Anorexia as a subversive bodily act: psychic incorporation or body narratives of the self?

Josephine Brain, PhD student, London School of Economics

 

 

My anorexia is a form of self-knowledge.  People think that anorexics imagine ourselves fat and diet away invisible flab.  But people are afraid of the truth: we prefer ourselves this way, boiled-down bone, essence.… I know exactly what I look like, without hyperbole.  Every inch of skin, each muscle, each bone.  I see where and how they connect…

Stephanie Grant, The Passion of Alice, 2

 

Seeing myself is enough to make me gasp with pleasure, to make my hands shake with excitement.  I am amazed by this body I’ve made.  I don’t interpret it as a criticism that no one else admires it, only as evidence that my standards are too rarefied for ordinary human beings to appreciate… I am my own lover.  At night I go to bed naked, and in the dark I touch my body until I know by heart the map of my hunger.

Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss, 40-1

 

This paper is inspired by the irreducibility of autobiographical and literary accounts of anorexia to  dominant medical and feminist cultural models.  Marya Hornbacher’s effusion about her “crashing tide of self within the skin”[1] does not fit with the ‘deficient sense of self’ that psychiatrist Hilde Bruch posits as a ‘core deficiency’ in anorexia.[2]  Stephanie Grant’s and Kathryn Harrison’s striking accounts of anorexic feeling-through-the-body cannot be made to comply with the psychiatric/medical criteria of ‘body-image distortion’ or ‘delusional misperception of the body as fat’.[3]  And literary self-productions of the anorexic body have no place within feminist cultural theories of that body as the toxic product of over-consumption of media images, or as a ‘text’ on which discursive forces converge.

 

Feminist cultural theorists of anorexia have criticised medical models’ focus on individual pathology to the exclusion of culture, arguing that this perpetuates the Cartesian mind/body split which they see as constitutive of anorexia.  Treating the anorexic body as a faulty machine in need of repair, feminist theorists argue, and pathologising any subjective perceptions of the self as distortions arising from that faulty body, medical approaches completely eclipse the experience of the self.  Traditional psychotherapy’s reliance on a conception of the ‘healthy self’ outside time, space, culture and gender, similarly leaves the anorexic a “disembodied self” while dangerously reinscribing ‘self’ with the gender, class and race criteria of the dominant group.[4]

 

But, following Rebecca Lester, I argue that while the medical model leaves the anorectic a “disembodied self”, the feminist cultural model leaves a “de-selfed body”.[5]  In an attempt to theorize beyond mind/body, individual/culture binaries, I suggest that anorexia is a renegotiation of subjectivity through a contestation of body boundaries.  Employing Judith Butler’s theorisation of gender as loss, I suggest ways of understanding the anorectic’s gendered performance through psychic incorporation of power, and drawing on Jay Prosser’s work on transsexuality, I emphasise the critical usefulness of reading anorectics’ body narratives as a means of tracking the redrawing of the self.  I rely on Elspeth Probyn’s suggestions for theorising the embodied subject that embrace both the ontological and the epistemological.  I argue that theories of incorporation (how the outside gets in) and readings of ‘body narratives’ (how the inside gets out) can explain the mechanisms of the anorectic’s renegotiation of subjectivity.  Thus rather than reinscriptive of the heterosexual dominant, as medical and feminist cultural models usually suggest, anorexia can be seen as an attempt to subvert the regulative binary of sex.  I propose two alternative frameworks for conceptualising that subversion.

 

These two frameworks are not only alternative means of reading anorexia but, as reflections on one another, they engage some of the differences between psychoanalytic and discursive readings of the body.  On the one hand, psychoanalytically-informed approaches’ allow us see gendered identities as more than just the effects of social oppression, and explain the experience of compulsion in anorexia and other self-stylizations of the body.  On the other hand, discursive approaches situate body practices within the dynamic historical and socio-cultural frameworks which inspire them and from which they derive their meaning.  They thereby avoid psychoanalytically-informed theories’ frequent positing of gender as stable or static.  Drawing on both the psychoanalytic and discursive, therefore, I attempt to theorise an anorectic subject with a problematised agency.  Power pressing against the body from the outside, I suggest, frames the possibilities of this gendered performance, while the transformation of power in its ‘psychic life’ allows anorexic bodies to be seen as individualised, subjective, body narratives.

