ABSTRACT
Wallis Simpson is generally credited with having decreed ‘a woman can never be too rich or too thin’. This book focuses on teenage girls who apply at least part of this saying to the letter and on a diagnosis that runs counter to its premise, by positing that young women can be too thin or have lost too much weight. ‘Another book on anorexia?’ you might ask and it’s true that there have been quite a few. This book differs from the others, though, in one important way: it is grounded in sociology, a discipline that might seem to have a somewhat questionable remit for discussing anorexia. How can we ‘do’ a sociology of anorexia? Is it right, even just on an epistemological level, for sociology to study something that at first sight seems to fall only under the realm of the psychological and pathological?
