ABSTRACT
Eating disorders are widely acknowledged to be fuelled by media and other social discourses delineating normative notions of the female body. In this chapter, I argue that diagnostic discourses on eating disorders themselves delineate normative notions of the female self and discuss an alternative way of making sense of eating disorders. The ®rst part of the chapter brie¯y discusses historical and contemporary discourses on eating disorders. I will analyse how Hilde Bruch's pioneering research on obesity and anorexia emerged from a speci®c American historical context between 1930 and 1960. Her pre-war research on the causes of childhood obesity among poor immigrants framed fat children as constrained by the traditionalism of their Eastern European families. Bruch's later research on anorexia interpreted young middle-class self-starving women as falling victim to the post-war, middle-class, suburban mass culture, associated with fascism and communism. Both the obese and the anorexic individual were de®ned as de®cient in relation to the American, liberal or rugged individualism ± imagined as male, white and privileged ± while articulating speci®c historical anxieties of their times.
