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Eating Disorders: The Feminist Challenge to the Concept of Pathology

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The Body in Medical Thought and Practice

Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine ((PHME,volume 43))

Abstract

In the clinical literature on eating disorders, the description, classification, and elaboration of “pathology” has been the motor of virtually all research. In the leading journals, attempts to link eating disorders to one or another specific pathogenic situation (biological, psychological, familial) proliferate, along with studies purporting to demonstrate that eating disorders are members of some already established category of disorder (depressive, affective, perceptual, hypothalamic, etc.). Anorexia and bulimia increasingly are appearing in diverse populations of women, making the possibility of describing a distinctive profile for each less and less likely [11, 21, 30, 39, 66]. Yet the search for common “underlying” pathologies still fuels much research [24, 49]. As each proposed model is de-stabilized by the actual diversity of the phenomena, more and more effort is put into precise classification of distinctive “subtypes”, and new “multidimensional” categories emerge (e.g., bulimia as “biopsychosocial” illness [36]), which satisfy fantasies of precision and unification of phenomena that have become less and less amenable to scientific clarity and distinctness.

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Note

  1. This piece, in modified form, will appear as part of a chapter of my forthcoming book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (University of California Press, 1992).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, USA

    Susan Bordo

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  1. Susan Bordo
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  1. Loyola College in Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

    Drew Leder

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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Bordo, S. (1992). Eating Disorders: The Feminist Challenge to the Concept of Pathology. In: Leder, D. (eds) The Body in Medical Thought and Practice. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7924-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7924-7_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4140-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-7924-7

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