Womaen under erasure: Anorexic bodies in postmodern context

This paper explores how 'anorexia nervosa' can be understood not so much as individual psychopathology than as a plural collectivity of embodied subje ctivities, experiences and body-management practices, embedded in and const ituted by the contemporary discourses and discursive practices of late twen tieth-century 'postmodern' culture and in the gender power-relations that c ut across this socio-historically specific discursive context. Specifically , the paper uses extracts from a series of interviews conducted with 23 wom en diagnosed and self-diagnosed as 'anorexic'. It deploys a feminist post-s tructuralist form of discourse analysis to analyse the interview transcript s so as to elucidate a recurrent discursive construction of women's 'anorex ic' bodies as disappearing bodies that signify a (feminine) 'anorexic' iden tity constructed as an identity-put-under-erasure. This construction of 'an orexic' embodied subjectivity is located within a gendered 'postmodern' cul tural context in which, it has been argued, the body qua body has been disp laced by the body-as-image and in which identity has been deconstructed. Th e paper thus seeks to move beyond a concept of 'anorexia nervosa' as indivi dual pathology, towards a re-conceptualization of 'anorexia' as discursivel y constituted within the complex contexts of late capitalist 'postmodern' c ulture. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.