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To Make A Dragon Move: From The Diary Of An Anorexic
by: Raina Lenney

Pamela White Hadas

 I have rules and plenty.  Some things I don’t touch.

I’m king of my body now.  Who needs a mother—

Once upon a time, I confess, I was fat—

gross.  Gross belly, gross ass, no bones

showing at all.  Now I say, “No, thank you,” a person

in my own right, and no poor loser.  I smile at

her plate of brownies.  “Make it disappear,”

she used to say, “Join the clean plate club.”

 

I guess that’s what I want: to disappear.

That’s pretty much what the doctor said, touching

me with his icy stethoscope, prying apart my smile

with that dry popsicle stick, and he said it to Mother.

And now all she says is “What kind of a crazy person

would starve herself to death?”

 

I know Hunger as a person

inside me, half toad, half dwarf.  I try to mother

him; I rock and rock and rock him to sleep like a mother

by doing sit-ups.  He leans his gargoyle head against the fat

              pillow of my heart.  But awake he raves, a crazy person,

                               turned on by my perpetual motion, by the disappearing

                                            tricks of my body; his shaken fist tickles drool to my smile.

He’s worse in my gut where

                                   his stamped foot means binge and puke.  Don’t touch me,

                                                  Hunger, Mother…Don’t you gut my brain.

                                 I am a pure person, magic, revealed as I disappear

into my final fat-free smile, where there is no pain.

Introduction

Women and Eating in History

The Invention of Normal

Media and Women's Bodies

The Tyranny of Slenderness

Ellen Fisher Turk and Turning Back the Gaze

Conclusion

 

 

 

Introduction

The woman in this monologue is expressing the mastery of her body through her denial of food.  She is at violent war with dominant forces she neither perceives nor anticipates.  She is suspicious of the doctor’s aid: “I guess that’s what I want: to disappear.  That’s pretty much what the doctor said, touching me with his icy stethoscope” .  Her mother has pathologized her, suggesting that she has chosen this form of martyrdom: “And now all she says is ‘What kind of a crazy person would starve herself to death?”  She anthropomorphizes Hunger as a vicious animal that lives inside of her, threatening to overtake her will.   She seeks release from this demon inside of her and imagines that she will be free only when she has rid herself of this evil.  “I am a pure person, magic, revealed as I disappear into my final fat-free smile, where there is no pain”.  This woman is exemplary of a woman who, through her unique place in a society that is intolerant of women – specifically of women who do not conform to a standardized image – has been implicated in what has come to be seen as an epidemic of eating disorders.   

 

The subject of eating disorders has long been fascinating and perplexing. A large body of writing has been devoted to the study of eating disorders; the scope of this writing traverses the medical canon, feminist and cultural constructionism, historical perspectives, autobiographies, theatre and film, and practically every other form of expression and inquisition.  Many questions arise when considering these disorders, which range from anorexia, bulimia, and obesity to a host of other, less discernable compulsive disorders.  The major questions surround the nature of these disorders and, specifically, for whom they are most prevalent.  According to ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc.), “only about five to ten percent of people with anorexia and bulimia are male”.  If this is true, why are women primarily affected by this epidemic? 

 

There are three theories concerning the cause of eating disorders: a biomedical theory, a psychological theory, and a cultural theory.  The biomedical theory suggests that these disorders are pathological and attempts to define their biological root.  According to Joan Jacobs Brumberg, in her landmark historical analysis of anorexia nervosa, Fasting Girls, this biomedical model, while serving some important functions, is limited in crucial ways.  “The question that biomedicine must address…is not whether the disease has somatic components (it obviously does) but whether these symptoms are primary or secondary in the etiology of anorexia nervosa” (26).  The biomedical model fails to explain why this disorder mainly affects women, and why these women tend to reside in upper to middle class Westernized areas.  Another limitation with this model is the inability to address the question of incidence—why are there so many women afflicted with these disorders at this precise historical moment (27)?  The psychological theory interrogates the influences of the home and the internal workings of the mind, and the effects that these factors have on the manifestation of these disorders (28).  While this model is useful in some ways, it too ignores the social factors surrounding these disorders.  The cultural model seeks to demonstrate the role of society and culture (particularly mass media) and the effects these systems have on the structure and severity of these disorders.  It is this model that is the most widely contested within the medical profession, yet it is also this model that may provide the most complete set of answers.  Brumberg suggests that the limitations of this model are based on two naïve assumptions:  “…(1) that anorexia nervosa is a new phenomenon created by the pressures and circumstances of contemporary life and (2) that the disease is either imposed on young women (as victims) or freely chosen (as social protest) without involving any biological or psychological contribution” (38).  She outlines the strengths of this model as well, stating that its main power lies in the ability to identify the troubling set of ideas that surround a woman’s mind and body in this culture (35). 

