Food!!! Since we are born we are fed, food being a necessity for living, but this need acquires other meanings for many people: anorexics, bulimics and compulsive eaters, 90% of whom are women anduse food as a way of talking. Society has defined these women as "cultural dopes", considering that women do not eat because they want to be thin, which nowadays is an ideal of beauty. There is a need to go further in order to deconstruct this statement.

To do this, I take into account Freud's, Lacan's and Irigaray's theories from a feminist point of view. Freud's and Lacan's theories have in common the importance given to the psychosexual developing of the representation of the body, both of them presenting a girl or a boy without no gender differences at the start. Lacan makes clear the opposition among genders in the symbolic state, order defined by Saussure as a linguistic state and, consequently, social. It is in this position where sexual differences acquire meaning and the concept of gender appears.

Lacan, using the mirror image, deconstructs the subject explaining its social and fictitious character. The image of the "other", that also defines us, is fictitious since it is socialised, not a part of reality but of the symbolic. The imaginary is created, becoming through the language a real , since as Lauretis has said "the imaginary is your representation to yourself of your real life condition". For Lacan the imaginary state is culturally set up, only once you have acquired the fictitious it is possible to see this construction, since the subconscious acts before being conscious of its proper function. The is alienated, it shades the real behind a mask which is the fictitious which, in turn, as Merleau-Ponty says, is

In order to know the real feminine Irigaray deconstructs the Lacanian theory reconstructing the feminine , to do that she sets as an object the composition and use of a new language different to the patriarchal one, adding a new element to the symbolic order: "the two lips mucous". Irigaray analyzes the Lacanian theory which divides the power in four states, being the first one the real order. Lacan asserts that there is not a sexual difference in the unconscious, since as Rosi Braidotti says "we are born on a script". Eating disorders do not exits in the unconscious, they appear in some cases once you put in practice the patriarchal script created and broadcasted by the symbolic order. Then we realize the lack of a language to develop our real feminine , since the patriarchal is not our own; the need of creating a new language appears and, in the case of women with eating disorders, it is food.

The most important aim in Lacan's theory according to Braidotti is the imaginative order where the norms and social values are designated, where man becomes synonym of activity and woman of passivity. The symbolic order does not exist, as it is well known, but it is created because it is necessary to establish an order where subjects can be created. This state is known as totality or Phallus, it is like a satellite channel which gets information and sends it to us, creating us. This satellite receives the information sent by the patriarchy and creates the feminine function then establishing the dichotomy man-woman where the man is the subject and the woman is the object. For Lacan it is a question of having, if you have not a penis you can only become an object; Irigaray explains that if the penis is already represented in another order, the phallus is not the penis, which means that it is not a question of having but of getting it. Irigaray points out that the patriarchal discourse which has defined woman as what she is not or has not, has to be deconstructed. For women to reach the Phallus or symbolic order, Irigaray defends the enunciation of women as and the elimination of the dichotomies.

To sum up, the psychoanalytic theory shows the problematic part of the gender identity socially constructed. The post-structural feminist theory has to deconstruct the Lacanian symbolic order and explore the socio-political contexts where our experiences of identity and gender are formed.

Psychoanalytic theory is characterized by its own historical omission, while post-structural theory points to a subject, whose history shows how it has been constructed. This theory explains how popular discourses about the body have been constructed for a society that believes them as absolute truths, to eliminate them we need a deconstruction. Eating disorders are related with the wish of being thin, worrying about overweight and continuous dieting. It is true that anorexia and bulimia nervosa appear because of the wish to be thin, but these disorders end up being a way of revolting against an absolute truth given by the symbolic order.

The construction of fatness as a synonym of ugliness and thinness as a synonym of beauty is so dominant and so embedded that it often appears to be an unquestionable prescription of some law of natural aesthetics. I am quoting now two different discourses constructed in two different societies with the intention of showing through its comparison the importance of the symbolic order and the evident necessity to deconstruct it.

This "constructed identity" has been assimilated by girls from a very early age and it is not until they are teenagers when some of them realize that the constructed discourse makes it impossible to develop their real identity.
Some of them rebel against an identity which doesn't belong to them by using food, at the same time bulimics give to the patriarchy the image of an objectivized woman; this happens because of the difficulty of getting rid of the ideas which the symbolic order has emited and we have internalized.

Part of the psychoanalytic feminist theory goes back to the Kleinian theory, base of the post structural theory; it moves from sexual difference to a literary and esencialist interpretation of the body. This change is not a way of going backwards but a reposition. Klein asserts that psychic life is structured in subconscious fantasies, guided by corporal experiences whose presence since childhood persist, not as stages where the subject can go back, but as positions always present, where one is sometimes lodged. For Klein the past and the present is just one. Klein formulates an horizontal theory where the subject is defined by its relations with the objects, moving between positions that are never closed. For the Lacanian theory the movement from the adult body to the child body is a way of going backwards, instead Klein states that this is a simple change in the horizontal line. The main subject in Klein's theory is fantasy, understanding by this not a subconscious work of the mind but a corporal movement. The simple fact of eating cannot be so simple, acquiring another connotation: the developmemt of a fantasy. A bite can represent metaphorically a person or object, "it" can be elimininated by its intake. Previously this worry is cut into pieces that later on are eaten depending on how the subject manifests its fantasy. An example of this theory is the Bourgeois exhibition The destruction of the Father in 1974.

In this fantasy eating is synonym of talking. The wish to talk and the frustration of not being able to do so provokes a new wish, the necessity to acquire power and consecuently pleasure. Since they cannot use words they use another way of communicating: food. Cutting, biting and eating, they kill the person that opresses them and they acquire power.

The messages created by a society that construct us are transmited through language, where woman is characterised by its femininity and where violence and many other things are not allowed, according to Klein's theory; anorexics and bulimics use food as a way of expression. Bourgeois describes a situation where children follow truths transmitted by a Symbolic order, that do not always correspond with their inner wishes. They need to talk, and the constructed patriarchal language is not enough by itself but it does not belong to them, that is why there is a need of creating a new means of communication. In the case of some bulimics, once the exceeding eating has been done, they proceed to the elimination of the food by throwing up or using laxatives, since they feel totally depressed; because although they have talked they have not used the adecuate instrument: words.

The Edible Woman (Atwood, 1980) is paradigmatic of the deconstruction of eating disorders and of Klein's theory. The principal character of this novel suffers from anorexia nervosa, once she is conscious of it, which happens at the end of the novel, she goes on using the food as a way of communicating but this time in a different way; following the stages described in Klein's theory she bakes a cake which represents what her future husband wanted her to be.

Anorexia and bulimia nervosa harm physical health; at one stage patients adquire oral power and pleasure but in another sense they are not getting away with anything. If a problem is solved by the negative to ingest, a second problem is created immediately: the pathology of eating disorders which is more difficult to solve, and whcih might be the theme to consider in another paper.