In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

179 8 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb The aim of this book has been to provide a new approach to the phenomenon of anorexia. In my discussion of anorexia there is one player that I have consciously relegated to the background: the media. As I argued in the introduction , I did not wish to reproduce the discursive explanation of anorexia as a “reading disorder” and tried to steer away from media representations of anorexia. I anticipated that in focusing on participants’ everyday worlds, my fieldwork would be led away from the disembodied textual analyses that have already been extensively explored in the eating disorder literature. As my fieldwork progressed, however, I came to realize that to disengage from the power of these representations would be a grave methodological error. This realization was unavoidable when, toward the end of my research for the book, parts of it were broadcast and printed in the national and international media. It is these very particular representations of anorexia, and their relationship to psychiatry and anthropology, that I address here. In examining the underpinning framings of these characterizations, the major analytical strands of this book come together. Ironically, my conclusions are situated in that which I initially tried to ignore—the intertwined relationship of ethnography and the media. Turning Up the White Noise The relationship between the media and ethnographic enquiry is problematized by Ortner, who broadens the term “media” to “public culture” in order to generate a more inclusive approach to representational systems. Public culture , she argues, includes “all the bodies of images, claims, and representations created to speak to and about the actual people who live in the US: all of the products of art and entertainment (film, television, books, etc.), as well as Reimagining Anorexia 180 ABJECT RELATIONS all of the texts of information and analysis (all forms of journalism and academic production)” (, ). It is through these pervasive and takenfor -granted representations that “lifestyles, habits, tastes and attitudes are everywhere, and inescapably before us. . . . Who [then] can presume to step ‘outside’ of it? Its ideas and assumptions are everywhere, and not least in our own minds” (Ehrenreich , cited in ibid.). The same can be claimed about knowledges and representations of anorexia. Examples of this inescapable relationship were the anonymous flyers that appeared during my fieldwork with increasing regularity: “Lose weight fast”; “Lose  kilograms in  weeks”; “Lose weight now, ask me how.” At first these advertisements annoyed me and I tried to ignore them; they smacked of the insidious commercialism that flourishes around the weight-loss industry and get-rich-quick schemes. But I couldn’t ignore this pervasive “white noise” of fieldwork (see also Marcus , ). Their appearances became more intrusive and significant. Returning to my car following a hospital visit, I found a flyer stuck to the windscreen. When I was unchaining my bike late one night from a lamppost outside a community support service for people with eating disorders, I looked up and there, glued to the pole, was a flyer. After poring over the minute details of food-packaging labels in a supermarket, a participant and I returned to the car to find a weight-loss advertisement flapping under the windscreen wiper. The flyers acted as a forcible reminder of the connections between the fields in which participants and I moved, between institutions, community organizations, public spaces, and people’s homes. Media representations were ubiquitous in each. While waiting in hospital corridors and waiting rooms, I picked up women’s magazines and read stories about movie stars’ weight losses/successes, and sometimes stories of someone’s “battle with an eating disorder.” At Lane Cove a young woman recovering from anorexia leapt across the cushions of the lounge to turn off the television advertisement for a multinational weight-loss consortium. Amanda would while away hours on the bed program by cutting out stories about weight loss (and recipes) in magazines to add to her already voluminous collection at home. The plethora of such media provided community groups with so much ammunition against stereotypes of women and anorexia that one community organization filled a bulletin board at its main office entrance with an ever-changing array of offending clippings. These were the fields in which people traveled, part of their everyday worlds and experiences. To ignore the interconnections between experiences and objects, between people and places, would be to explore only part of their worlds. My field sites, like the everyday worlds of participants, were not pristine , bounded, or contained. People moved back and...

Share