Spreading the Religion of Thinness from California to Calcutta: A Critical Feminist Postcolonial Analysis

This paper engages a critical feminist postcolonial analysis to explore the neocolonial dynamics and effects of the spread of white-Western female body norms to women in the two-thirds world. Using the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and postcolonial feminist theologians, and drawing on research about the growing influence of the Euro-American idealization of thinness on women in the global South, the author analyzes the missionary-colonizing dynamics of the globalization of American culture's devotion to "feminine" thinness, highlighting its commercial underpinnings, implicitly racist subtext, and deleterious effects on the mental, physical, and spiritual well-being of women in postcolonial contexts. Ultimately, Lelwica argues that the globalization of the Hollywood ideal of female slenderness to women in the Southern Hemisphere illustrates the extent to which women's bodies continue to function as primary sites of contact, conflict, and colonization in the process of Western expansion.

On any given day, untold numbers of girls and women participate in an Internet subculture known as "pro-Ana," whose fairy-like goddess "Ana" (short for anorexia) has been depicted as an ethereal young woman, with silky blond curls, glimmering white skin, butterfly wings, and a slender body. Ana's disciples believe that anorexia and bulimia are lifestyle choices, rather than illnesses, and that those who go to extremes for the sake of thinness need not be bothered by the mediocre standards of ordinary people, who simply cannot understand. Pro Ana websites offer a variety of tools to support the anorexic's quest, including Ana-Psalms, Ana Commandments, an Ana Creed, and "thinspirational" images of emaciated movie stars and models.¹

However bizarre and troubling it seems, the philosophy and rituals of the pro-Ana movement are, in many ways, a more extreme version of the beliefs and behaviors of many ordinary girls and women in the United States. Studies show that as many as 80 percent of ten-year-old girls have dieted, and the same percentage of women in their mid-fifties express a desire to be thinner. More than three-quarters of healthy-weight adult women in this country believe they are "too fat," and nearly two-thirds of high school girls are on diets (compared to 16 percent of boys). As Susan Bordo points out, full-blown eating disorders have never been the norm. The real epidemic is among those with seemingly "normal" eating habits, who regularly police their appetites with the aim of getting or staying noticeably slim.²

Some scholars who study this epidemic suggest the idealization of female thinness in the contemporary United States illustrates the "modernization of patriarchal power," to use Sandra Bartky's phrase. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, feminists like Bartky and Bordo criticize the way women's disciplinary practices regarding weight and eating promise to empower them by requiring their obedience to patriarchal cultural norms.³ In essence, such feminists argue, the cultural mandate for women to be thin is a form of social control, and women's dissatisfaction with their bodies is rooted not primarily in biological or psychological imbalances, but in the oppressive gender norms many women internalize.

Despite the important insights such analyses have yielded, they unwittingly perpetuate a kind of sanctioned ignorance (to borrow Gayatri Spivak's term) insofar as they fail to highlight the extent to which race, religion, class, and culture have been crucial aspects of the idealization of female thinness in the West.⁴ A closer look at the construction of this slender ideal in the United States and its spread to non-Western contexts illuminates the neocolonial dynamics of the pursuit of thinness: its implicitly racist and classist subtexts, its missionizing movement, its commercial underpinnings, and its potentially homogenizing and harmful effects on the mental, physical, and spiritual well-being of women around the world.

While this analysis draws heavily on the work of postcolonial feminist scholars of religion, it is particularly indebted to the insights of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Throughout my graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School in...