I was intrigued this week by the feminist/cultural approach to eating disorders in Bordo’s Unbearable Weight. I was particularly interested in how it argued for the interpretation of something like body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) as in fact not a misconception on the part of the patient. Instead of a person developing an abnormal sense of reality (as the medical model would claim), this approach proposes that they are actually perceiving the pressures of gender and society, reflecting reality in their suffering.
According to Bordo, the feminist/cultural paradigm has done three things:
- “cast into doubt the designation of anorexia and bulimia as psychopathology”
- “reconstructed the role of culture and gender as primary and productive rather than triggering or contributory”
- “forced the reassignment, to social causes, of factors viewed in the standard medical model as pertaining to individual dysfunction”
I’m trying to think of how this paradigm would grapple with something like the child obesity epidemic in North America. I agree with the feminist criticism of eating disorders, but I wonder how similar approaches would deal with strategies that attempt to counter the rising rates of type 2 diabetes in kids. Campaigns like Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move seek to end childhood obesity. They could easily been seen as bodily rhetoric that reinforces the “ideal” slim body. But if childhood obesity is proven to be a key link to diabetes and heart disease, isn’t there a moral imperative to promote healthy living?
Busily Bodily 