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Feminist Theory
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Unsettling 'body image': Anorexic body narratives and the materialization

of the 'body imaginary'
Josephine Brain
Feminist Theory 2002; 3; 151
DOI: 10.1177/1464700102003002342
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02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 151
151
Unsettling body image

Anorexic body narratives and the materialization of
the body imaginary
FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright 2002
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 3(2): 151168.
[1464-7001
(200208) 3:2;
Josephine Brain London School of Economics and Political Science 151168; 026342]
Abstract This article critiques contemporary feminist theorys frequent

ocularcentric readings of the anorexic body as a surface of cultural
inscription or as a paradigmatic sign of the female bodys alienation
through sexual difference. In an initial speculative attempt to find a
theoretical framework that might sustain a more generative and
embodied account of anorexia, I read anorexia through Butlers theory of
gender as psychic incorporation because she problematizes an
interior/exterior topography of the subject. This Butlerian framework
proves problematic because, by establishing an association between
visibly queer gender and subversion, it effectively designates as
hegemonic any sense of gender as a felt interiority. In a second
framework, I draw on Prossers anti-ocularcentric reading of transsexual
body narratives derived from Anzieus theory of the skin ego.
Filtering Butlers theory of melancholia through this skin ego
framework, I find a theoretical space for anorexia as a transitional
embodied subjectivity which both re-lives and relieves the melancholic
trauma of gender.
keywords anorexia, embodied subject, experience, gender, visual
register
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. (Grant, 1995: 2)
Seeing myself is enough to make me gasp with pleasure, to make my hands shake
with excitement. I am amazed by this body Ive made. I dont interpret it as a criti-
cism 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. (Harrison, 1997: 401)
This article is inspired by what I perceive to be the irreducibility of

auto/biographical and literary accounts of anorexia to feminist cultural and
corporeal feminist models. Marya Hornbachers effusion about her

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 152
152 Feminist Theory 3(2)
crashing tide of self within the skin (1998: 25) and Stephanie Grants
(1995) and Kathryn Harrisons (1997) striking accounts of embodiment
through emaciation belie feminist explanations of anorexia as a disembod-
ied effect of Cartesian dualism (Chernin, 1981: 55), as a mere poisoned
product of overconsumption of media images (Wolf, 1990), or as a surface
site/sight of myriad discourses convergence (Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998).
In this article, then, I bring to feminist theories of anorexia Jay Prossers
question: At what point do our experiences of our bodies resist or fragment
our theoretical generalizations, reveal them as displacements of experi-
ence, and demand from them new formulations? (1998: 96).
Beginning from a sense of the anorexic embodied self as occluded, I turn
first to deployments of anorexia in feminist cultural theories and feminist
philosophies of the body, asking after the epistemological assumptions that
seem to write out the anorexic self. Central to these perspectives is a prob-
lematic derived from a predominantly Foucauldian and/or Lacanian
legacy: the persistent location of the imaginary anatomy in the visual
register alone. This ocularcentrism1 in feminist theories of the body, I argue,
is both what limits more generative or authorial understandings of anorexia
and that which anorexia exposes as limited. In my initial and speculative
attempt to re-embody the anorexic subject, I am drawn to Judith Butlers
(1990, 1997) theorization of gender as loss because, in her deft interweav-
ing of the discursive, the psychic and the material, she problematizes an
inside/outside topography of the subject, challenging a metaphysical oppo-
sition between discourse and the body, representation and materiality. But
thinking anorexia through this Butlerian paradigm reveals a stark privi-
leging of the bodys visualized surface which pushes the anorexic body-as-
felt out of sight. In a renewed attempt to locate an epistemology that might
sustain the realm of the experiential in anorexic subjectivity, I find inspi-
ration in Prossers (1998) analysis of transsexual body narratives. Follow-
ing Prosser, I suggest that tracing anorexic feeling-through-the-body in
narrative accounts of bodily becoming offers a starting point for bringing
the experiential back into theory and, in the process, troubling predomi-
nant feminist and queer theories derogatory deployment of certain bodies
as queers/subversions constitutive outside.2
Deauthorized3 anorexic bodies

