Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (21 page)

The central point of intellectual orientation for this essay is expressed in its subtitle. I take the psychopathologies that develop within a culture, far from being anomalies or aberrations, to be characteristic expressions of that culture; to be, indeed, the crystallization of much that is wrong with it. For that reason they are important to examine, as keys to cultural selfdiagnosis and self scrutiny. "Every age," says Christopher Lasch, "develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure."
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The only aspect of this formulation with which I would disagree, with respect to anorexia, is the idea of the expression of an underlying, unitary cultural character structure. Anorexia appears less as the extreme expression of a character structure than as a remarkably overdetermined
symptom
of some of the multifaceted and heterogeneous distresses of our age. Just as anorexia functions in a variety of ways in the psychic econ

omy of the anorexic individual, so a variety of cultural currents or streams converge in anorexia, find their perfect, precise expression in it.

I will call those streams or currents "axes of continuity":
axes
because they meet or converge in the anorexic syndrome;
continuity
because when we locate anorexia on these axes, its family resemblances and connections with other phenomena emerge. Some of these axes represent anorexia's
synchronicity
with other contemporary cultural practices and forms—bodybuilding and jogging, for example. Other axes bring to light
historical
connections: for instance, between anorexia and earlier examples of extreme manipulation of the female body, such as tight corseting, or between anorexia and longstanding traditions and ideologies in Western culture, such as our GrecoChristian traditions of dualism. The three axes that I will discuss in this essay (although they by no means exhaust the possibilities for cultural understanding of anorexia) are the
dualist axis,
the
control axis,
and the
gender/power axis.
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Throughout my discussion, it will be assumed that the body, far from being some fundamentally stable, acultural constant to which we must
contrast
all culturally relative and institutional forms, is constantly "in the grip," as Foucault puts it, of cultural practices. Not that this is a matter of cultural
repression
of the instinctual or natural body. Rather, there is no "natural" body. Cultural practices, far from exerting their power
against
spontaneous needs, ''basic" pleasures or instincts, or "fundamental" structures of body experience, are already and always inscribed, as Foucault has emphasized, "on our bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures."
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Our bodies, no less than anything else that is human, are constituted by culture.

Often, but not always, cultural practices have their effect on the body as experienced (the "lived body," as the phenomenologists put it) rather than the physical body. For example, Foucault points to the medicalization of sexuality in the nineteenth century, which recast sex from being a family matter into a private, dark, bodily secret that was appropriately investigated by such specialists as doctors, psychiatrists, and school educators. The constant probing and interrogation, Foucault argues, ferreted out, eroticized and solidified all sorts of sexual types and perversions, which people then experienced (although they had not done so originally) as defining

their bodily possibilities and pleasures. The practice of the medical confessional, in other words, in its constant foraging for sexual secrets and hidden stories, actually
created
new sexual secrets—and eroticized the acts of interrogation and confession, too.
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Here, social practice changed people's
experience
of their bodies and their possibilities. Similarly, as we shall see, the practice of dieting—of saying no to hunger—contributes to the anorectic's increasing sense of hunger as a dangerous eruption from some alien part of the self, and to a growing intoxication with controlling that eruption.

The
physical
body can, however, also be an instrument and medium of power. Foucault's classic example in
Discipline and Punish
is public torture during the Ancien Régime, through which, as Dreyfus and Rabinow put it, "the sovereign's power was literally and publicly inscribed on the criminal's body in a manner as controlled, scenic and wellattended as possible."
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Similarly, the nineteenthcentury corset caused its wearer actual physical incapacitation, but it also served as an emblem of the power of culture to impose its designs on the female body.

Indeed, female bodies have historically been significantly more vulnerable than male bodies to extremes in both forms of cultural manipulation of the body. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that women, besides
having
bodies, are also
associated
with the body, which has always been considered woman's "sphere" in family life, in mythology, in scientific, philosophical, and religious ideology. When we later consider some aspects of the history of medicine and fashion, we will see that the social manipulation of the female body emerged as an absolutely central strategy in the maintenance of power relations between the sexes over the past hundred years. This historical understanding must deeply affect our understanding of anorexia and of our contemporary preoccupation with slenderness.

This is
not
to say that I take what I am doing here to be the unearthing of a longstanding male conspiracy against women or the fixing of blame on any particular participants in the play of social forces. In this I once again follow Foucault, who reminds us that although a perfectly clear logic, with perfectly decipherable aims and objectives, may characterize historical power relations, it is nonetheless "often the case that no one was there to have invented" these aims and strategies, either through choice of individuals or

through the rational game plan of some presiding "headquarters."
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We are not talking, then, of plots, designs, or overarching strategies. This does not mean that individuals do not
consciously
pursue goals that in fact advance their own position. But it does deny that in doing so they are consciously directing the overall movement of power relations or engineering their shape. They may not even know what that shape is. Nor does the fact that power relations involve domination by particular groups—say, of prisoners by guards, females by males, amateurs by experts—entail that the dominators are in anything like full control of the situation or that the dominated do not sometimes advance and extend the situation themselves.
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Nowhere, as we shall see, is this collaboration in oppression more clear than in the case of anorexia.