 

Cultural feminists sought to restore some agency to the anorectic but their efforts foundered on an over-privileging of the discursive.  Attempting to depathologise the medical model and to put the self back into the body in a gendered, socio-culturally- and historically-specific context, these  theorists emphasized that anorexia must be seen as a “metaphor” for our age or the “crystallization of culture” and located eating disorders at one end of a continuum of contemporary Western women’s problematic relationships with eating and body size.[6]  But rather than finding an embodied self, these theorists inadvertently produced a parallel split between culture and the individual, leaving the anorexic a “de-selfed body”.  Theorising the physical body as a “surface of emergence,” “interface of the discursive and the extra-discursive,” “medium of culture” or “text”[7], leaves the impression that “cultural discourses are written on the docile body, merge together and work their mysterious alchemy with no direct or predictable linkage to the internal processes of the person.”[8]  Helen Malson’s The Thin Woman is a case in point.  Defining the anorexic body as a site of convergence for a multiplicity of discursive currents - such that it can simultaneously signify dependence and control, sickness and glamour, hyper-femininity and boyishness/androgyny, conformity and rebellion, embodiment and transcendence, self-production and self-annihilation - leaves the anorectic as nothing but body/surface, the unwitting, passive, reflector of her era’s power relations.[9]  “[W]e begin to wonder if we are talking about real women at all,” Lester remarks, “While a self is always implied in these analyses, it is left largely unexamined as a sort of black box where cultural forces somehow collide and interact to produce unpredictable constellations of behaviour.”[10]  Malson does refer to a ‘subject’, but one that is somehow “constituted outside of herself in discourse.”[11]

 

Apart from muting the anorexic woman by writing out the self, the feminist cultural model has also been criticized for seeing anorexia as a “reading disorder” or a trope for the pathologised way in which, apparently, women generally ‘consume’ media images.[12]  Abigail Bray has shown how a dominant paradox surrounding the metaphor of consumption has been mapped on to the anorexic subject.  “An excessive consumption of media images is perceived to activate a pathological fear of corporeal consumption:” she argues, “over-reading, produces under-eating.”[13]  This view that “poisoned texts” produce “toxic bodies”, dominant in medical models, widely disseminated by the press, and theoretically developed in Naomi Wolf’s best-selling The Beauty Myth, has become ‘common sense’.  So seductive is this model that in June this year the British government joined forces with fashion editors and health experts to launch a ‘Body Image Summit’ as part of a new drive to ban contaminating images of ‘superwaifs’ in fashion magazines and on television.[14]  Not only does this interpretation “fix the truth” of the anorexic subject as the “perfect victim” of discourses of normative femininity, and the simple product of a monolithically patriarchal culture, but it allows the anorectic to function as a synecdoche for the oppression of all women, such that women generally are rendered pathological dupes of representation.[15]  The effect of the feminist cultural model, like the medical account, is to render the anorexic body a docile body.

 

In the first model I considered to counter the reading of the anorexic body as docile, I used Judith Butler’s ideas about ‘subversive bodily acts’ and the psychic dimensions of power to refigure the anorectic act as disruptive of the binary of sex.  My aim was to challenge the multifarious judgement-laden accounts of anorexia as a “collusion with forces that sustain [the anorectic’s] own oppression”. [16]  The positing of anorexia as a tragically self-defeating protest seemed to go hand-in-hand with Cartesian descriptions of the separation of mind and body in such a way as to call the anorectic’s very subjectivity into question.  “[B]oth bodily integrity and bodily instrumentality prove to be ellusive [for the anorectic],” asserts Morag MacSween.  “She continues to elaborate her rituals of denial in a never ending spiral, and never finally and securely reaches the place where, with personal control of her body as an object, she could begin to act as a subject.”[17]  In this first model, in other words, my aim was to remove anorexia from its denigrated position on one half of a binarised hierarchy of values: literalising, reinscriptive, hegemonic, and replace it on the opposite side: deliteralising, transgressive, subversive.  Jay Prosser’s and Elspeth Probyn’s work, together with the difficulties I had trying to force anorexia neatly into one half of the binary, led me to conclude that it was not so much the positioning of anorexia on that binary but the binary itself that needed challenging.  I will develop this further later.  Though somewhat superseded in my thinking, I will first sketch out this first model as its major shortfall – the omission of the ‘inside-out’ – highlights the critical importance of bodily narratives of the self in my second model.

