Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia

4. The Complexities of Being Anorexic

70 4 In this chapter I explore the ways in which people with anorexia understood and experienced relatedness in their everyday lives, that is, with how they continually transformed connections by truncating, creating, sustaining, and abandoning them. My understanding of relatedness stems from recent approaches to kinship that have been critical of the traditional divide between biological and social understandings (Carsten b, ; Edwards , ). “Relatedness,” as I use the term, is about the intersection of the social and the biological, which, as Stafford suggests, “refers to literally any kind of relation between persons—including those seemingly ‘given’ by biology and/or ‘produced’ via social interactions—and is thus obviously intended to encompass formal and informal relations of kinship and much else besides. The justification for using such a decidedly general term is . . . that the boundaries between various categories of human social relations . . . are often very malleable indeed” (, –). This malleability allows what I consider a fundamental feature of relatedness to come to the fore: its dynamic, divisive, processual, and at times ambiguous nature. The constantly changing nature of relatedness was how people with anorexia understood and explained their experiences, most particularly through their shifting sense of belonging. The differing and competing knowledges in the field of anorexia brought with them a chain of claims, most notably claims of where people with anorexia belonged—in either psychiatric settings or alternative care. “Belonging” in this frame was premised on what Edwards and Strathern refer to as a “contiguous association of meaning in English, from ownership, to belonging to association to link” (, ). A diagnosis of anorexia nervosa given in a hospital, for example, set in motion a series of placements that designated one as a patient who belonged to psychiatric care and a psychiatric The Complexities of Being Anorexic The body must be seen as a series of processes of becoming, rather than as a fixed state of being. —Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb THE COMPLEXITIES OF BEING ANOREXIC 71 ward; once entered into hospital records, one belonged to what staff termed “the psychiatric community” of people with eating disorders. In various treatment settings (not just psychiatric), people with anorexia were commonly referred to as “my girls” by health practitioners, denoting a taken-for-granted association of ownership, belonging, and gender. Here I look beyond the discursive naming of anorexia and the ways in which people came to be represented as anorexic to examine the effects of this labeling, in particular how desire and everyday practices of concealing and revealing became central to participants’ relatedness. My aim is to show not how classificatory systems of psychiatry were applied, but how participants strategically used them to their own advantage. As one might expect, participants described very different experiences of belonging and identity from those described by the medical or scholarly community. These experiences were not fixed by the identity of anorexia; they were constantly moving and always dependent on participants’ changing positions in the field. I am thus concerned with how people with anorexia performed belonging—both through bodily practice and spoken language—toward and away from a psychiatric diagnosis. Building on established critiques of anthropological concepts of belonging and identity, I argue that there are a number of problems with an inclusive approach to the concept of belonging. Like the concept of home, “belonging” is a term that is replete with sentimentalist overtones, similar to what Edwards and Strathern refer to as the “romantic view of connections as benign and community as harmonious” (, ). It is assumed that the desire to belong to a collective—be it family, community, or place—is a universal motivation . I argue that an exclusive focus on inclusion works to the detriment of exclusion, or rather, the inherent tension of exclusion in belonging. Edwards and Strathern remind us that belonging includes exclusion, not in the sense of owning or being disowned, but in operating to cut networks and truncate chains of relations (). In the second part of this chapter, I deal with these multiple values of belonging through a discussion of what participants referred to as the “secret world of anorexia.” Secrecy operated on a number of levels and extended beyond the simple spatial dichotomies of insider/outsider to the more nuanced processes and performances of concealing and revealing. Secrecy was concealed and revealed in very particular ways. Some participants concealed weight loss practices from all others, reluctant to reveal the intimate relationship that they had with “their friend.” For many, anorexia was embodied not as illness, but personi...