Feminist cultural theorists4 of anorexia criticize medical, psychiatric and
psychoanalytic models for privileging individual (psycho)pathology over
sociocultural forces, thereby reifying the Cartesian mind/body split which
they see as constitutive of anorexia (Bordo, 1993: 14464; MacSween, 1993:
Ch. 2; Malson, 1998: Chs 4, 6). In biomedical accounts, the experience of
the self is completely eclipsed, as Rebecca Lester puts it (1997: 480), with
any feelings or explanations that the anorexic might express pathologized
away as symptomatic distortions arising from her faulty body or dysfunc-
tional development. To counter this disembodied self (1997: 481) feminist
cultural theorists seek to put the self back into a body thoroughly contex-
tualized within the gendered power relations of western consumer

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Brain: Unsettling body image 153
capitalism. Sexual difference becomes the primary and indispensable lens

through which anorexia is intelligible in these cultural accounts: eating
disorders are taken to be fundamentally continuous with the experience of
all western women (for example, Malson, 1998). But, by adhering too
strictly to a social constructionist perspective, these theorists reduce
embodied experience to cultural expression, inadvertently producing a de-
selfed body (Lester, 1997: 481).
Cultural theorists emphasize that anorexia must be seen as a metaphor
for our time (Malson, 1998: 5; Orbach, 1993: Ch. 1) or the crystallization
of culture (Bordo, 1993: 139; see also Bartky, 1988: 65). Theorizing the
material body as a surface of emergence, interface of the discursive and
the extra-discursive (Malson, 1997: 231), medium of culture or text
(Bordo, 1993: 165) leaves the impression, as Lester puts it, 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 (Malson, 1997: 481). Even in Helen Malsons
complex theorization of discursive currents as multiple and contradictory,
the anorexic seems to figure as body-text rather than embodied subject.
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, hyperfemininity and boyishness/
androgyny, conformity and rebellion, embodiment and transcendence, self-
production and self-annihilation (Malson, 1998: Chs 58, see also 1996)
leaves the anorexic as little more than the unwitting reflector of her eras
power relations. As Lester remarks (1997: 481): [W]e begin to wonder if we
are talking about real women at all. 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 constella-
tions of behaviour. Thus, while Malson does refer to a subject, it is one
that is curiously constituted outside of herself in discourse (1997: 227).
The privileging of the body as cultural inscription in feminist cultural
theories allows for the figuring of anorexia as a sign of the oppressive
effects of disciplinary femininity (Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1993). The
anorexic body, as Bordo puts it, may be viewed as a surface on which
conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view,
through their inscription in extreme or hyperliteral form (1993: 1745).
This tendency to read meaning off the bodys surface constrains debate
around a series of polarized judgements based on the visual. The anorexic
body is endlessly reproduced through a set of binarized terms subver-
sive/hegemonic, transgressive/reinscriptive, embodied/disembodied in
a circular logic that serves to reify the subject as constituted outside of
herself. Whether figured as overconformist as opposed to deviant
(Gimlim, 1994) or as an (unconscious) protest that collapses into its
opposite and proclaims the utter capitulation of the subject to the
contracted female world (Bordo, 1993: 176; see also Orbach, 1993: 7896),
anorexia is taken to be an overdetermined reaction to an image of the
perfect female body. This reading of anorexia as an effect of a phallocentric
signifying economy tends to reify a denigrated association of femininity

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 154
with corporeality which actually reproduces rather than challenges Carte-

sian dualism. Embodied subjectivity is then written out. For the anorexic,
as Morag MacSween puts it:
both bodily integrity and bodily instrumentality prove to be ellusive [sic]. . . . 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. (1993: 248, 250)
The pernicious effects of reducing corporeality to representation emerge

strikingly from the commonsense construction of anorexia as an image
reading disorder (Bray, 1994, 1996). An overconsumption of media images
of thin-ideal femininity is assumed to activate an autophagic response in
women such that they narcissistically consume their own bodies (Bray,
1994: 8). The implication that women identify with images of their own
gender so fully that they cannot distinguish the difference makes sense
only within the context of heteronormative assumptions about women as
interchangeable objects of the male gaze. Moreover, because represen-
tations are presumed to have gender-differentiated effects, anorexia
becomes a trope for the generally pathological way in which western
women are assumed to read media images (Bray, 1996; Probyn, 1987: 203).
As a synecdoche for womens alienated body image in general (Bray, 1996:
417), anorexia functions as evidence of the impossibility of a female
embodied self.5
Whats the matter? Anorexia and body image