 

In this first model, I explain anorexia as a gendered performance governed by the law of  compulsory heterosexuality.  Following Butler’s arguments about the performativity of gender in Gender Trouble and her explanation of the regulation of that performance through heterosexual melancholia in Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power, I argue that anorexia might be seen as a parodic repetition of normative femininity in which unacknowledgable and ungrievable desire for the mother is displayed on the body.  Butler argues that the idea of gender as the expression of an inner ‘core’ or ‘self’ is an illusion created retroactively by acts, gestures and desire that are organised and ritualised by the law of compulsory heterosexuality.  Performances of gender which expose the illusory status of that expressive model, such as drag, have the potential to disrupt the hegemony of reproductive heterosexuality and the gender hierarchy founded on it.  If the anorectic’s emaciation and elimination of secondary sexual characteristics is seen as a ‘hyper-feminisation’ of the body, or repetition of normative femininity to the point of excess, then the anorectic might be seen as exposing the internal gendered coherence of the subject to be a fiction.[18]  And by rupturing the expressive model of sex, gender and desire by coupling this parodic hyperfemininity with asexuality, the anorectic might be seen as subverting the regulative binary of sex.

 

In The Psychic Life of Power Butler argues that the external performance of gender can only be understood in relation to the internal prohibitions on performance.  Certain forms of disavowal and repudiation, she argues, organise the performance of gender.  Using Freud’s theory of melancholia, she shows how the prohibition on homosexuality forecloses the possibility of love for the same sex, rendering that loss unrecognizable and ungrievable.  The lost object then becomes ‘incorporated’ by the ego such that the gender of the ego is determined by that identification.  In other words, masculinity and femininity emerge from love rendered unknowable and ungrievable by the social taboos against homosexuality and incest.  Therefore, anorexia, seen as a performance of femininity taken to excess, could be the result of foreclosure of homosexual love, perhaps beginning in the prohibition of incestual love for the mother.[19]

 

This model not only explains the mechanism of the anorectic’s gendered performance but resonates with the anorectic’s experience of compulsion.  For example, the ‘anorectic voice’ or sense of an internal ‘dictator’ berating and reproaching the anorectic is consistent with melancholia.  When an ungrievable object is lost through social prohibition, Butler argues, and if the relationship with that other was ambivalent, the anger that the ego felt against that object (for abandoning it or as a result of unresolved conflict) is “turned back on itself”.  The critical voice that the ego once directed at the other is now internalised, invested with moral agency in the super-ego and directed at the ego.  Further, this melancholic mechanism can provoke the internalisation of social prohibitions within the conscience.  If, for example, the ego feels anger towards a social ideal, such as a prohibition against certain love objects, then the super-ego will measure the ego against that very ideal, thus perpetuating that prohibition in the psychic sphere.  The “acting out” of gender, Butler argues, may be a channel for aggression that can no longer be contained within the circuit of self-beratement.[20]  Because the melancholic takes social prohibitions as well as the lost object into itself, and because the super-ego ruthlessly measures the ego against an ideal of social rectitude, the ego will always be found by the super-ego to be wanting.  “A form of moral reflexivity is produced in which the ego splits itself to furnish an internal perspective by which to judge itself.”[21]  As can clearly be seen in the case of anorexia, the aggression wielded by the super-ego against the ego can be life-threatening.  “As an instrument of psychic terror, conscience wields the power of condemnation that, quite literally, poses a threat to one’s life.”[22]  Repetition of norms is always risky, Butler argues, because if the subject does not reinstate those norms in the ‘right’ way, it is subject to discipline and sanction.  And yet we are, for our own sake, compelled to take those risks.  “Without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization- ” Butler rhetorically asks, “how might we begin to… performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?”[23] 

