Deconstructing Un/Healthy Body-weight and Weight Management

Abstract

The practices of body-weight management and the normative corporeal ideals embedded therein occupy a pivotal place in the discursive regulation of bodies in contemporary Western/global cultures (Bordo, 1993). As numerous authors (Bordo, 1993; Burns, 2004; Malson, 1998; Orbach, 1993) have illustrated, the corpo/hyper-real ideal of thinness that is inscribed upon female bodies can be understood as one of the principal ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault, 1972) of those subjectivities and practices of weight management that might be termed ‘eating disordered’. From a feminist post-structuralist perspective it is the analyses of these conditions of possibility, the multiple and shifting production and regulation of our always-already discursively constituted embodied subjectivities that are crucial in understanding both pathologised and normalised experiences of body-weight and practices of body management. As outlined below, a growing body of critical feminist analyses have already elucidated how fat and thin bodies are saturated with a multiplicity of gendered meanings and moral connotations, and have identified a considerable array of discursive contexts which are constitutive of ‘anorexic’ subjectivities, bodies and body-management practices (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998, 1999; Probyn, 1987). In doing so, these analyses have thereby exposed the profoundly regulatory and gendered operations of discourse upon the body, elucidated its multiple and socio-historically shifting meanings, deconstructed the seemingly categorical division between the normal and the pathological, and thus located pathologised disorders of eating firmly in the context of normative orders of body-weight and its management.