ABSTRACT
In challenging the prevailing conceptualisation of `eating disorders' as individual psychopathologies, critical feminists have been at the fore in re-theorising `anorexia' (Bordo, 1993; Eckermann, 1997; Hepworth, 1999; Malson, 1998) and, to a lesser extent, `bulimia' (Burns, 2004; Burns and Gavey, 2004) as culturally embedded, complex and heterogeneous collectivities of discursively constituted subjectivities, experiences and body management practices that can be read as expressing a variety of often gender-speci®c cultural norms, values and dilemmas. In dismantling the distinction between the normal and the pathological, we have re-theorised and researched both the diagnostic categories and the lived experiences of girls and women diagnosed as `anorexic' or `bulimic'; understanding them as being constituted within and by the various regulatory norms of late twentieth-and early twenty-®rst century western(ised) cultures. Indeed, the notion that societal `factors', particularly media idealisations of thinness in women, play some part in producing girls' and women's distressed and pathologised body management practices has been widely accepted for some time. The conceptualisation of `eating disorders' as `culture bound' (Littlewood and Lipsedge, 1987; Swartz, 1985), as a problem particular to contemporary western cultures and, more speci®cally, to middle-class, white western girls and young women (see Bordo, this volume), thus has some considerable cultural as well as academic currency.