 

I would like to suggest that culture and mass media play a larger role than has been supposed (or accepted) in terms of form, extremity, and development of these disorders.  I would like also to suggest that Brumberg’s first assumption might be revealed to coincide with rather than refute a cultural model for, while anorexia nervosa may not have existed previously, many forms of starvation did exist, and the shape these various fasts took was dictated for women by the expectations of the surrounding society.  I wish to avoid the label of “victim” when referring to these women; rather I am stating that a limitation of acceptable modes of behavior for women has dictated the course and prevalence of these disorders.  With these ideas in mind I will outline a brief historical perspective to demonstrate how these disorders have manifested themselves in other times and places.  I will also demonstrate the ways in which the idea of woman has been conflated with the body and the negative implications of this conflation, the birth of a normalizing image for women which has been consistently idealized, and the commodification of the female body.  This normalized image, which has become alternately more and less oppressive depending on the feminist political climate, has dictated the strict images that women must emulate.  These perspectives will be useful as I link past and present in an attempt to argue that the role society plays is much larger than formerly imagined. 

 

I will explore a new therapeutic technique pioneered by photographer Ellen Fisher Turk and psychologist Ira Sacker in treating patients of eating disorders.  This method of treating patients, which involves photographing these women as nudes combined with therapy sessions and journal keeping, is exemplary of the way cultural practices, which previously have had a negative impact on the health and well being of women, are fluid and simultaneously may be subverted for positive use.   Through the use of traditional theories of the gaze, and how this gaze has been gendered as male, I will demonstrate that the previous seeming fixity of the gaze may be altered and appropriated by these women for their personal growth.  The brief history of normalization of the body will demonstrate the extent to which the body of the woman has been policed and commodified by the mainstream culture.  These normalizing practices, which organized bodies into acceptable and unacceptable modes, may be seen as another example of the dualisms fostered in Western society.  In each of these dualisms (mind/body, able-bodied/disabled, normal/abnormal, etc.) the dominant and acceptable mode must be supported by the image of deviance; without deviance there would be no way to discern the normal.  It will be demonstrated that these normalizing practices, which have consistently become less attainable for women, have led to the pathologization of the female body.  In other words, the evolving demand on the female body to conform to images of excessive thinness has led to the necessity for extremity.  I will not attempt to discover the root causes of these disorders, nor to suggest that the three existing theories concerning the causes of eating disorders do not overlap in some way, but rather I will propose an explanatory cultural model for the prevalence of these disorders.  

 

In the poem above, the woman perceives Hunger as an animal or mythical creature, “half toad, half dwarf”.  She associates this Hunger with her body, and cries out against this creature and her body simultaneously as this Hunger threatens to destroy her.  She has disassociated herself from the Hunger, the evil “Gargoyle”, “a crazy person”.  She no longer recognizes that this Hunger was once part of her, she has forgotten, and she imagines that she will become transcendent when she is finally able to rid herself of this presence.  This disassociation of the body and the mind is not specific to this one woman.  Throughout the literary canon a distinction has been cultivated between the material body and the ephemeral mind.  In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo demonstrates the shift in ideology.  “The body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects: these are common images within Western philosophy” (3).  While Plato perceived the body as an “epistemological deceiver, its unreliable senses and volatile passions continually tricking us into mistaking the transient and illusory for the permanent and the real” (3), in the poem above, Hadas describes the body as a fleshy, material weight binding the protagonist to the earth.  Both of these ideas, while variable, reinforce the split between the mind and body in literature, and both inscribe the body with a negative materialism, while granting the mind (soul) with a sense of freedom and redemption.  Bordo takes this analysis one step further and demonstrates that this split has been gendered: women become conflated with the body, while men “…represent the part of the person that wants to stand clear of the flesh, to maintain perspective on it…” (5).  This gendering of the body as female has dire consequences for women, for if the body contains everything material (and thus sinful) then the woman herself is contaminated and must free herself from the fetters of the body.  It is this desperate need to split from what has been constructed as contamination that compels the woman in the poem above to “binge and puke” in an effort to achieve transcendence, to rise to a bodiless, universal (male) state where she will finally be free—in essence, to make herself “disappear”.

 

Women and Eating in History

Women have a long and convoluted history with food.  As early as the fourteenth century there are writings available that attest to this tumultuous relationship.  Caroline Walker Bynum has constructed a comprehensive collection of religious women and their complex interactions with food entitled Holy Feast and Holy Fast.  One famous example of a saintly faster is Catherine of Siena, a young woman who began fasting at puberty and devoted her life to religious teaching and miraculous events.  Catherine was the youngest, and most favored, of twenty-three children.  The death of her twin sister, a result of having been weaned outside the home while their mother weaned Catherine, may have contributed to Catherine’s excessive guilt surrounding food (165-167).  She is said to have considered her prolonged fast an “infirmity” (168), and appears to have been motivated through her guilt and a desire to control the sins (such as material consumption) of the body.

