ABSTRACT
Even whilst such notions as cognitive distortion, predisposing personality, a gene for anorexia, a biopsychological vulnerability of female bodies and so forth continue to jostle for position in academic, clinical and popular accounts about the causes of `eating disorders', the idea that `eating disorders' are `culture-bound' (Littlewood and Lipsedge, 1987; Swartz, 1985) has nevertheless become widely accepted. `Culture', however, or perhaps more precisely, that which is considered pathogenic about culture and hence `bound' to `eating disorders', tends all too often to be understood only as idealised media images of thin women and the concomitant prescription ± for girls and women in particular but increasingly for boys and men too ± to `diet' (see also Probyn, Burns, both this volume). `Culture' here is thus often reduced to the media, fashion and diet industries such that everything else of culture appears to be `let off the hook' and in a bizarre but ± in my experience, oft-repeated turn of conversation ± these industries may then be further reduced to individuals such as Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham, Gianni Versace or Jean Paul Gaultier, who can stand as metonyms of fashion. So that ®nally, in this scheme of things, it is not culture at all but a handful of famous thin fashion models and (usually gay1) fashion designers who are
held culpable for the spread of `eating disorders'. And, with `cultural cause' thus reduced to a few guilty celebrities and/or to images in the pages of women's magazines, those diagnosed as `anorexic' or `bulimic' are made to appear as the ultimate fashion victims; as (already pathologically vulnerable) `super-dieters' (Polivy and Herman, 1985) who, because of their own individual predisposition or vulnerability, have (irrationally) over-internalised an idealised image of female beauty as thinness.
