ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Martha Rosler explores the issue of dieting and starvation in her 1977 video, Losing: A Conversation with the Parents. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rosler's background and education and her involvement with art and leftist politics from early on. It then discusses how she uses a fake news interview about the death of a fictional teenage girl from an eating disorder to examine how the media perpetuates the “thin ideal” that pressures women into extreme dieting measures. This chapter considers how Rosler frames the conversation of self-starvation by an upper-middle-class white girl within a larger political discourse around the social and political ills of global hunger and malnutrition. In so doing, Rosler calls out the systems of patriarchal capitalism that allow for either form of starvation to be considered socially acceptable.
