Writing Size Zero
Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures
Isabelle Meuret
The question underlying this research is how to reconcile the medical discourse which
mostly defines anorexia as a “mental” disease and what anorexics actually say about their
experience of self-starvation. In other words, is it possible to make sense of this hunger strike,
which is often misunderstood and whose sufferers consequently receive inappropriate
treatment.
The once enigmatic term anorexia, which was hardly known before the 1980s, has
today become common parlance and is no longer restricted to the medical jargon. It seems
that anorexia has reached epidemic proportions at the turn of the millennium, although figures
often remain vague. Nevertheless, like hysteria in the nineteenth century, anorexia nervosa, as
it is qualified today, has become a fin de siècle disease and sparked off massive interest from
doctors and researchers from other disciplines. 1 This compelling pathology has copiously fed
the medical, but also sociological, cultural, feminist, literary, and psychoanalytical literature,
to wit the number of books on the topic and the publication of magazines which specialise in
food pathologies. Reviews like the American Journal of Eating Disorders dissect the body ad
nauseam, with articles ranging from the origins of anorexia in the brain to the prevalence of
anorexia in the Jewish population, to male anorexia.
True, the pathology is fascinating. Starving in a world of plenty is a daring challenge,
and it is worth mentioning that this “mental” disease has the highest death rate in the West.
Such facts confirm, if need be, that anorexia is more than the passing fad of some fashionconscious teenagers. It is, as Maud Ellmann argues, “a strange adventure in seduction” since
you cannot really starve without obliging the other to intervene. 2
The objective of this paper is twofold. First, on the basis of experiential texts written
by women who suffer(ed) from self-starvation or witness(ed) the ailing condition of a relative,
it describes a writing process – writing size zero –, which provides information about the
pathology and its related creativity. 3 Second, it dismantles some myths regarding anorexia.
Although self-starvation is a killer, it cannot be reduced to a debilitating disease. Indeed, there
are a lot of preconceptions and reductive interpretations of anorexia, for instance that it is the
malady of young white female upper-class westerners. In this perspective, the multicultural
aspect of the study is of special interest.
In the manner of Susan Sontag, we posit that anorexia is not a metaphor. Anorexics
are literally starving. Based on its Greek etymology αν and ορεγομαι, anorexia means absence
of desire. It is the sublimation of an insatiable appetite, the yearning for something that has
yet to be expressed. As Lacan said, it is “eating nothing,” and this nothing represents a void
that has to be named. We define anorexia as a pathology, rather than a disease, i.e. as the
expression of pathos and as an effort of the organism to regain its balance and retrieve its
harmony, whatever it takes. 4
As it has often been repeated, the term was first coined simultaneously in England and
in France in 1873, as anorexia nervosa by William Gull and as anorexie hystérique by
Charles Lasègue, respectively. The former emphasised the physical or biological factors in the
aetiology of anorexia, whereas the latter was convinced that the pathology was a consequence
of a deficient psychological mechanism and flawed emotional bonds. Yet, a case of “nervous
consumption” was described earlier, namely by Richard Morton in 1689 and then 1694 in his
Phthisologia; or, a Treatise on Consumptions, and a phase of insanity called “sitomania,” or
fear of food, was identified by William Stout Chipley in 1859. 5
1
For Rudolph Bell, the current anorexia nervosa entails a link with the holy anorexia of
medieval saints like Catherine of Sienna. Although one should not obliterate the religious
rationale behind the fasting of those women, and their lack of concern with thinness, there
remains a common attitude of abnegation and desperate need to control their bodies. While it
is impossible to conflate medieval and modern fasting because of the totally different cultural
contexts in which they occur, Bell insists that both involve “the need to establish a sense of
self, a contest of wills, a quest for autonomy.” Moreover, the so-called vitae on which Bell
bases his assumptions were very effective means to publicise self-starvation. 6 Showalter also
believes that the countless self-help books and autobiographies that come out today have the
same effect as the hagiographies of the Middle Ages.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, for her part, identifies various forms of fasting depending on
the motivation behind self-starvation in her impressive study on the significance of food to
medieval saints. 7 The key issue for Bynum is to understand why food has always been central
as a language of protest for women. There would be a lot to say about the female body indeed,
which is itself food when it bears life, but also about the constricted and stifling domestic
roles played by women across time and space. The numerous occurrences of anorexia in the