 

The anorectic, one might argue, risks life, paradoxically, in order to survive.  According to this model, therefore, anorexia is not conscious protest but a subversive stylization of the body brought about through the psychic effects of incorporating the regulatory law of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality.  It avoids assumptions of pre-discursive gendered identity, such as in Louise Kaplan’s theory of anorexia as an adolescent eruption of the repressed masculine half of a pre-cultural bisexuality.”[24]  It contributes to an understanding of the feeling of compulsion that anorectics experience. “I didn’t know what I was doing: I just felt compelled to do it,” one autobiographer recalled.[25] 

 

However, this model leaves little space for an authorial subject, a subject actively engaged with an individualised (as opposed to universalised) stylization of herself as anorexic.  It lacks  historical and cultural specificity (:if reproductive heterosexuality has always been compulsory, then why is anorexia at epidemic levels now?), and neglects the specificities of each individual’s experience of localised power relations, such as the specificities of power dynamics within the family.  Further, Butler’s model in The Psychic Life of Power remains tied to an understanding of gender as Oedipal, and therefore absolutely linked to sex and sexuality.  Butler does not appear to consider alternative theorisations of gender and sexuality as spatially- or culturally-produced.  Her psychoanalytic notion of repudiation leaves her prioritising the linear over the spatial, identity over location, subjectivity over presence.[26]   A spatial analysis of gender and sexuality, in contrast, asks not only “[w]here are particular sexual behaviours and identities located?” but also “[w]hat imaginative (rather than simply geographical) spaces do the disenfranchised create and occupy?”.[27]  As Michael Dorn and Glenda Laws suggest, we need to see the body as a ‘site of struggle’.  The ‘deviant body’ might be seen as balancing the ‘outsider’s representation of space’ or its objective emplacement within static hierarchies, with the ‘insider’s space of representation’ or subjective view of emplacement that rises from the desires of the body.  In other words, “[w]e need to rethink places as they are contested in embodied social practices.”[28]  Crucially, therefore, a spatial or cultural approach allows two shifts away from psychoanalysis’s emphasis.  First it does not define gender and sexuality solely in terms of the visible.  And second – a point I will return to in my second model – it gives space to the realm of the imagination as source of subversion, thereby investing the subject with an active, subjectively-rooted role in that subversion.

 

The different effects of Butler’s psychoanalytic-based conceptualisation of sexuality versus a spatially-produced model can be seen in relation to anorexic asexuality.  Because Butler’s model relies on a definition of repudiation based on object-choice, it privileges the visual, leaving the anorexic body to be assigned meaning by an external gaze, invested inevitably with the onlooker’s own gendered and sexual subject positioning.  Following Butler’s occularcentric schema it is difficult to maintain a theorisation of the anorectic as subversive.  For Butler subversive bodily acts are those that parody heterosexuality because through mimicry they expose heterosexual identity as founded on repudiation rather than the expression of some ‘natural’ ground.  The examples Butler chooses to illustrate this – drag and butch/femme – are selected precisely because of their closeness to heterosexuality, as Clare Hemmings has pointed out.[29]  But the subversion of drag or butch is immediately visible.  Hemmings uses this visual bias to show how the bisexual femme marks the limit of Butler’s theory.  In contrast with drag or butch, the non-heterosexuality of the bisexual or lesbian femme is much more precarious because it depends on the presence of a visibly non-heterosexual subject to be read as such.  In its “almost perfect copy” of heterosexuality, the bisexual femme’s “spectre of straightness” cannot be dismissed.  Hemmings suggests that non-heterosexual identities would avoid the visual bias tied to object-choice repudiation if the subject’s cultural repudiation of heterosexuality were seen as formative of those identities.[30] 

 

