and images are pathologically capable of both engendering disgust in the non-anorexic spectator and, second (and more threateningly), moving vulnerable, female spectators to imitation – a power to affect and infect onlookers which is central to contemporary debates about what is popularly called ‘body image’. By drawing on Warin’s work, the article examines how a critical feminist ethnography might move debates on eating disorders beyond the reproduction of tropes of abjection, disgust and discipline which have led to an impasse in the field, and ask whether, by paying attention to the lived experience of anorexia, it might be possible for the anorexic subject to speak.
AB - This article draws on a review of Megan Warin’s 2010 book, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, to discuss the ways in which a feminist ethnographic approach might disrupt dominant cultural narratives of eating disorders and embodiment. My argument draws on feminist work on figuration and ‘body image’ to discuss how the anorexic body becomes a figure of abjection, both in media images and in popular feminist discourse. I examine how cultural narratives and images are pathologically capable of both engendering disgust in the non-anorexic spectator and, second (and more threateningly), moving vulnerable, female spectators to imitation – a power to affect and infect onlookers which is central to contemporary debates about what is popularly called ‘body image’. By drawing on Warin’s work, the article examines how a critical feminist ethnography might move debates on eating disorders beyond the reproduction of tropes of abjection, disgust and discipline which have led to an impasse in the field, and ask whether, by paying attention to the lived experience of anorexia, it might be possible for the anorexic subject to speak.
KW - anorexia
KW - affect
KW - embodiment
KW - abjection
KW - disgust
KW - body image
KW - eating disorders
KW - ethnography
KW - visual culture
U2 - 10.1177/1357034X12440830
DO - 10.1177/1357034X12440830
M3 - Journal article
VL - 18
SP - 139
EP - 155
JO - Body and Society
JF - Body and Society
SN - 1357-034X
IS - 2
ER -