I will begin with the most general and attenuated axis of continuity, the one that begins with Plato, winds its way to its most lurid expression in Augustine, and finally becomes metaphysically solidified and scientized by Descartes. I am referring, of course, to our dualistic heritage: the view that human existence is bifurcated into two realms or substances: the bodily or material, on the one hand; the mental or spiritual, on the other. Despite some fascinating historical variations which I will not go into here, the basic imagery of dualism has remained fairly constant. Let me briefly describe its central features; they will turn out, as we will see, to comprise the basic body imagery of the anorectic.

First, the body is experienced as
alien,
as the notself, the notme. It is "fastened and glued" to me, "nailed" and "riveted" to me, as Plato describes it in the
Phaedo.
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For Descartes, the body is the brute material envelope for the inner and essential self, the thinking thing; it is ontologically distinct from that inner self, is as mechanical in its operations as a machine, is, indeed, comparable to animal existence.

Second, the body is experienced as
confinement and limitation:
a "prison," a "swamp," a "cage," a "fog''—all images that occur in Plato, Descartes, and Augustine—from which the soul, will, or mind struggles to escape. "The enemy ["the madness of lust"] held my will in his power and from it he made a chain and shackled me," says Augustine.
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In the work of all three philosophers, images of

the soul being "dragged" by the body are prominent. The body is "heavy, ponderous," as Plato describes it; it exerts a downward pull.
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Third, the body is
the enemy,
as Augustine explicitly describes it time and again, and as Plato and Descartes strongly suggest in their diatribes against the body as the source of obscurity and confusion in our thinking. "A source of countless distractions by reason of the mere requirement of food," says Plato; "liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the pursuit of truth; it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in very truth, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body."
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And, finally, whether as an impediment to reason or as the home of the "slimy desires of the flesh" (as Augustine calls them), the body is the locus of
all that threatens our attempts at control.
It overtakes, it overwhelms, it erupts and disrupts. This situation, for the dualist, becomes an incitement to battle the unruly forces of the body, to show it who is boss. For, as Plato says, "Nature orders the soul to rule and govern and the body to obey and serve."
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All three—Plato, Augustine, and, most explicitly, Descartes—provide instructions, rules, or models of how to gain control over the body, with the ultimate aim—for this is what their regimen finally boils down to—of learning to live without it.
25
By that is meant: to achieve intellectual independence from the lure of the body's illusions, to become impervious to its distractions, and, most important, to kill off its desires and hungers. Once control has become the central issue for the soul, these are the only possible terms of victory, as Alan Watts makes clear:

Willed control brings about a sense of duality in the organism, of consciousness in conflict with appetite But this mode of control is a peculiar example of the proverb that nothing fails like success. For the more consciousness is individualized by the success of the will, the more everything outside the individual seems to be a threat—including the uncontrolled spontaneity of one's own body Every success in control therefore demands a further success, so that the process cannot stop short of omnipotence.
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Dualism here appears as the offspring, the byproduct, of the identification of the self with control, an identification that Watts sees

as lying at the center of Christianity's ethic of antisexuality. The attempt to subdue the spontaneities of the body in the interests of control only succeeds in constituting them as more alien and more powerful, and thus more needful of control. The only way to win this nowin game is to go beyond control, to kill off the body's spontaneities entirely—that is, to cease to
experience
our hungers and desires.

This is what many anorectics describe as their ultimate goal. "[I want] to reach the point," as one put it, "when I don't need to eat at all."
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Kim Chernin recalls her surprise when, after fasting, her hunger returned: "I realized [then] that my secret goal in dieting must have been the intention to kill off my appetite completely."
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It is not usually noted, in the popular literature on the subject, that anorexic women are as obsessed with hunger as they are with being slim. Far from losing her appetite, the typical anorectic is haunted by it—in much the same way that Augustine describes being haunted by sexual desire—and is in constant dread of being overwhelmed by it. Many describe the dread of hunger, "of not having control, of giving in to biological urge,'' to "the craving, never satisfied thing,"
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as the "original fear" (as one puts it),
30
or, as Ellen West describes it, "the real obsession." "I don't think the dread of becoming fat is the real . . . neurosis," she writes, "but the constant desire for food [H]unger, or the dread of hunger, pursues me all morning. Even when I am full, I am afraid of the coming hour in which hunger will start again." Dread of becoming fat, she interprets, rather than being originary, served as a "brake" to her horror of her own unregulatable, runaway desire for food.
31
Bruch reports that her patients are often terrified at the prospect of taking just one bite of food, lest they never be able to stop.
32
Bulimic anorectics, who binge on enormous quantities of food sometimes consuming up to 15,000 calories a day
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indeed cannot stop.)

These women experience hunger as an alien invader, marching to the tune of its own seemingly arbitrary whims, disconnected from any normal selfregulating mechanisms. Indeed, it could not possibly be so connected, for it is experienced as coming from an area
outside
the self. One patient of Bruch's says she ate breakfast because "my stomach wanted it," expressing here the same sense of alienation from her hunger (and her physical self) as Augustine's when he speaks of his "captor," "the law of sin that was in my member."
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Bruch notes that this "basic delusion," as she calls it, "of not owning the body and its sensations" is a typical symptom of all eating disorders. "These patients act," she says, "as if for them the regulation of food intake was outside [the self]."
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This experience of bodily sensations as foreign is, strikingly, not limited to the experience of hunger. Patients with eating disorders have similar problems in identifying cold, heat, emotions, and anxiety as originating in the self.
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