Applying a cultural repudiation model to anorexia may open a space for sexual readings of anorexia as non-heterosexual in a different way than for the bisexual femme.  Looking at the anorectic’s sexual identity solely in terms of object choice, her repudiation of heterosexuality through asexuality renders her non-heterosexual identity distinctly precarious.  She cannot ‘prove’ it visually except through the absence of a sexual partner at her side, which is no indication at all.  What makes the anorectic different from other repudiations of heterosexuality, like drag or butch, is that there is nothing necessarily ‘queer’ about anorexia, either in the sense of transgender or in the sense of same-sex object choice.  Rather the anorectic’s repudiation is in her refusal of any object choice.  While “Alice”, the anorectic in Stephanie Grant’s The Passion of Alice, realizes her lesbian desire through her anorexia, Kathryn Harrison’s repudiation of heterosexuality – her “smug avoidance of boys” while anorectic – , set in the context of an autobiography otherwise about her love affair with her father, involves a conscious repudiation of opposite sex desire but there is nothing queer in this repudiation, either visible or invisible.[31]  Adapting a cultural repudiation model such that it does not only relate to object choice and is not necessarily rooted in queer culture may open up a space for anorexic heterosexual repudiation.  If, at Eve Sedgwick’s suggestion, sexuality were uncoupled from its reductive determination through the gender of object choice, and if gender and sexuality were conceived of as distinct, albeit necessarily related, analytic axes,[32] then the anorectic’s non-visible cultural repudiation of heterosexuality might not be consigned to the hegemonic.

 

The implications of my first model’s reliance on unconscious repudiation can be seen in relation to a theoretical impasse in corporeal feminism’s debates surrounding eating disorders.  Because corporeal feminists frequently rely on Lacan’s idea of the self or ego as the introjection of a visualised body, corporeal feminism remains tied to the body as objectively represented, and therefore a body as externally perceived.  In the face of the phallocentric economy’s repression or negation of gynocentric body images, corporeal feminism appeals to a corporeality beyond or outside representation.  But the idea that subjectivity or identity is the effect of ‘primary repression’ or negation of an originary maternal, pre-Oedipal, and implicitly more authentic, corporeality, leaves the body ‘outside’ discourse.  It follows from this that women are disembodied because they have incorporated phallocentric representations.  Eating disorders have become a special concern for corporeal feminists precisely because they appear to demonstrate the potentially lethal effects of incorporating repressive imagery.  Anorexia in particular is often called upon as an “exemplary instance of (dis)embodiment”.[33]  Elizabeth Grosz, for example, argues that “anorexia can, like the phantom limb, be a kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal (i.e., precastrated) body that women in patriarchy are required to abandon.”[34]  This tension surrounding representation – an appeal to a body outside phallic representation, coupled with an investment in the body as sign of an excluded feminine, therefore a body that is inescapably representational – actually sustains the Cartesian mind/body split that it ostensibly criticises.  The over-privileging of the represented body neglects the body-as-felt and a single theory of the body’s relation to signification – in, for example, a single schema for explaining eating disorders – presupposes a body in general.[35]

 

So how can a feminist ethics of the body, and a theory of anorexia, avoid cultural feminism’s de-selfed body and corporeal feminism’s deadlocked quest for a pre-representational body?  My second model is informed by Elspeth Probyn’s suggestions for a positivistic approach drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ or the ways in which the self, as a ‘form’, is constituted through practices along a particular line of ‘attitude’, and Gilles Deleuze’s use of those ‘technologies’ in his conceptualisation of le pli, the ‘pleat’ or ‘fold’.  The pleating of the outside, that is, power pressed against the body, with the inside, or the particular motivated ways in which those folds are made, enables the subject to be figured as a rearticulation of inside and outside. [36]  In Deleuze’s challenge to the dichotomy representation/materiality, thought is not contained within the body but is “the realization of a specific body and its various capacities”. The emphasis falls on the “positive difference of specific bodies”, that is, in their specific singularities and in a multiplicity of differences, bodies are positive events working through active connections.  Self-formations like anorexia are creative because through “being otherwise”, they create a distance from normalised ways of being, thereby opening up a space for critique of normativity. [37]

 