Victorian period testify to this phenomenon as well. Anna Krugovoy Silver, for instance,
highlights the continuity between the nineteenth century woman, whose control of the body
was a “fundamental component of Victorian female gender ideology,” and the current frenzy
to conform to beauty ideals. For Silver, anorexia is thus a cultural paradigm. 8
The work of Joan Jacobs Brumberg is instrumental in understanding the switch “from
sainthood to patienthood.” 9 Fasting women commanded admiration; their behaviour was
inspirational. But the fascination lasted until the sixteenth century, when the clergy decided
that these women were insane and not saints. The general craze for self-starving women then
faltered and finally disappeared. Some anorexics obviously emphasise the sacred dimension
of their endeavour, but most of them are bound to defend such a line of thinking given that
their family is religious in the first place. The ascetic determination that pervades the
testimonies collected by Caroline Giles Banks is undeniable, and the overrepresentation of
anorexia in the Jewish population is a fact, as Doctor Thomas Silber has shown, but the
pathology is in these cases always determined by the particular background of the sufferers. 10
Obviously, the ritual of the dieting process provides a structure for subjects who may lack
substance and need a sense of direction. A pathology can therefore be a coping mechanism to
avoid depression, for instance. In this perspective, Brumberg is right to emphasise that sadly
enough, the pursuit of thinness is one of the few coherent philosophies offered to young
women today. Religious or not, the objective is, as Maud Ellmann argues, to experience “a
miraculous transfiguration, be it “in the body of a movie star” or “the body of an angel.” 11
So much has been written about anorexia, that it is difficult to separate the wheat from
the chaff. The very term anorexia nervosa is a modern construction, which reductively poses
limits as to the signification of self-starvation today. Like Jacques Maître, I prefer to cut the
term to the bone and to relieve it from any oversimplification or improper interpretation.
According to Maître, there is an “anorexic way of being in the world,” which might even been
thought of as an anorexic ideology. 12 And it is true that “morbidity is still a way of life,” as
Georges Canguilhem argues. 13
As the overabundance of studies on anorexia proves, the pathology is saturated with
meanings, so much so that some authors now refer to its inevitable “coding problem.” Abigail
Bray conceives of anorexia as a “reading disorder,” given that “the territory of the anorexic
body has been colonized by a motley group of discourses contesting the truth of the anorexic
lack.” 14 Starting from a taxonomy of different interpretations, from which countless
neologisms have sprung up, she denounces the imprisonment of anorexics in “the sentence of
2
the medical discourse.” Bray regrets that anorexics have to fit in a prewritten text which is
very restrictive and alienating.
There is indeed an “epidemic of signification,” both within the field of medicine, but
also within all other disciplines taken together. The latest version of the American psychiatric
manual, DSM IV, has an increased number of entries regarding eating disorders, and anorexia
is now referred to as a code number – DSM IV-307.1 –, which raises questions as to the
dehumanisation of the pathology. Some doctors, though, believe that tinkering with the
criteria and creating subcategories has not helped at all our understanding of anorexia. 15 The
“epidemic of signification,” as Bray calls it, characterises the mythologizing of anorexia.
Roland Barthes explains that “terminology” and consequently neologisms, are necessary to
“decipher myths.” 16
Nevertheless, although Bray makes a point in denouncing the fact that right-thinking
doctors and therapists may have induced more stress or despair in some patients, it would be
an outright aberration to reject the medical breakthroughs in the field of eating disorders. The
current research carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, for instance by Doctor Walter Kaye
in the United States, and the team of Doctors David Collier and Janet Treasure in England,
focuses on the genetic and biological predispositions of people with eating disorders. 17 By
identifying the genes that could possibly be responsible for anorexia – a process which
implies a careful observation of the levels of serotonin in the patients’ brains – these scientists
are contributing to a better understanding and, most importantly, an effective treatment of
anorexia.
As Deleuze and Guattari said about Kafka’s work, writing is fasting because food and
words compete with each other. 18 It seems that some fall prey to the disease following a
language problem, and can paradoxically get back into life through writing itself, which is
their saving grace. Also, it is particularly intriguing to note that some of the most prominent
writers confessed that they had eating disorders. Interestingly enough, Leslie Heywood has
thrown into relief an “anorexic logic” that undermines modernist literature. 19 As for Maud
Ellmann, her work on starving and writing is a milestone in the field. While the former
emphasises the becoming text of the literal body, the latter believes in the inverse process of
writing to starve.
