ABSTRACT
Feminist scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has long taken anorexic or bulimic bodies produced variously by starvation, bingeing and purging as a focal point in the domain of body politics; key works have suggested that these eating practices are responses to gender-based disempowerment. Similarly, and more recently, feminist scholars have addressed fat bodies as symptomatic of the hegemony of gender and, conversely, as spectacles of resistance to gender norms. Yet because the vast majority of the scholarly literature on eating disorders emerges from this medical paradigm, the politics of the normalization project remain largely invisible. Discourse analysis from a critical feminist perspective provides a much-needed antidote and this chapter, written by a Communication scholar with a feminist cultural studies perspective, attempts to shed light on this normalization process.
