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  • Hunger, Emotions, and Sport: A Biocultural Approach1
  • Leslie Heywood (bio)

Among the various offerings on the menu of contemporary popular culture, sports are the most organically suited for offering glimpses into [a] soulin their own way, sports can be a means of grace.

—Shirl James Hoffman (xii)

Over the course of our conversations it became clear that throughout Lindsey’s life physical activity had been both a friend and an enemy: something that sustained and nourished her, as well as damaged her. Therefore, our proposition is that Lindsey’s stories point to the confusions, tensions, and even crises that are generated when embodied physical activity as a dimension of identity collides with the idea of physical activity as a kind of medicine or tonic that we take to improve our moral or medical health.

—Cathy Zanker and Michael Gard (63)

That’s right. Sometimes it is possible, despite your best efforts and a hundred goddamn miles a week, not to even exist.

—John L. Parker (62)

Hunger is a subject that straddles old oppositional paradigms from the sciences and the humanities in fascinating ways. If we narrow the subject of hunger to eating disorders, and eating disorders to one particular type, “anorexia athletica,” this focus demands an interpretive perspective that demonstrates the indissociable relation between nature and culture, ontic and ontological. In the standard medical literature, eating disorders tend to be viewed as irregularities in the body’s homeostatic mechanisms, while the [End Page 119] feminist literature emphasizes cultural components such as beauty standards in mass media as formational in the etiology of the disease. Both perspectives have been instrumental in developing an understanding and treatment for this disorder, but recent work in the neurobiology of emotions provides a way to push that understanding further by linking these perspectives in a biocultural approach that incorporates insights from gender studies, neuroscience, and psychology. Doing so gives us a new understanding of the dynamics that contribute to “anorexia athletica,” a phenomenon that itself incorporates interactional issues related to eating disorders, body image, and sport culture.

Hunger as Biological Process

Before attempting to construct this associative constellation, let me first address the discomfort many in the humanities have with strains of mechanistic analysis I will be invoking here. Much of the tension between what C.P. Snow famously called the “Two Cultures” associated with the sciences and the humanities comes from the materialistic reductionism characteristic of the scientific method. Furthermore, the “genetic determinism” associated with biological explanations—linked to scientific racism and sexism—is seen by many as both conceptually inadequate and threatening. Many scientists are attempting to address that threat in order to bridge the critical orientation of social science and humanities perspectives with the materialist emphasis of their own.

Jaak Panksepp’s work facilitates this bridge, and is particularly useful for explaining the levels of complications that characterize anorexia athletica. His book Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998) is credited with establishing the research area from which the book takes its name. Panksepp addresses the scientific tendency toward reductionism when he writes that

the desires and aspirations of the human heart are endless. It is foolish to attribute them all to a single brain system. But they all come to a standstill if certain brain systems, such as the dopamine (DA) circuits…are destroyed. DA tracts lie at the heart of powerful, affectively valenced neural systems that allow people and animals to operate smoothly and efficiently…. These circuits appear to be major contributors to our feelings of engagement and excitement as we seek the material resources needed for bodily survival, and also when we pursue the cognitive interests that bring positive existential meanings into our lives.

(1998, 5365–67) [End Page 120]

According to Panksepp, there are seven basic brain systems at the primary process level that humans and animals share. These systems include “SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY” (2009, 1). Dopamine circuitry provides the mechanism through which all these complex cognitions eventually form, but these cognitions are not “just” dopamine. It is one contributing factor in a constellation that includes electrical signals between neurons, various emotions, and the brain and behavioral...

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