As this paper illustrates, anorexia and writing are two faces of the same coin. Both
signifying practices are – solidly or flimsily – grounded in the body. Contrary to Heywood,
we would rather postulate that writing size zero is the becoming flesh of the textual body.
Writing, i.e. the production of a “linguistic flesh,” is the body of the we(a)ning author. 20 In
other words, the writing process of anorexics is beyond representation, and is more on the side
of figuration. Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook denounce the harmful effects that excessive
representations can have on anorexics:
In terms of eating disorders, this ambivalence surrounding representation might be cashed out as
follows: the anorexic is the victim of representation, trapped in embodiment through stereotypical and
alienating images – but at the same time only representation can cure this malaise; only a realistic,
nonrepressive and less regulative form of representation will allow women to see themselves as
autonomous subjects. 21
Bray and Colebrook’s perception of the anorexic body as “productive rather than
representational” is illuminated by insights into the Deleuzean theoretical interpretation of
anorexia as a complex mechanism. 22 Although it is impossible to reconcile Lacan with
Deleuze, it is nevertheless essential to delve into the latter’s perceptive reading of anorexia as
a question of “fluxes,” and not just “food fluxes” but also “a clothes flux, a flux of language, a
flux of sexuality.” 23 Therein lies the truth of the anorexics, i.e. in their dealing with a
prismatic life experience and concurrent short-circuit.
3
Most of the writers turn to a fragmented kind of writing, resort to their own sensations
to translate self-starvation. Prisoners of language and food obsessions, often entangled in an
enmeshed relationship with their mothers, anorexics regress to a pre-subjective stage. Unable
to define their body outline, they desperately lack autonomy and have no access to the other
and desire. Their figurative writing, which is a semiotic assemblage of flesh and words,
intends to reflect these sensations as much as it keeps them in a certain motion. As already
mentioned, anorexic writing is a question of figuration and not representation, the latter being
an “embarrassed figuration,” i.e. “when nothing emerges, when nothing leaps out of the
frame.” 24 Writing size zero is the dynamic binding of multifarious vanishing lines that shake
the anorexics out of their lethargy and help them reconcile their parallel worlds or modified
states of consciousness.
By écriture faminine, I refer to the abundance of experiential texts that constitute a
noticeable literary movement. Beside the plethora of self-help books and autobiographies that
has appeared both in the United States and in Europe, texts have also emerged from more
surprising places regarding the alleged overrepresentation of the pathology in the West.
Examples are the diary of Algerian author Sabrina Kherbiche and the novel of Zimbabwean
writer Tsitsi Dangarembga. 25 In both cases, anorexia epitomises a problem of hybridity and
conflicting identities. The former, Sabrina Kherbiche, has an Algerian father and a French
mother, and she is completely torn apart between two cultures, all the more so since she loses
her virginity before marriage, which means that she is lost, in the Algerian context. The
consequence of this is that she has her virginity reconstructed – a new hymen is sewn inside
her body, hence the title of her diary, La Suture. On her wedding night, the fraud is discovered
and she is rejected by her husband and forced to flee to France to avoid shame in her country.
Following this terrible trauma, she becomes severely anorexic. In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions, a young Zimbabwean girl, Nyasha has to leave her country with her
family to study in England. Being separated from her grandmother, from her African roots,
she is also desperate because she ends up being a stranger everywhere. She is not British, but
she is no longer African anymore. She is desperately looking for authenticity and anorexia is
the response to her internal fragmentation. In their writings, both authors manage to reconcile
both identities. Kherbiche writes a diary (western kind of genre) with a lot of Arabian motifs
(light, music), while Dangarembga produces a text that appropriately fits in her grandmother’s
tradition of story telling, i.e. allegorical at some point, and peppered with shona words (her
mother tongue)
Mauritian author Lindsey Collen brings forward the testimony of a young anorexic
woman whose pathology derives both from family and cultural problems, such as the
Americanisation of her society. 26 Countless examples exist across the world, some of them
figuring anorexia as a hunger strike, a sociocultural syndrome, or a search for the sacred.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of dealing with texts originating from a variety of cultural
backgrounds, there nevertheless exists a common ground to analyse them. This joint fabric is
writing itself, made of textual and corporeal “regimes of signs” that are intertwining to form a
body of evidence. 27 All texts testify to the coalescence of fluxes which make up the anorexic
logic, or philosophy.
