INTRODUCTION

This book is about ‘anorexia nervosa’. It is about the distress that many girls and women in contemporary Western society experience around eating and not eating, around losing and gaining weight, being fat or thin, around being a woman. But this book is also about questioning the ways in which we currently understand these ‘anorexic’ behaviours and experiences. It is about questioning the socially dominant ‘mainstream’ bodies of knowledge about ‘anorexia’ and about exploring new ways in which to theorize and research women’s ‘anorexic’ practices and experiences. It is about ‘making recognizable things which would normally remain hidden’ (Freud, in Klein, 1968:339), exploring what ‘anorexia’ has to say about being a woman in late twentieth-century Western culture.