Thesis Abstract

There exists an ocularcentric focus on the visual image of the anorexic body, to the exclusion of the anorexic body as lived, in popular, medical and feminist discourses. This focus is fueled by a desire to witness the Otherness of the anorexic body that continually reinscribes anorexic subjects as strange, pathological and other-than-human. In this thesis I work from the premises that the behavior of food refusal and the physical state of emaciation are dissociable, and that the relationship between anorexia and emaciation is neither predetermined nor natural. Through exploring the discursive construction of “the anorexic body” in three historical time periods, I demonstrate how the provocativeness of the image of emaciation has played an important role in the solidification of the diagnostic criteria of anorexia nervosa, and how anorexics’ emaciation has been and continues to be pointed to as the emblem of anorexic illness, and in turn, Otherness.

In Chapter 1, I locate the beginning of the relationship between anorexia nervosa and emaciation in the medical debates of the 1870s surrounding the emergent condition of “anorexia” amongst young women. English physician Sir Wiliam Gull, seeking to gain the prestige associated with discovering a new illness, sought to establish anorexia nervosa as a new category of disease. His chief task in achieving this end was to convince his peers that anorexia nervosa was an illness distinct from hysteria. I argue that Gull successfully used the image of the emaciated anorexic to convince his peers that “anorexia nervosa” was an illness more akin to consumption than hysteria, and therefore an illness separate from hysteria and worthy of its own diagnosis. As a result of Gull’s efforts, emaciation became the enduring central symptom of anorexia nervosa. In Chapter 2 I move from the 1870s to the 1970s, at which point discussions of anorexia nervosa moved from the exclusive realm of medical discourse to popular discourse. I argue that an Otherization of “the anorexic,” grounded in “the anorexic’s” visible emaciation, was transferred from medical discourse to popular discourse. Finally, in Chapter 3, I look at the current moment. Anorexics are for the first time able to represent themselves on a massive scale through pro-anorexia websites, speaking from the position that has traditionally been talked about as other than the speaker in popular, medical and feminist discourses on anorexia. However I conclude that in pro-ana websites, the image of the archetypal anorexic body—which is a sexed, raced, classed and gendered body—represents the ideal pro-ana communities choose to put forth, eclipsing rather than revealing the diversity of experiences of eating disordered people. I end with the hope that we may strive to look beyond the visual in the study of anorexia nervosa and that we may aim to appreciate that severe pain and illness are often not readable on the visible surface of the body.