ABSTRACT

It is a pleasure to write a re¯ection on these chapters examining `therapies' as well as community-based interventions for eating dis/orders, understood from constructionist and feminist perspectives. Before I begin, let me situate myself and my work in relation to the topics at hand. I am a middle-class, heterosexual, Euro-American woman whose academic work ± informed by gender studies, anthropology, post-structuralist approaches to counseling, and cultural studies ± is both a re¯ection of and a critical response to my location within powerful discourses of identity and belonging that are marked by an ethics of individual achievement, both scholarly and bodily (the latter in terms of health and `®tness'). To date, an important part of my life's work has been a constructionist and ethnographic analysis of mainstream, hospital-based, `multidimensional' treatments for anorexia (Gremillion, 2003). I have argued that dominant therapies for and analyses of eating dis/orders in the US (but with relevance elsewhere) participate in socioculturally normalized and historically speci®c conditions of possibility for these problems (cf. Gremillion, 2008). I have also argued that narrative therapy, which is discussed in three of the chapters included in my re¯ection here, is a very promising `alternative' intervention. I am not a therapist, but for some time now I have been developing numerous research and practice collaborations within narrative and collaborative therapy communities, and I have been a participant in many narrative therapy training workshops.