Metaphors of eating, drinking, hungering, and vomiting, of 
          food, blood, tables, and servants are central in Catherine’s 
          writing.  To eat to Catherine means to be or to become, to 
           take in or to love. …Most fundamentally, or for Catherine to 
           eat and to hunger have the same meaning: one eats but is 
         never full, desires but is never satiated.  Both are active, not 
         passive, images.  Both stress pain more than joy.  Both mean, 
         most basically, to suffer and to serve—to suffer because in 
         hunger one joins with, “eats”, Christ on the cross; to serve 
         because in hunger /suffer is to expiate the sins of the world 
         (original italics) (175).

In this passage it is evident that Catherine equates desire with the consumption of earthly food (both insatiable proof of sin), and suffering with a joining of herself to Christ.  This conflation of desire and sin with site of a woman’s body was a theme that was reinforced in the religious papers of the time.  St Jerome and St. Augustine devoted an inordinate amount of their writings to the association of lust in women with the consumption of food.  Bynum points out that while the consumption of food also evidenced sin in men, “…the food behavior especially associated with men was gluttony, not abstinence or food providing or eucharistic fervor” (79).  Thus the denial of food as repentance for the bodily sins was an association cultivated specifically for women.  Hence, it was through this suffering, through this denial of her own flesh, that Catherine felt she could alleviate the pain of others, and release herself from the sin of desire.

 

Bynum questions the central theme of food in women’s religious lives and suggests that “Food is important to women religiously because it is important socially” (189).  She elaborates that women’s traditional roles have centered on the growth and preparation of food, stressing that food is the one resource that women control.   “Food-related behavior was central to women socially and religiously not only because food was a resource women controlled but also because by means of food women controlled themselves and their world” (193).   In a society where women are allotted a limited medium of power, and where the activities of their minds and bodies are regularly policed, it seems inevitable that food will become a means of manipulation.  It is also important to note that only in a society blessed with a plentitude of food could this denial of sustenance become a feminine ideal.  As Gloria Steinem states in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, “What is rare and possessed only by the powerful is envied as a symbol of power” (212).  Women serve as status symbols in societies where food is plentiful, reflecting the ideal of thinness while  “poor societies with little food produce an ideal of feminine beauty that is plump and available only to the rich” (212).  Thus although these early forms of starvation may resemble modern day anorexia, the importance lies not in the label but rather in both culture’s emphasis on the relationship of women and food.  “The behavior [fasting], then, whatever basis it may in some cases have in the physiology and the family history of individuals, is also, in the very particular form it takes, learned; and it is learned from a culture that has complex and long-standing traditions about women, about bodies, and about food” (Bynum 198).   It is clear that, regardless of the presence or absence of a biological explanation for these disorders, a culture that intertwines the relationship of women and food will produce women whose ideas about food are inextricably bound to their personal ideology.   

 

The Invention of Nomal

In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard J. Davis deconstructs the notion of normalcy, and  reveals a purpose behind this mode of standardization that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.  “The word ‘normal’ as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the common type or standard, regular, usual’ only enters the English language around 1840” (24).  Not coincidentally, in 1830, the use of statistics in England became widespread, and the purpose shifted from strict scientific use to a general quantifying of human experience.  It was in this era that terms such as “norm” and “deviation from the norm” began to have special significance concerning the general population (30).  There are two key points to note concerning the impetus of the movement concerning statistics: this movement consisted mainly of eugenicists, and it coincided directly with the rise of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe.  These eugenicists perceived the new uses for statistics as a method to standardize the population and decrease deviance.  Using statistical analysis as a means of quantifying and categorizing human behavior, statisticians furnished the middle class with a discourse of normalcy; this discourse established a binary relationship between the norm and the deviant, cementing the norm as the position of desirability (30).  This binary structure was crucial to the bourgeoisie; just as this new class of upwardly-mobile individuals was negatively distinguished from the older, wealthy class, so existed the necessity to distinguish (and elevate) themselves from the working class.