Three subcategories can be delineated on the basis of the multicultural corpus. A first,
limited, category of texts, renunciation / disincarnation, is produced by women still in the
throes of anorexia. Their writing is opaque, schizophrenic, fragmented (use of different
pronouns, impersonal sentences), and extremely confusing. A second group of texts,
enunciation / incarnation, deals with testimonies by women who are in the process of
recovering from anorexia. They are writing using the pronoun “I” and manage to express their
fears and anger. The last category, denunciation / reincarnation, is more critical of medical
4
misinterpretations and sometimes offers alternative treatments. More distance is here taken
from anorexia, the author resorting to the “she” pronoun, as if to keep the pathology at bay.
From this group of texts, Australian author Fiona Place’s Cardboard (1990) stands as
a good example of the first subcategory. Her text is about the reminiscences of an anorexic
young girl named Lucy, who confesses how “frightened and withdrawn” she felt while in the
midst of events she could not control. 28 Her text offers several clues as to the enigma of
anorexia. First, there may exist a biological predisposition to develop the condition; second,
anorexia shares similarities with schizophrenia and should be understood as a pathology of
language. In a few straightforward words, the narrator Lucy announces her decision to starve:
It was then that I decided to stop eating altogether.
to ward off
Panic 29
Fiona Place is very critical of the medical jargon that is “a linguistic straightjacket,”
which tends to standardise or universalise the pathology. 30 She is in fact the only author to
point out that physiological reasons play a part in the onset of anorexia. While on a trip from
Australia to England, a trip that was like a maturity test which involved leaving her family
behind her, she had an ulcer, lost blood, and ended up in intensive care. As a doctor told her
later, she then deceived herself into thinking that separating from her mother meant dying.
Both events – ulcer and bleeding – were in fact symptoms of a panic attack, which triggered
her self-starvation. Indeed, anorexia is for Lucy the inevitable response to “fear [that] ate at
[her] constantly.” 31 It makes sense in the light of the latest findings regarding anorexia.
Indeed, as Doctor Walter Kaye explains, renouncing food may be a way for anorexics to fend
off panic since fasting reduces the levels of serotonin in the brain, and serotonin is a powerful
mediator of emotions and judgment. As malnutrition affects brain chemistry, the resulting
imbalance may lead to eating problems. 32
According to Julia Kristeva, those who suffer from maladies of the soul are unable to
structure themselves. 33 Therefore they represent through their bodies. Creating a process that
mingles flesh and words, helps figure rather than represent the anorexic experience. Through
the voice of Lucy, Fiona Place identifies her pathology as a language problem. At some point,
she develops a fear of words and letters, which I like to call “physiograms,” i.e. units in which
flesh and words coagulate and reveal the essence of her condition. These “physiograms”
constitute the yardstick to read the grammatology of anorexia. By way of illustration, Place
writes that:
she got to
the stage
where she was
scared of
the letter e
E for employment
E for existence
E for ego
little e’s
were jumping
up and down
before her eyes
every minute of
the day 34
5
At this stage, Lucy’s ego is broken and fragmented. Consequently, she topples over
into a world where her perception of reality is altered and her apprehension of language is
irrational. Lucy is thus both afraid of food and language – “[t]he e was nearly choking [her] to
death.” 35 Eating disorders and language problems are also symptoms of schizophrenia, and in
Place’s text, the narrator clearly suffers from a depersonalisation which leads to a schizoid
fragmentation. Lucy’s food and word phobias are also concurrent with her hearing voices,
bouts of madness and delusions:
The food wouldn’t stop screaming. The neat little nuclear family of edibles stared white into white. The
vegetables linked forces with the fish, the apple pie serenaded the icecream and the yoghurt nestled
healthily next to the over-ripe banana.
The rest of the food glared beadily up at me, but I refused to be sucked in. 36
Janusz Wróbel describes schizophrenic language as “a separate linguistic system,”
which is opaque and difficult to understand. 37 This particular idiom is mired in neologisms,
metaphors, and chains of associations. The hallucinations show that ego, food and language
conflate in a very tight knot, and Lucy resorts to new words of her own making to share her
experience of living in the obsessive anorexic world:
She parch onion lipped one tired evening that she was no longer my mother.