Locating a place from which to speak is precisely Probyn’s concern in seeking a constant conversation between the ontological and the epistemological so as to avoid pure ontology’s speaking from the body as truth and the poststructuralist legacy of eliminating an enunciative position.  The constant tension in moving between the ontological and epistemological allows the critic’s experience to become a ‘third term’, “mediat[ing] between an ontological pull to define experience as primary and transcendental and an epistemological tendency to privilege structural determinants of knowledge.”  Signification or representation are not the negation of some ground, in this theory, but images of the self that can be creatively employed to articulate alternative positions and to constitute us as new kinds of subjects. [38]  Thus experience has the potential to create a space from which to speak.  Through this framework anorexia might be analyzed within the historically- and culturally-specific, localised power relations in which it is situated, allowing for the unique narrative of each anorectic’s self-production.  Seen as a  reconfiguration of the inside and the outside in an renegotiation of subjectivity, the possibility of agency is restored to the anorectic, though an agency always circumscribed within the discursive context in which the anorexic self-production occurs and from which it gains meaning.

 

While drawing on Probyn’s insistence on the grounding of epistemology in experience, my second model of anorexia is also inspired by writings on transsexuality and, in particular, the limits to Butler’s theory of subversion that transsexuality exposes.  This second model continues to rely on Butler’s theory of gender as a regulatory norm, constituted by performative acts, and on the mechanism of ‘incorporation’ for the constitution of gendered identity, though, significantly, removes the Oedipal context for this process.  Crucially this model completes the picture of the anorectic’s renegotiation of her subjectivity around her bodily boundaries by including the reverse dynamic to incorporation’s ‘outside-in’: by conceptualising anorexia as a ‘bodily narrative of the self’, the anorexic body can be seen as a self-production, giving space to the ‘inside-out’.

 

If, as Butler argues, sex is not prior to gender, but gender as a regulative norm produces sex, then our knowledge of ourselves as embodied subjects is always mediated by gender.  We experience  our bodies through gender.  This inseparability of identity from gender, I argue, is precisely the anorectic’s contention with femininity.  She reacts to the deterministic reading of her body through femininity.  Anorexia, Lester clarifies, is not ‘caused’ by a repressive culturally-induced Cartesian conviction that ‘I am not my body’, as both the medical and the cultural models contend.  Rather, the anorectic’s denial that her self is linked to her body is her goal.  She seeks to separate the sexing of her self from her sexed body because, far from being alienated or detached from her body, “she is painfully aware that she, culturally speaking, is her female body” and all that this conveys in terms of opportunities and treatment.[39]  In other words, the anorectic contends the feminisation of her body, or the regulatory production of her sexed body by the socio-cultural laws governing heterosexuality.  In this second model I adapt Butler’s model of melancholic incorporation to suggest that the anorectic’s hyperfeminisation of the body is produced through the ungrievable loss of a direct connection to her own (female) corporeality, that is, a corporeality not ruled by the gendered norms of compulsory heterosexuality.

 

Drawing on Bernice Hausman’s analysis of gender as myth, I suggest a means for explaining how gender as a regulatory norm came to govern the sexed body, thereby investing my second model with historical context.  Hausman employs Roland Barthes’s semiotic model of mythology to explain how gender as myth ‘naturalises’ its history as the ‘truth’ of the present, thereby obscuring the historical processes through which gender became the signifier for the body and its sex.  Myth, according to Barthes, is the result of a semiological chain of two orders of signification, in which the sign of the first order shifts to becomes the signifier of the mythic second order, but obscures this shift in the process.  Hausman argues that gender came to replace the body as the signifier of sex at a specific historical moment in the mid-1950s when intersexed children exposed the body’s unreliability as a signifier of sex, ‘gender identity’ based on sexed behaviour was produced instead as the source of one’s sex, and transsexuals used this semiotic slide to argue for the determination of their sex on the basis of gender identity.  She uses this historical grounding of gender’s mythic status to criticise Butler for her ahistorical assumption that the coherence of the heterosexual subject can only be unsettled through a redeployment or parodic repetition of gender.  Gender is only one historically-specific kind of regulation of the category sex, Hausman contends. [40]  This historical situating of Butler’s theory of subversive repetition contributes to an explanation of why anorexia has reached epidemic levels since the mid-twentieth century.  Anorexia appears as one by-product of the ‘living death’ of gender.  As a “literalizing fantasy”, to use Butler’s expression, gender is a refusal of loss which encrypts itself in the body, thereby warding off the death threatened by the loss of the desired object.  But it is “only as a living corpse that the subject can maintain itself in the myth of gender.”[41]  The anorectic’s hyperfeminisation of the body might be seen as a refusal of the death of the real, or a display on her body of an irretrievably lost connection with the body.

