ABSTRACT
Bodies become recognizable only as they are connected to a cultural body of meaning-making, and this connection occurs through rituals. Ritual gives the individual body a cultural space or capacity for making meaning. The cultural meaning that is made then co-creates individual experience, such that we come into being through rituals. This chapter discusses the simultaneous and seemingly contradictory meanings of eating disorders as both self-destructive and as a form of resistant survival. Disordered eating has become a ritualized way of being a woman, which seems to standardize one kind of misogynous cultural body, normalizing the extreme practices required to achieve and maintain it. Researchers like Striegel-Moore and Thompson describe how women of colour may use eating disordered behaviours to cope with the stress of bridging different ethnically marked worlds. The chapter presents Gender Section panel which was organized by Virginia Goldner on the contributions of feminist psychoanalysts.
