Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 12

I use the term eating disorder to describe what seems to be a universal preoccupation among the nine survivors of incest whom I interviewed—whether they are affected by anorexia, bulimia, extensive dieting, or chronic overeating. When I use the term I am referring to the process whereby a woman develops a distorted relationship to food, her body consciousness, and her weight because of living in a sex-exploitive family and culture where her power and worth are defined along a bodily plane. I see these behaviors as gendered tools used to manage and express the trauma of sexual abuse. I do not use the term eating disorder in the traditional sense (referring to an individual disease) because it categorizes food and weight problems as individual pathologies and deflects attention away from social and traumatic contexts that underlie them.

I use the term relentless pursuit of thinness interchangeably with eating disorder. When I do so I do not wish to imply that the survivor’s emphasis on slenderness reflects a vain “obsession” with appearance. In fact, throughout I argue that the eating strategies that women develop begin as adaptive solutions to, as well as disguised expressions of, sexual trauma.