 

Davis suggests that the concept that predates the “norm” is the concept of the “ideal”, and stresses that this ideal is aligned with the divine and thus, “not attainable by a human” (24).  The norm then becomes a form of the ideal, while still maintaining its (tenuous) possibility.  I would argue that for a woman the ideal was and is conflated with the concept of the norm, hence completely unattainable except through superhuman means.  This is due to the fact that the images of women that proliferate are often “ideal” images; a lack of a myriad of images creates a void where a woman may try to conceptualize her identity.  While the concept of normalization is problematic for all people, for women this concept has specific repercussions.  Joan Jacobs Brumburg outlines the relationship of food and love in the bourgeois family in France, and documents the emergence of mass starvation among middle class girls at the onset of puberty.   The rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century had a number of effects on the middle class family.  With more economic power to purchase products outside of the home and with factories producing goods of better quality more cheaply, the role of the woman in the domestic sphere diminished significantly (126-127).  For the young women of the household, this meant that they were left to a leisurely existence; no longer required to work in an effort to assist the family, these women were encouraged to cultivate traits traditionally associated with their feminine role.  The mothers, who were displaced as domestic goods producers by the factories, took this opportunity to refine their daughters for their future marriage, as a desirable match could enhance the wealth and property of the family.  This pressure to conform to a standard image, an image reinforced by the normalizing practices effected earlier in the century, was often unbearable to a young woman (135).  Similar to the fourteenth century woman whose only form of power was invested in food, so too did the Victorian adolescent barter with this medium.  The preparation, serving, and consumption of food, for the middle class, had assumed a new level of importance: “Among the middle class it seems that eating correctly was emerging as a new morality, one that set its members apart from the working class” (136).   Thus it was through rejection of this eloquent ceremony of meals that these women could assert their discomfort with the limited roles that were available to them (135-138). 

 By the late nineteenth century the bourgeois mother was no 
           longer even a midwife to her daughter in childbirth.  She gave 
           that role to professional medicine and became, instead, 
           midwife to her daughter’s social persona.  Because she was 
           so actively engaged in managing her daughter’s physical 
          growth, appearance, and moral development, the middle-class 
          mother had a significant investment in how her daughter fared 
          in the marriage market.  A daughter was, after all, an extension 
          of the mother.  To see her consistently refuse food was hurtful 
          and frustrating indeed (137).       

It seems apparent that the emphasis on food in Victorian culture, combined with the enormous pressure to conform to a particular ideal, served as a catalyst for these eating disorders.  I would like to reiterate here that while it seems evident that biological and psychological factors certainly contributed to these disorders, it appears that the surrounding culture largely influenced the form and prevalence of these patterns of starvation. 

            The unhappy adolescent girl, who was in all other ways a dutiful daughter, chose food refusal from within the symptom repertoire available to her.  Precisely because she was not a lunatic, she selected a behavior that she knew had some efficacy within her own family.  Middle-class parents, especially mothers,  were predictable in their responses: they consistently offered more food and more love in the face of the girl’s compulsion to starve.  To have anorexia nervosa, the adolescent girl had to be privileged both emotionally and materially by her family (140). 

 

It is crucial to realize that while not all women were predisposed to this form of behavior, nor could all women sustain this behavior, for some this was the only way to manifest a profound uneasiness with their assigned role.  To reiterate an earlier statement, I would like to suggest that these women were neither passively struck by these disorders nor did they actively choose them, but rather they were caught somewhere in the middle; in the limited sphere of female power and the strict confines of the regulatory practices of the Victorian era, these women were compelled to these forms of disordered behavior.  Thus, while Davis states that “there is in such societies no demand that populations have bodies that conform to the ideal” (25), I would argue that the normalizing practices of the day were complicit in institutionalizing a role for women, and due to the lack of any other role models, the ideal became seemingly and necessarily attainable.

 

            In the passages above, I have tried to delineate an historical perspective that has shaped the way particular societies view the body of the woman, and I have also tried to demonstrate the ways in which the female body has been regulated and policed by the surrounding hegemony. This historical overview is useful in discerning the views of contemporary society, as these perceptions, shaped and modified throughout time, continue to inform the definition of woman.  In contemporary Western society (particularly the late 1970’s to the present) there has been a marked increase in eating disorders.  Certainly some of this increase may be attributed to a more accurate system of diagnosis, a greater recognition by society of these disorders, and less hesitancy (due to this awareness) on the part of the women involved to admit to these disorders, however, the figures are so stunning as to suggest a need for consideration.  The Harvard Eating Disorders Center provides these facts:  “More than five million Americans suffer from eating disorders”, and “Fifteen percent of young women have substantially disordered eating attitudes and behaviors.”   “A 1998 survey done by Exeter University included 37,500 young women between twelve and fifteen.  Over half listed appearance as the biggest concern in their lives” (ANRED).  Fifty-nine percent of these women indicated that they were dieting (ANRED).  What factors contribute to contemporary prevalence, and how (if at all) are the historical factors present and complicit with these disorders? 