She gave me a cool fisheyed look and opened the fridge door to get out her own dinner. 38
As Wróbel notes, neologisms and also peculiar punctuation characterise schizophrenic
language, and Fiona Place’s reshaping and reformatting of English is a strategy to match it
with her anorexic experience. Indeed, Wróbel shows that, at least in the case of schizophrenia,
there is an adaptation of language to experience, and not the opposite. By infusing the
language with new and “sensory-pictorial” words, Place makes her pathology palpable for the
reader and indicates that her being-in-the-world has been modified. 39 Other means are used to
convey the idea of fragmentation. For instance, she writes either in prose or poetry, or she
uses italics and bold types to show her awareness that language is made of different subtexts,
some of which she cannot grasp. And finally, she changes perspectives, using first and third
person pronouns, as well as odd and eccentric punctuation, as if to torture language as she
does with her body, either with hyphens:
Fiona Place’s claim that anorexia is “first and foremost a language problem,”
emphasises the fact that her condition is constitutive of the speaking subject in a particular
social and cultural context. Second, she also suggests that the clinical discourse is reductive
because homogenising. In other words, she denounces the patients’ dependence on physicians
and experts, who may ignore or play down the variety of anorexic experiences. As Abigail
Bray explains, “Place argues that the clinical definition of anorexia nervosa creates the
identity of the subject who practises self-starvation by excluding everyday language: any
other understanding of the anorexic’s identity is marginalized. 40 Or, to put it differently,
Place’s reminiscences provide not only a guiding framework to capture anorexia from within,
but they are also an attempt to explain the relevance of experiential writing and take issue
with some therapeutic practises.
Anorexia, although predominantly female, is not limited to women. Intriguing is the
fact that a number of prominent writers, either male or female, were openly anorexic. Some of
them spontaneously linked their self-starvation to their writing. André Gide confessed in his
journal that he suffered from anorexia, and that writing helped him get his appetite back.
Byron is often cited as the perfect model of the romantic self-starving artist. He spent his life
trying to dominate his appetites and tame his body. Kafka confessed in his own diary that he
6
had to abstain from food to be able to write. Neither was Karen Blixen productive when she
ate, and she preferred to starve herself for art’s sake. Emily Brontë had her own issues with
food, just like Virginia Woolf, or the American poet Emily Dickinson before her. And these
are just a few examples. This puzzling observation originates from the dual relation between
food and words, but again, all these authors were led to fast and even starve for various
reasons. Further research should be conducted on the compulsive writing and obsessive notetaking that anorexics often develop.
Surely there are various forms of anorexia, all of which engage with a diverse range of
issues. While some anorexics deliberately embark on a hunger strike against any kind of
authority, others respond to an unnameable trauma, have psychosomatic reactions to panic
attacks, suffer from the consequences of physical injury, do penance because of religious
ideals, or go on a starvation diet amid contradictory messages from the consumer society. All
these facets need to be observed, and all of them touch up the portrait of the anorexic. As
Helen Malson notes, there is “fictioning” of various “anorexias” – and the plural is intentional
– which is attributable to the interdisciplinarity of a thought-provoking subject matter. 41 The
many interpretations that have emerged are of crucial significance to understand the
phenomenon and, most importantly, to try and cure people who claim they are not patients
and that anorexia is their way of living.
Although anorexia is a debilitating experience and a lethal pathology, writing size zero
is an ethical process. By appending a message to their pathology, the authors convey meaning
to anorexia. Indeed, by exposing the agony they are going through, and by offering their
personal testimonies, they contribute to the creation of new epistemologies. The abundant
research that has been carried out in the field has paradoxically complicated our perception of
anorexia, and treatment has remained highly unsatisfactory. As some writers stipulate, or with
regards to their confirmed authorship, we are led to believe that writing autobiographically or
simply writing, i.e. laying out letters on paper, building up words and sentences, and possibly
constructing a plot, obviously helps some anorexics to pull themselves together. Therefore,
writing size zero is also a way to recover. The paradox is that some may fall prey to anorexia
following a language problem. Conversely, some anorexics manage to repair the disjunction
they experienced at some point in their lives, and keep on track by substituting words for
food, and then food for words. In this perspective, we should encourage creative and curative
cultures. Writing size zero is a gift of life.
1
Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1998 [New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997]), 17-20.
2
Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 17.
3
This paper is part of a wider project, published in Isabelle Meuret, Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in
Contemporary World Literatures (Brussels: Peter Lang Publishing Group, forthcoming).
