ABSTRACT
The above encounter re¯ects common ways of working in schools in westernised cultures, where `education' about disordered eating is delivered in de-contextualised and potentially individualising ways. Such interventions (no longer practised in this way by the Eating Dif®culties Education Network (EDEN)) are informed by well-intentioned notions that delivering health education will generate greater awareness resulting in an eventual shift in individual (health-related, and in this case, eating dis/ordered) behaviour. But EDEN's experience in this and other schools ± combined with a developing appreciation of critical feminist and socio-cultural models
of eating issues ± has highlighted the necessity of moving beyond this didactic approach. As this vignette exempli®es, there is an overriding tension between postmodern, feminist conceptualisations of eating dis/orders, as socio-culturally contextualised, gendered and discursively constituted phenomena and a focus on imparting information to students in the hope of generating individual change, as if this were something distinct from the contexts in which those phenomena are constituted and in which young women are immersed. This chapter will therefore highlight some of the ways in which EDEN's work engages with a conceptualisation of disordered eating not as individual psychopathology but as `culturally embedded, complex and heterogeneous collectivities of discursively constituted subjectivities, experiences and body management practices' (Nasser and Malson, this volume: 74).
