Anorexia

Anorexia as a protest to control the body- to resist, protest, retreat, and separate the person from society, is often an attempt by a person to fit in to society. To be as thin or thinner and as beautiful or more so than the people they see on TV. The constant pressure of the mass media certainly does not help the situation, the popular culture not being one to dissuade the negative aspects of anorexia. This attempt to create the rationality, to be able to look at their bodies not only as the objects they are told to on TV and in the magazines, but as an object that is theirs to control, an expression of themselves that they can control. It is the very control that they crave , and what they cannot have that sets up the constant struggle with anorexia. The anorexia itself ends up reproducing the very problem they are trying to solve, by transforming the problem, spiraling it out of control.



Photo Source: Human Illness: ANorexia [sic]

"The pathologies of female protest function...reproducing rather than transforming...that which is to be protested" (Bordo, Susan; Unbearable Weight p 177)