4
Georges Canguilhem, Le Normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. Quadrige,
1999 [1966]), 85, 12. My translation.
5
Jean Kestemberg, Évelyne Kestemberg, and Simone Decobert, La Faim et le corps (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1994 [1972]), 14 ; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia
Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 2000 [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambrige University Press, 1988]), 45-46, 104107.
6
Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 8, 150.
7
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988 [1987]), 197.
8
Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 11.
9
Brumberg, 43-61.
10
Caroline Giles Banks, “‘Culture’ in Culture-Bound Syndromes: The Case of Anorexia Nervosa,” Social
Science and Medicine 34:8 (1992): 867-884; “The imaginative use of religious symbols in subjective
experiences of anorexia nervosa,” Psychoanalytic Review 84:2 (1997), 227-236; “‘There Is No Fat in Heaven’:
7
Religious Asceticism and the Meaning of Anorexia Nervosa,” Ethos 24:1 (1996), 107-135. For the
overrepresentation of anorexia in the Jewish population, see for instance Thomas Silber, “Anorexia Nervosa in
Blacks and Hispanics,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 5:1 (1986), 121-128.
11
Ellmann, 14.
12
Jacques Maître, Anorexies Religieuses, Anorexies Mentales: Essai de Psychanalyse Sociohistorique (Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 2000), 13. My translation.
13
Canguilhem, 155. My translation.
14
Abigail Bray, “The Anorexic Body,” Cultural Studies 10:3 (1996), 413-429.
15
Pierre Beumont, David Garner and Stephen Touyz, “Diagnoses of Eating or Dieting Disorders: What May We
Learn from Past Mistakes?” International Journal of Eating Disorders 16:4 (1994), 349-362.
16
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (London: Vintage, 1993), 120-121.
17
For latest research on anorexia, and more precisely in the field of genetic factors contributing to the
development of eating disorders, see the work of Walter Kaye, Janet Treasure, and David Collier. For instance,.
Andrew Bergen et al., “Candidate genes for anorexia nervosa in the 1p33-39 linkage region: serotonin 1D and
delta opioid receptors display significant association to anorexia nervosa,” Molecular Psychiatry 8:4 (2003),
397-406; David Collier and Janet Treasure, “The aetiology of eating disorders,” The British Journal of
Psychiatry 185 (2004), 363-365.
18
In their critical work on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari write that “writing transform[s] words into things
capable of competing with food … To speak, and above all to write, is to fast.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 20.
19
Leslie Heywood, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996).
20
Chantal Chawaf, “Linguistic Flesh,” trans. Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello, in New French Feminisms: An
Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtviron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980),
177-178, originally published as “La Chair linguistique,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires 2534 (1976), 18.
21
Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, “The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of
(Dis)Embodiment,” Signs 24:1 (1998), 37.
22
Ibid., 57.
23
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002 [1987]), 109, 111).
24
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. and notes by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1999 [1975]), 56-57.
25
Sabrina Kherbiche, La Suture (Algiers: Laphomic, 1993);.Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Seattle:
Seal Press, 1989 [London: the Women’s Press, 1988]).
26
Lindsey Collen, There Is a Tide (Port-Louis, Mauritius: Ledykasion pu Travayer), 1990. See also Françoise
Lionnet, “‘She breastfed reluctance into me’: Hunger Artists in the Global Economy,” in Women, Culture, and
Practices of Development, eds. Celeste Schenck and Susan Perry (London: Zed Press, 2001).
27
Deleuze and Parnet, 111.
28
Fiona Place, Cardboard (Sidney, University of New South Wales: Local Consumptions Publications, 1989),
24. Author’s emphasis.
29
Ibid., 153.
30
Ibid., 162.
31
Ibid., 39.
32
Bernie Devlin et al., “Linkage analysis of anorexia nervosa incorporating behavioural covariates,” Human
Molecular Genetics 11:6 (2002), 689-696.
33
Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995).
34
Place, 16
35
Ibid., 71.
36
Ibid., 41, 45.
37
Janusz Wróbel, Language and Schizophrenia (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing
Company, coll. Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe, vol. 23, 1990), 4.
38
Place, 3. My emphasis.
39
Wróbel, 15.
40
Bray, 424.
41
Helen Malson, The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism, and the Social Psychology of Anorexia
Nervosa (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 97.
8