ABSTRACT
Eating disorders have been traditionally conceptualized as “women’s problems.” As a result, much of eating disorder research has focused on the pressures of diet culture, gender roles, and changing feminine beauty ideals to explain why women are disproportionately impacted by these disorders, how socialization and social environment contribute to these disorders, and how gender may moderate the experience of these social environments. While most eating disorder research has centered the experiences of cis women, in recent years, multiple scholars have emphasized the need to explore male, trans, and nonbinary experiences as well. This chapter reviews feminist eating disorder discourses, and how these discourses are often in tension with a fat studies perspective. The chapter reviews the development of feminist thought on eating disorders, synthesizes some of the main developments, and integrates a lens of fat liberation and weight stigma to assess these feminist discourses around eating disorders.
Following this, the chapter briefly examines six of the major tensions and debates in feminist eating disorder literature which must be examined with a fat studies lens: (1) fat acceptance as integral to vs. adjunctive to feminist approaches to eating disorders, (2) anti-fat messaging as health promotion or as a trigger for eating disorders, (3) the need for vs. harm in categorizing, diagnosing, and pathologizing eating problems, (4) eating disorders in non-Western cultures vs. centering white Western experiences, (5) pro-ana and pro-mia sites as spaces of resistance vs. subjugation, and (6) body dysmorphia vs. gender dysphoria and other challenges facing trans eating disorder patients.
