Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Keywords

Anorexia, Eating Disorder, Treatment, Pathology

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the materialization of the anorectic body. In the first chapter, I examine philosophical interventions into discourses on anorexia and assert what is attractive about these accounts, what is unattractive, and where an analysis of anorexia needs to go. I argue that what is missing from these accounts is an appreciation of the productive power of those acts, centralized in the psychiatric institution, in and through which a body is recognized as anorectic. The productive power of these practices I refer to as ‘pathologization.’ In the second chapter, I articulate a dialectical account of pathologization which is intended to bridge phenomenological approaches and abstract cultural analyses by (a) locating the points of intersection between the phenomenological account of diagnosis presented by Sartre and the structuralist account of interpellation presented by Althusser and (b) applying a discourse theoretic analysis of the discourses of the institutions most directly implicated in the material production of anorectic bodies. I claim that in and through those acts in which a body is recognized as “anorectic,” the body is materialized as anorectic on objective and subjective registers according to the terms of that recognition, according to and through specific norms. In the third chapter, I explore the play between the objective and subjective materialization of the anorectic body through an analysis of the “treatment” practices which constitute a particular in-patient eating disorder treatment center. I claim that through the very “treatment” practices which are supposed to “treat” the body admitted to this facility, the patient becomes a site of the very cultural oppression in and by which she was produced. I conclude the thesis by urging that further research be conducted on (a) the consequences of the productive power of those practices in which bodies are recognized as having psychiatric disorders in general and (b) alternative treatment methods for anorexia.

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