 

In balancing the theoretical positioning of the anorexic body with the experiential, I draw on Prosser’s initiatives in bringing the materiality of the body back into theory.  He criticises paradigms which conceive of the body solely as discursive effect for calcifying “[t]he binary of textual effect (subversive/ hegemonic)… onto the binary of the subject’s relations to referentiality (literalizing/ deliteralizing).”  The effects of such binarised value-judgements are polarised readings of transsexuality as either a negative, ontological, conformist, essentialising literalisation of gender and sexuality, or exactly the reverse, a positive, subversive, deliteralising, fictionalisation of the sex/gender system if seen as a liberation from the body of the signifier sex.[42]  Most often, the transsexual, like the anorectic, has been positioned on the devalued side of the binary.  They have even been bracketed together as examples of “body management strategies… that are about ‘normalization’ and invisibility,” the perfect conformity to late capitalist consumerism’s production of inconspicuous, docile, healthy bodies.[43]  Such “constructionist theories,” Prosser argues, “desubjectiviz[e] the subject”, precluding a discussion of agency or how transsexuals are “contructing subjects.”  Prosser’s aim in Second Skins is to reintroduce the materiality of the body into theory through transsexuals’ body narratives and to use those ‘body narratives’ “to rupture the identity between the binaries, opening up a transitional space between them.”  ‘Body narratives’ therefore become a framework not only for redefining the transsexual as “authorial subject” but also for reading the specificity of each subject’s transitions back into the text.[44]  This is what Probyn means when she says that speaking the self is a “motivated set of practices that foreground and hopefully encourage the necessary movement of identities”, such that the self is not contained in one moment or place but expresses “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’.”[45]  Probyn points out that Foucault invites us to see his published memoirs of Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivičre as constructions of selves, rather than expressions of ‘authenticity’.  By putting themselves into discourse, they transformed themselves in print, produced themselves, ‘affected an operation’ on their bodies and thought.[46] 

 

Though the anorectic’s body narratives will be radically differerent from those of the transsexual – the anorectic does not transgress material sexed boundaries and her bodily transformation does not usually have a defined telos – as a framework applied to the anorectic, body narratives allow for the subjective material and textual construction of the anorexic body.  Not only is that body itself a form of ‘body narrative’ or form of self-stylization through the body, but in the narrative writing of the body, the self is re-constituted and re-problematised.  Both anorexia as a ‘technology of the self’ and ‘body narratives’ as a redrawing of that self, produce the embodied subject through producing an enunciative position or place to speak from.

 

Prosser’s critique of Butler’s enmeshment of gender and sexuality may similarly be put to work in a theorisation of anorexic subversion in my second model, though my ends are rather different from his.  Prosser focuses on transsexuality’s marking of the limit of Butler’s subtly rigged syllogism transgender = gender performativity = queer = subversive. His main contention with this syllogism is the implicit equivalence of transgender and homosexuality by figuring gender performativity as queer performativity, evidenced in for example Butler’s assertion that “parodic and subversive convergences [of sex/gender/desire] characterize gay and lesbian cultures.”[47]   This collapsing of gender back into sexuality, Prosser contends, means that Butler’s theory of subversive bodily acts cannot account for a mutable body/sex or for the transsexual’s desire for sexed embodiment as telos, and therefore cannot sustain the body as a literal (as opposed to discursive) category.  Thus the transsexual’s ‘narrative of becoming’ is written out of the queer deployment of transgender.[48]  Further, this syllogism is sustained through the figuring of straight gender as constative and naturalizing.  In her discussion of heterosexual melancholia, what allows Butler to argue that lost homosexual love is incorporated as the ‘surface’ of the body, while masquerading as interior literal sex, or, in other words, to refigure sex from material corporeality to phantasized surface, is a subtle reversal of Freud’s description of the ego as a bodily ego.  Whereas Freud’s intent was to emphasise the bodily origins of the ego, to figure the ego as the mental projection of the surface of the body, Butler’s rereading allows the body itself to become a psychic projection.  Thus by figuring heterosexuality’s literalisation of sex as a corporeal interiority, in juxtaposition to queer’s deliteralisation of sex as a parodic surface, Butler value-loads the surface of the body, equating subversion with performances as they are externally perceived.[49]  This occularcentrism not only renders phantasmatic any sense of the body as sexed interiority, but designates unsubversive those bodily practices which are not visibly queer in the sense of trans-.