 

           Media and Women's Bodies 

           It is no stretch to assert that the media dominates the present day with a proliferation of images designed to commodify everything within reach.  This commodification extends to women and their bodies, which are used to sell products ranging from clothing, perfume, and cars to palm-pilots (About Face).  The body of the woman is glorified, idealized, subordinated, exaggerated, and mythologized, creating again the impossible ideal that must be attained.  These proliferating images, combined with a lack of competing images, may cause confusion for young women attempting to define their role in society.  In an article published by the American Anorexia Bulimia Association, Inc. (AABA) the author, Natalia Zunino, Ph.D., suggests that “The emphasis on physical attractiveness and thinness at a time when the physiological changes at puberty are increasing the proportion of girls’ body fat and changing their body shape toward larger thighs, often creates anxiety”.  ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc.) documents the conflicting messages presented to boys and girls: 

Only about five to ten percent of people with anorexia and bulimia are male.  This gender difference may reflect our society’s opposite expectations for men and women.   Men are supposed to be strong and powerful.  They feel ashamed of skinny bodies.  Women, on the other hand are supposed to be tiny, waif-like, and thin.  They diet to lose weight, and if they lose control of the resulting hunger, or develop rigid and compulsive overcontrol, they can become anorexic, bulimic, or both (1).   

While it is noted that some cases of anorexia or bulimia exist among males, these cases are generally restricted to males in the sports arena, where a huge amount of pressure is placed upon the maintenance of a particular weight.  Why is the ideal for women opposite the reality of their bodies?  Why is excessive dieting fostered, encouraged, or even thrust on women in this country?   How does this fit in with the oppression experienced by women in contemporary society?  

 

Susan Bordo, in her essay “Reading the Slender Body”, suggests that the female body has been “coded” morally and economically “in terms of its capacity for self-containment and the control of impulse and desire…” (191).  The meaning should be clear; to extrapolate from the past, it is evident that the female body, under constant surveillance, is being used again as a political and economical barometer.  The sublimation of the body, combined with the capitalistic uses of this same body, serve to promote the interests of an opportunistic society.  The power of the media to perpetuate this exploitation is undeniable; according to the Body Talk web-site consumers are bombarded with 330 million television ads, six million magazine ads, and twelve billion newspaper display ads per year (Jones 1).  A particularly telling case is revealed in an article by Ellen Goodman called “Why they’re not getting fat in Fiji”.  Fiji, a relatively isolated island, was a place where the acceptable image of a woman was the complete antithesis of the perception in America.  Women were “big and beautiful”, and thinness “…was considered to be a sign of some social problem, a worrisome indication the person wasn’t getting enough to eat” (1).  This image changed drastically with the introduction of television and Western programming to the island in 1995. 

                 Within 38 months, the number of teens at risk for

            eating disorders more than doubled to 29 percent.  The

            number of high school girls who vomited for weight

            control went up five times to 15 percent.  Worse yet,

            74 percent of the Fiji teens in the study said they

            felt “too big or fat” at least some of the time and

            62 percent said they had dieted in the past month (2).

 

These numbers are astounding, and are indicative of the devastating power of the media. “On television and in popular magazines, with a flip of the page or barely a pause between commercials, images of luscious foods and their rhetoric of craving and desire are replaced by advertisements for grapefruit diets, low-calorie recipes, and exercise equipment” (Bordo 199).  These conflicting images of desire versus control contribute to the normalizing processes that surround the female body, and this policed body, which may be acquired only through deprivation, becomes conflated with success. A woman inundated with these images and desperate to achieve this standard, begins the process of modifying the body leading, for some, to obsessive or compulsive behavior concerning food.  Relying on a Foucaultian theory of self-policing, docile bodies Bordo suggests that “Between the media images of self-containment and self-mastery and the reality of everyday stress and anxiety about one’s appearance lies the chasm that produces bodies habituated to self-monitoring and self-normalization” (202-203).  In this way, women become complicit in their own destructive behavior.  It is the inability to balance the proliferation of images, the need for a particular body shape, and the demands of the contemporary society that lends itself to the development of these disorders.  Bordo goes on to explain that the women who cannot maintain these boundaries are pathologized for their excessive behavior.  This pathologizing prohibits any serious inquiry into the role of the media on the production of women’s bodies, and of the culture that produces and sustains that media, and shifts the blame to the woman herself (202-203).  Ironically, it is this same pathologization that is necessary to maintain the illusory ease with which a woman may acquire this idealized body, and thus this necessity that provides the impetus for the perpetuation of these disorders.    

