Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders

Book Overview

This book utilizes a feminist perspective to illuminate and explore the relationship between the anguish of eating disorder sufferers and the problems of ordinary women. The book examines the sociocultural pressure on women to conform to culturally ideal body types and how this affects individual self-concept. Such controversial topics as the relationship between sexual abuse and eating disorders, the use of medications and the role of hospitalization,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1572301821
• ISBN13: 9781572301825
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Guilford Publications
• Length: 465 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

reveals dearth of serious feminist theorizing about EDs

This collection of twenty-two essays by therapists, professors, researchers, and philosophers explores the sociocultural phenomenon of eating disorders from a feminist perspective, working through questions of theory and application with an eye toward cultivating a better-informed approach to the epidemic. The book begins with some historical framing, includes a section on the issues that mere fact of having a body raise for patient and therapist, deals with questions of textuality and discourse, and calls for a feminist model of treatment and recovery as well as a redefined research agenda for the entire field. Two important essays, Marcia Germaine Hutchinson's "Imagining Ourselves Whole: A Feminist Approach to Treating Body Image Disorders" and Deborah L. Tolman and Elizabeth Debold's "Conflicts of Body and Image: Female Adolescents, Desire, and the No-Body Body," unsettle the position of woman within speech and society by using the compound "body-image" to show how woman stands as both speaking, acting subject (body) and passive gazed-at object or picture (image).

A well-explicated series of works on a ubiquitous problem

The authors delve into some of the least-examined aspects of eating disorders with grace and insight. This is the book that the eating disorder literature has needed: one that incorporates a feminist perspective, involves cultural considerations, and combines theory with research for a dynamic text.

A Powerful Read

I have read many books on the multidimensional subject of eating disorders, and I can confidently say that this is one of the best. The 22 authors deal with all aspects of eating disorders: historical, cultural, social, and psychological, to name just a few. I especially like the on-going theme of the FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE--I find it empowering. Hopefully, the views in this book can generate discussion that will lead to change.