 

The implications for anorexia of Prosser’s critque of Butler’s theory of subversive bodily acts are twofold.  First, Prosser’s deconstruction of Butler’s syllogism and critique of her occularcentrism allows the question: why do subversive bodily acts have to involve visible transgendered performativity or, indeed, a visible trans- anything?  Why, for example, should the anorectic’s hyperfeminised gendered performance, mismatched with the asexuality of her (non-)desire not be considered a subversion or display of “incoherence” and “discontinuity” that refuses to be reduced to the gendered norms of ‘woman’?[50]  Second, I want to return to Prosser’s point that the transsexual’s experience of his or her body as differently sexed from its materiality supports “the material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of material reality.”[51]  If, as I have argued, the anorectic’s contention is the loss of a connection to her corporeality unmediated by gender, then her objective may be the carving out of a body not deterministically read through femininity.  As anorectics frequently document in their body narratives, anorexia often involves an imaginary transgendered becoming.  The anorectic often imagines a masculine or androgynous body as a means of separating her body from femininity.  Thus anorexia becomes an enactment of “the material reality of the imaginary”.  Take, for example, Kim Chernin’s description of her imagined transgression:

 

I reverted to a fantasy about my body’s transformation from this state of imperfection to a consummate loveliness, the flesh trimmed away, stomach flat, thighs like those of the adolescent runner on the back slopes of the fire trail, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, running along there one evening in a pair of red trunks, stripped to the waist, gleaming with sweat and suntan oil, his muscles stretching and relaxing as if he’d been sent out there to model for me a vision of everything I was not and could never be.[52]

 

I am not suggesting here that the anorectic aspires to transsexuality.  What I am trying to emphasise is the  enormously powerful effect of the imagination on the materiality of the body, the power of the ‘inside out’, as well as the effects of socio-cultural laws regulating the sexual subject in framing the conditions for that bodily becoming, the ‘outside in’.

 

A theory of anorexia which draws on Butler’s use of  ‘incorporation’ to explain gender performativity, and an account of self-production through ‘body narratives’ embodies two critical dynamics.  ‘Incorporation’, or the ‘outside-in’, explains how socio-cultural laws regulating sexuality frame the possibilities for the subject’s becoming.  In my second model I have argued that anorexia is a subversion of the current manifestation of the binary frame of sex, in that the anorectic contends the way in which gender regulates the category sex.  Critically, this second model includes the reverse dynamic, that is, the ‘inside-out’ expressed through the experientially-motivated ‘body narratives of the self’.  Though anorexia does not meet the usual criteria for “subversive bodily acts” in that it is ‘queer’ neither in the sense of object-choice nor trans-gender or -sex, I have suggested that anorexia is subversive both through gendered performance – the hyperfeminisation of the body –, and sexuality – the repudiation of heterosexuality through asexuality.  I have criticised the collapsing of gender into sexuality and the defining of sexuality solely in terms of object choice which have led to over/under-valuations of the body pivoting on the subversive/hegemonic binary, and which have excluded the weight of the experiential.  The anorexic body, I suggest, is a tailoring of the self along a particular line of ‘attitude’, in a specific contestation of the regulatory laws of reproductive heterosexuality.

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