 

            The Tyranny of Slenderness 

            Throughout this paper, I have attempted to demonstrate the ways in which the female body has historically been monitored and sublimated by hierarchical society.  This sublimation has produced a normalized body that has become a necessary standard of achievement for women in Western societies.  The 1970’s represent a resurgence in mass starving practices by women, and it is at this curious intersection of history and contemporary society where evidence of male hegemony, which some view as eradicated, becomes again evident.  Why have eating disorders flourished from this time period to the present?  What purpose, or what benefit, does this oppression garner for those who oppress?  These questions do not have easy answers, nor will this paper be sufficient enough to answer them, however, I would like to suggest, as Kim Chernin does, that it is no coincidence that the prevalence of eating disorders in contemporary society parallels the emergence of second wave feminism.   In The Obsession, Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, Chernin suggests that the second wave feminist movement, and its subsequent backlash, can be seen as contributing to the debilitating images of women that proliferate presently.  “I am suggesting that the changing awareness of women of our position in this society has divided itself into two divergent movements, one of which is a movement toward feminine power, the other a retreat from it, supported by the fashion and diet industries, which share a fear of women’s power” (99).  This “fear” of an assumption of power by women has resulted in the infantilizing of women in the media images of the culture.  In an effort to reassert the sense of power that masculine society feels has been lost, the woman’s image as victim is moderated; her youthful appearance (often only possible through the use of fifteen and sixteen year old models), and unnaturally boyish figure are now the normalizing images presented to women (99-100).  It is this practice that leads Chernin to state boldly:

                                    Thus, what we are seeing in this tyranny of

                        slenderness is more than a cultural warfare between

                        body and mind, more even than a bitter struggle

                        against the life cycle and the free expression of

                        our kinship with nature.  In this age of feminist

                        assertion men are drawn to women of childish body

                        and mind because there is something less disturbing

                        about the vulnerability and helplessness of a small

                        child—and something truly disturbing about 

                        the body and mind of a mature woman (110).

 

In Listen Up, Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, third-wave feminist/ essayist Abra Fortune Chernik comments on her own battle with anorexia, and her dawning awareness of the inter-relatedness of female power and the prevalence of these disorders.  “As long as society resists female power, fashion will call healthy women physically flawed.  As long as society accepts the physical, sexual and economic abuse of women, popular culture will prefer women who resemble little girls” (81).  It seems evident that whatever explanations may exist for the fear of a mature, self-possessed woman, this fear has perpetuated a site of struggle that exists presently around women’s bodies.

 

Ellen Fisher Turk and Turning Back the Gaze

A particular form of therapy that has recently made headlines is the photographing of patients diagnosed with eating disorders.  A psychologist, Dr. Ira Sacker, director of the Eating Disorders Program at Brookdale Hospital Medical Center, works with photographer Ellen Fisher Turk, in an endeavor to enable these women to move forward in their therapy.  The idea is simple, yet the implications are expansive: the women, in the course of their therapy, pose for pictures with Turk in various states of undress with the ultimate goal of full nudity.   These photo sessions are accompanied by therapy sessions and the women keep a journal recording all of their feelings during this process (MSN Women Central, October 2000).  According to the women that have taken advantage of this unique form of therapy, it has been successful in enabling them to see their body in a different way.  Laura, a twenty-four year old bulimic, states:

                         When I got involved with Ellen, I was very           

                        self-conscious about things that sagged or had 

                        cellulite.

                        I remember getting some of the contact sheets back

                        and cringing, ‘I don’t like that.  I don’t like that.

                        There’s a nice one.  Oh, God, I hope no one ever

                        sees that one.’  Then it got to the point where I could

                        look at my body in a photograph and say, ‘I can 

                       change that to a degree’…Looking back, I notice that 

                       in the first shots, my arms were never open, like, ‘Here 

                       I am!’

   I was always trying to cover myself up.  But by the end,

   I was a lot less inhibited, like, Yeah, so what?  It’s just

   a body.’ There’s way too much attached to the

   human form (Shape Magazine, Nov. 1997).

 

 

Jennifer, a former bulimic, says that her reaction to her photograph was “ ‘I don’t want to see all of me—it’s too ugly.’ But, she says, ‘that lasted for about three minutes; then I began to see myself as human” (Glamour, June 1998).  Lynn, a patient who has binged for thirty years, says of Turk’s photographs: “I have never been able to really see myself in a mirror—for me, this is an amazing, amazing breakthrough” (New York Post, June 2000). 

