ABSTRACT
Ever since the late 1980s when the ®rst feminist postmodern analyses of dis/ ordered eating began to emerge, there has been an ideological division of sorts between feminists who are interpreted as emphasising the inscriptive nature of cultural imagery and those who emphasise embodiment or the body as experienced. As a scholar, activist and therapist working within the ®eld of dis/ordered eating, I am interested in how postmodern theories of the discursively constituted body might be deployed in ways that trouble the constructed divisions between interior/exterior, experience/discourse, agency/passivity and embodied practice/image. Employing bulimia as a case in point, and drawing upon the work of critical feminists, this chapter engages with ideas about disordered eating, as an outcome of the inscriptive power of cultural representations, and of the body as the site of lived experience engaged in body management practices that may or may not have anything to do with idealised (western) images of slenderness.
