Abstract
The essay analyzes anorexia as a theatrical performance, complete with its chosen acting school and particular dramatic features (plot, acting style, suspense-establishing mechanisms and motifs).
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Notes
While, to my knowledge, there exists no sustained discussion of the anorectic as actor/director, there are important anticipations and overlapping claims that should be read alongside this essay in a comprehensive consideration of anorexia as theatricality. Maud Ellman writes about the interdependency between the ability to maintain hunger and the state of being perceived, and many of her insights could be cast as claims regarding performance (1993, 17). For Sigal Gooldin’s analysis of the spectacle-based dimension of various forms of performed hunger in the nineteenth century, see Gooldin (2003). In her analysis of contemporary anorexia, Gooldin (2008) perceives anorexia as a self-orchestrated heroic drama.
See papers by Burns, Probyn, and Malson, (in Malson and Burns eds., 2009, 113–145).
Many online sites provide statistics that undermine ethnic stereotyping of eating disorders. For a relatively recent survey of the studies on the actual ethnic dissemination of eating disorders and the methodological problems of generating reliable data in this field, see Cummins 2005.
The blog is called Yummy Secrets—A Proana blog (http://yummy-secrets.blogspot.com).
Emily Halban reports a similar combination of theoretical clarity regarding her situation coupled with an inability to put this understanding into practice (2008, 116).
Many of the gender-related patterns highlighted in feminist writings on anorexia can be recast as claims about performing gender, or (subversively) dis-performing it in order to awaken a de-automatization of expectations, or as vain attempts to perform a gender-neutral identity. For the latter, see MacSween (1993, 4, 252). Relevant too, is Susan Bordo’s proposal to relate to eating-disorders as a personal enactment that reproduces (in my terms, dramatizes) social categories and concerns relating to the shifts between calculated parsimony and gluttonous self-indulgence in consumer cultures (1993, 198–199). A less familiar suggestion in this context is that feminism is itself somehow importantly linked to the emergence of eating-disorders, thereby attempting to account for the disturbing conjunction of first wave feminism and the emergence of eating disorders precisely in socio-ethnic contexts in which the woman’s liberation movement was most effectively felt. The suggestion would be that anorexia presents itself as a distorted possibility for total form of self-theatricalization, relying on the same capacities that would have enabled a woman to become a perfect mother and wife in the past, precisely as a crisis in women’s self-theatricalization was set in motion by feminism (for thoughts regarding such crisis, though not in terms of a crisis of shifting paradigms of self-theatricality, see Kim Chernin (1986, 17)).
A structurally similar argument has been made in fat studies: putting on weight is a mode of unsexing a body as it is being called to enter social regimentation. The thesis is Orbach’s (Fat is a Feminist Issue). For discussion and criticism of it, see Probyn (2003, 113–123).
Chernin’s (1986) is a sustained argument in which this claim is further restricted to the relations between mothers and daughters (rather than my use of the gender-neutral ‘child’).
“The options before me were equally abhorrent. I could slow down my exercise, eat more food, and gradually inflate into the monster I was so desperately fleeing, or I could continue my weight control efforts and ultimately end up in the hospital—Children’s Hospital at that!” (1983, 92–3, emphasis in the original). “My dad decided that if I was going to act like and obstinate child I should be treated like one. At five foot seven and 92 lb, perhaps I even looked like one” (p. 103, cf. p. 145).
Brumberg (1988, 11–42) aptly maintains that culture-based accounts of anorexia are insufficient, and favors rather a two-stage model in which the first stage (that can be culture-induced)— “recruitment into starvation”— is followed by a second, “career” stage, in which the persistence of starvation is no longer voluntary and related to cultural effects.
Maisel et al. (2004) present an elaborate attempt to personify anorexia as a dangerous possessive entity that insinuates itself into the would-be anorectic through various tactics which involve a combination of feigned friendliness and prescriptive demands. Consider, for example, the letter written by an anorectic (when asked to write as the voice of her own anorexia):
“I am a friend of Kristen Webber—her best friend. I have unselfishly dedicated myself to save her life. I tell her the truth and keep her safe. The thoughts I give her help her to become a better person. When she listens to me, she is happier and her problems disappear. Since I am the only one who tells her the truth and really wants her to be happy, I am her only friend….The most important thing she needs to realize is that she is …overweight. I’ve seen her body and know that this is the truth. People tell her differently, but they haven’t seen her like I have. She is the fattest person I’ve ever met. My job is to bring her into reality so she can see this and change…” (pp. 66–7).
“6:00 A.M. Rise, coffee, read Bible, dress for jogging; 06:30. Jog four miles; 7:15. Stretching exercises; 7:45. Dress for school, join family devotion” (O’Neill 1983, 80–81).
Megan Warin’s Abject Relations extensively discusses the abjectness of food in anorexia (2010, 99–127). Among the memoirs I have studied, the one that centrally brings out this dimension is Emily Halban’s. Here are some sentences from Halban’s memoir regarding fats: “I have effectively become afraid of such foods [fats]; they are the enemy. Taking the step to swallow any from the barred list remains such a frightening task though I know, I know, I should.”; “When we have chicken I take a piece and squeeze it in my napkin when no one is looking my way so as to pump out every last ounce of grease.” (2008, 117, 123). One of her strategies to avoid fats in restaurants was, she says, to “douse my food in vinegar, allowing it to soak through the food…to see whether there were any floating particles.” (p. 92).
Psychodramatist M. Katherine Hudgins (1989) provides material from self-psychology regarding the self-fragmentation and discontinuous sense of self in anorectics, describing psychodramatic interventions that aim to empower and solidify the self that is there. Dance-therapists Julia B. Rice, Marylee Hardenbergh and Lynne M. Hornyak note that in anorectics, “movements tend to be initiated in the peripheral body parts, as opposed to centrally in the trunk. These peripheral movements do not travel in a natural flow. They remain gestures, separate from full involvement with the body [which reflects] detachment from the self” (1989, 260).
Salvador’s Minuchin (1978) advocates a “systems model” rather than a “linear approach” to understanding the dynamics of anorexia. In the latter, the therapist isolates the anorectic, relating to her as the entity that should be explained and treated. In the former, the family is the basic unit, and the anorectic is merely one of its parts. The theatrical claims above, suggest that sometimes it might be useful to perceive the anorectic and her family as enmeshed in co-producing and reciprocally directing and acting in a jointly staged play.
‘Spectacle’ is a good term to use since it captures the continuity between contemporary anorexia and past forms of performed hunger (religious or theatrical); see Goodlin (2003).
The same vagueness as to what must be externalized appears in drama-therapist Maggie Young’s description of a drama exercise dealing with the concept of rubbish in a group of bulimic women: “Each member was asked to draw their image of rubbish and how it was contained, prior to expressing this through the body. Some members found the exercise difficult, saying that rubbish could not be drawn or represented as ‘rubbish is inside me and I am the rubbish’.” (1995, 116) It is the unrepresentable, unfocused nature of the inner polluting element that should impress us in this context – a non-definable foreign essence that cannot be assimilated into the self and yet, precisely because it is unrepresentable, can never be satisfactorily and finally expunged.
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This essay has benefited from thoughtful comments, eye-opening suggestions and significant leads by Inbal Barel, Emily Budick, Ahuva Goldstand, Sigal Gooldin and Talia Trainin.
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Zamir, T. The Theatricalization of Death. J Med Humanit 33, 141–159 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9180-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9180-x