 

Certainly this form of therapy, while its use at this time is limited, may be seen as demonstrative of the fluidity of cultural practices, as well as indicative of the prevalence of culture in the shaping of these disorders.  Women have traditionally been objectified through the very medium that is used here for healing.  The practice of exploiting idealized or exaggerated images of the body is not restricted to contemporary culture.  In Extraordinary Bodies, Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemary Garland Thomson delineates the ways photography has been used to represent disabled bodies as pathology: “The new technology of photography helped transform extraordinary bodies into freak exhibits…As dual cultural methods of producing the legible body witnessing its own deviance, both photography and freak shows…created an iconography of otherness set in a manipulated, yet naturalized, context of objective fact” (61-62).  These photographs were used to create a sense of authenticity, of believability in the difference of the freak, and in an era when the production of normalized bodies was becoming more and more important, the need for a deviant body became unavoidable.  It was through this deviance that many could claim normalcy; only through the co-existence of the deviant body and the normalized image could the two forms be differentiated.  In contemporary society, the production of idealized women’s bodies is justified by the pathologization of women who appear to have taken this idealized image to obsessive limits. Thus the eating disorder patient may be likened to the freak; each serves as the extremity by which the ideal (however difficult to achieve) may be justified. 

 

Turk’s method of therapy may be seen as an effort to subvert this mode of photography, which has been used repeatedly to exploit the female form. This is a unique approach to an epidemic perpetuated by contemporary culture, and it brings up crucial questions concerning its evident success. Why, for example, does this method allow women to see their bodies in a different way than they have previously been able?  How does this differ from the exploitation women experience at the hands of the mass culture? Is this therapy effective because the photographer is female?   Could this form of re-empowering these women be effective long term and on a mass scale?  In the next section, I will attempt to answer some of these questions, and to demonstrate the ways in which this intervention intertwines directly with the culture responsible for the form and production of these disorders.  I will elaborate on the ways women have traditionally been objectified through art and the media, and demonstrate the power inherent in the reclamation of these forms.  Theories of the gaze will be relevant here, as I will demonstrate that the traditional (male) gaze may be altered and that a proliferation of gazes may be utilized as a liberatory practice for these women.

 

In John Berger’s collection of essays, Ways of Seeing, Berger delineates the history of the nude in classical painting.  He demonstrates the objectification of women in painting by declaring that traditionally, the spectator is male (56).  Thus the object of the painting must necessarily be female, and painted in such a way that would be pleasing to the male.  Berger arrives at two classifications, calling the woman the “surveyed” and the man the “surveyor”:

      A woman must continually watch herself.  She is almost 
              continually accompanied by her own image of 
              herself…From earliest childhood she has been taught and 
              persuaded to survey herself continually.  And so she comes 
              to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the 
              two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity 
              as a woman.  She has to survey everything she is and 
              everything she does because how she appears to others, 
              and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial 
              importance for what is normally thought of as the success of 
              her life…One might simplify this by saying: men act and 
              women appear.  Men look at women.  Women watch 
              themselves being looked at…The surveyor of woman in 
              herself is male: the surveyed female.  Thus she turns 
              herself into an object—and most particularly an object of 
              vision: a sight (46-47).    

             

 

Thus women incorporate their own objectification, clouding the vision in the mirror.  Berger goes on to equate the mirror as equally complicit in this objectification, as it is the mirror that reaffirms the image within.  “The real function of the mirror …was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (51).  To elaborate, it seems plausible that the mirror, despite its seeming ability to reflect truth, can only reflect back the concept of the woman that she herself is capable of viewing.  This concept, shaped as it is by culture and its oppressive notions, must be necessarily limited.  When Lynn, the patient mentioned in the passage above, declares that she has never been able to see herself in the mirror, it seems clear that this is due to these limitations, and the photographs, which are a different form of seeing, have released Lynn from this slighted perception.  To utilize Berger’s words, the photographs have the potential to transform the woman from the “surveyed” to the “surveyor”; she now has re-appropriated the gaze, re-gendered it as female, and may see herself in new and spectacular lights. 

 

Discussions of the gaze, and the effect of the gaze on women particularly, have been utilized in multiple cultural forms and practices.  Film theorists have suggested that the traditional spectator is male, thus all cultural mediums are produced for his specific pleasure.  Laura Mulvey, in her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” states:

   In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking 
            has been split between active/male and passive/ female.  
            The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the 
            female figure, which is styled accordingly.  In their traditional 
            exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and 
            displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and 
            erotic impact (19).

 

Mulvey later expands her discussion of the gaze to include the woman who finds herself “…secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides” (29).  This expansion is indicative of the ways in which power has come to be seen as a shifting and turbulent force within society.  In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Michel Foucault discusses the ways in which sites of struggle, manifested as sites of victimization (particularly for females) may be seen as a point from which to mount an act of rebellion.  “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (101). Turk’s intervention in both the role of the audience and the role of the spectator (these photographs are for these women alone) may be seen as an act of resistance.  The fact that Turk has now wrestled control of the gaze is also important.  This control, which is then appropriated by these women who view their own bodies, is crucial in sparking a form of resistance.  It is this resistance that enables these women to create a space for identity that is distinct from the identity fostered by the existing culture.  This reconstruction of identity is a crucial step in the process of denaturalizing the norms that pervade society, and it is only through this denaturalization that a proliferation of bodies may co-exist freely.

