ABSTRACT
Patriarchal utopias have regarded women’s matrixial entity as the locus to found the individual’s illusion of self-sufficiency. During their upbringing, the indoctrination of women’s psyche is intrinsically related to the distortion of their anatomy to fit into the normative standards of womanhood. In so doing, the patriarchal woman becomes a compliant member of society, but only after her physical body is silenced and altered to ensure the materialization of phallogocentric biopolitics. Refusal to comply with the beauty ideals leaves them as outcasts and even becomes a form of dissidence. In the traditional discourse of utopian narrative, defective women are depicted with the need to overcome these physical flaws, as a reflection of their immaculate conduct. However, many contemporary patriarchal utopias present eating disorders and physical alterations as potential transgressive acts to defy the established utopian body. This dissident corporeality baffles the audience, as though being a visible form of resistance when their voices are not heard, it willingly flirts with death. This suicidal political stance is what Lucy Sargisson calls “ironic utopia” (2000, 141).
This chapter aims to present patterns of behaviour in which contemporary feminist dystopias depict eating disorders as utopian transgressive acts. Particularly, I focus on the figure of the young female rebel, whose liminal identity is lost during puberty. She disgusts her body in the process of self-discovery towards womanhood: what comes along with her biology forces her to abandon agency and innocence and become a beautiful abject object.