 

In an interview with Ellen Fisher Turk, Turk suggests that these women have experienced a split between the reality of their bodies, and the image that exists in their mind and is reflected in the mirror.  This image has been defined by a society that does not provide role models for strong, successful women, and must necessarily bend to those restrictions.  Turk sees herself engaged in a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of these women’s bodies.  This reconstruction, which is enabled by the camera, allows these women to discover and come to terms with, elements of the body they were unaware existed.  “It’s a non-cognitive process that helps women re-see themselves through another person’s eyes” (Levine 1).  Turk stresses the necessity of the contact sheets in this process of healing, as it is through these contact sheets, which provide a proliferation of images of the woman, that the particular patient may see the multiple representations of their body.  While all pictures may not be acceptable, it is here where these women find something pleasing.  Thus the subversion of the male gaze is evident; these women have been elevated to the status of “surveyor”.   In speaking with Turk, she emphasizes the need for a relationship of trust with her subjects.  It is this trust, she claims, that has the ability to break down the barriers that have been erected and enforced by society, and it is this trust that allows the beauty of the woman be present in these photographs.  The photographs, which are a frozen moment of time and space, then becomes forms of proof for these women; in essence these pictures serve as a constant reminder of an appropriation of a sense of power and control, and they become a tool for healing.

 

            Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, details several reasons why the photograph may contain such power.  The first suggests the power of possession: “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure” (9).  This power of possession is extended to the photographer—he/she may claim that which has been stilled through the use of photography.  In this way, the act of taking a picture may be seen as an act of aggressive acquisition.  “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (7).   Sontag genders the camera itself as male stating, “The camera as phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously employs.  However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without subtlety whenever we talk about ‘loading’ and ‘aiming’ a camera, about ‘shooting’ a film” (13-14).  Sontag goes on to equate the camera with a gun, a predatory weapon.  Certainly it does not seem far reaching to suggest that this camera, as a weapon employed by a misogynist society, has been used to sublimate women and produce a normalizing image designed to maintain that sublimation.  In an article in the New York Post, Amy Worden evokes this image of a camera as a gun.  “Point a camera at many women and you might as well be aiming an Uzi at them” (27).  If the camera is a weapon, then it seems obvious that the prey is the woman’s body.  Turk, through the creation of a space where these women are empowered by the use of the camera, manages to redirect the gaze.  In this way, the women involved may derive a sense of power over their own bodies, and by simulating the way that dominant culture has used these images to subordinate women, reclaim a sense of self. 

 

            Conclusion

            Thus it seems that this procedure, which intersects at a cultural site of struggle and subverts the mode and meaning of that struggle, is certainly a positive step in the direction of healing.  The process itself is fairly new (Turk began this series of photographs in 1995), so it remains to be seen if this type of cultural intervention can be effective on a mass scale.  However, the positive response from the women who have endured this process suggests the necessity of attention.  To return to the poem at the opening of this paper, it seems evident that the culture that surrounds these characters (the young woman, her mother, and the doctor) has predicated the fall of this woman.  The mother, afraid for her own position, must necessarily pathologize the daughter.  The doctor, in support of his profession, suggests that the woman alone is responsible for her situation.  It seems evident throughout this paper that one woman alone does not perpetuate the myths that enslave women by means of their bodies.  I would like to suggest that if culture is implicit in perpetuating these disorders (and I firmly believe that it is) then it is reasonable to suggest that we are all complicit in the maintenance of this culture.  If we are unable to view objectively a culture that demands normalized bodies for its continued function (and dually a deviant body) as a society reliant upon the commodification of the female form, women will continue to diminish themselves piece by piece.  There is a desperate need to recognize the role culture has played in the instigation of this pathology, as well as a need to acknowledge the sites of struggle that have been perpetuated around the body of the woman.  Until the ability to utilize these sites of struggle as “sites of resistance” is fully realized, we will continue to perpetuate a system that demands subordination of women.  This continual subordination, the extremity of which may be seen as a response to feminist demands, will be devastating for women.

 

In the poem above it is evident that this situation has the potential to be different. If the people involved had the strength to look beyond the assigned roles, to critique the normative patterns of society, and to view these roles as oppositional sites, perhaps this woman’s story would not be the one that has been told.  In conflict with existing stereotypes surrounding the woman, the body, and the perpetual struggle with food, it seems that this paper must be written again and again.  For, although this paper does not disavow the importance of education concerning all three theories concerning the evolution of eating disorders, I must restate the necessity of investigating the surrounding culture.  It is there, at the site of struggle that exists between men and women, and the war that is fought through a woman’s body, that this society has the most potential to transcend. 

  

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