A body of literature, usually described as corporeal feminism or feminist
philosophies of the body, has made varied and sophisticated attempts to
theorize embodied subjectivity in a way that attends to the complex inter-
action of corporeality, the psyche and the social. Rigorously opposed to
mind/body dualism, such theorists emphasize that thinking, emotions and
desire are experienced through specific socially-located bodies that are,
in turn, irreducible to brute matter (see, for example, Diprose, 1994; Gatens,
1996). What concerns me here, however, in these otherwise sophisticated
theories, is what might be described as a blind spot around anorexia
which often results from reading anorexia through a Lacanian lens (Bray
and Colebrook, 1998).6 In discussion of anorexia in these corporeal feminist
networks, Lacans sense of the imaginary anatomy as acquired through the
introjection of an externalized image of the body (in the mirror stage) func-
tions to privilege sight as the sense both that explains the anorexics
supposedly narcissistic behaviour and through which the meaning of
anorexia can be gleaned.
This reductive effect frequently contradicts an overtly stated aim in
relation to anorexia. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, is careful to refute the
popular narcissism-connoting idea of anorexia as an out-of-control
compliance with the current patriarchal ideals of slenderness (1994: 40),
implying that anorexia is not reducible to a pathological introjection of
phallocentric representations. But in the same moment she argues that

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 155
anorexia can, like the phantom limb, be a kind of mourning for a pre-
Oedipal (i.e., precastrated) body and a corporeal connection to the mother
that women in patriarchy are required to abandon (1994: 40). If sexual
difference is where the bodys materiality is most displaced, it is not clear
why all women are not anorexic. It is the Lacanian context of Groszs asser-
tion that the anorexic may risk her very life in the attainment of a body
image approximating her ideal which undercuts her own refusal of
anorexia as a renunciation of patriarchal ideals of slenderness (1994:
40). Her preceding theoretical trajectory through Freuds bodily ego and
Anzieus skin ego slips into temporary abeyance, occluding the possi-
bility that the body image for which the anorexic strives might be derived
from the sensations of her body rather than from an alienating represen-
tation of the body.
Gail Weiss at first seems to offer a more embodied account of anorexia.
She reverses the pathologizing logic that posits anorexia as body image
distortion in opposition to some imagined coherent norm, suggesting that,
because becoming a subject is conditional upon the self-alienation and self-
repudiation involved in abjection, normalized body images can only occur
on the basis of bodily distortions (Weiss, 1999: 957). What makes anorexia
different, then, is not contradictory body images (which we all share), but
an excessive coherence of body image or a driving fixation with one body
image at the expense of all others (1999: 99). However, while Weiss states
her sensitivity to the lived, bodily dimensions of anorexia (1999: 99) (in
line with her broader framework derived from Merleau-Pontys notion of
embodiment as intercorporeality), she returns to Lacan at the culmination
of her argument about anorexic body images as too coherent to pathologize
that very coherence. Following Lacan, she suggests that:
the Gestalt that arises out of the identification of the subject with the specular
image, attains its coherence at the expense of our lived corporeality. . . . For the
nonpathological subject, . . . it is the very multiplicity of these body images which
guarantees that we cannot invest too heavily in any one of them, and these
multiple body images themselves offer points of resistance to the development of
too strong an identification with a singularly alienating specular (or even cultural)
image. (1999: 100)
By implication, therefore, the anorexic identifies with a singularly alien-

ating specular image. This only makes sense if one already believes in a
visualized image of the body as foundational.
Use of the anorexic body in cultural feminism as an exemplary form of
gender oppression and in corporeal feminism as a paradigm case of
(dis)embodiment demands a rethinking of the topography of anorexic
corporeality. How might anorexic subjectivity be thought in a way that
attends to sociocultural exigencies without denying introceptive and affec-
tive experience? How might it be possible to think anorexia beyond a single
theory of the body or, indeed, a single theory of anorexia? In the next
section I ask whether reading anorexia through a queer destabilization of
gender identities might unsettle predominant deployments of anorexia as
a trope for gender oppression.

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 156
Anorexia as psychic incorporation: still nobody there

In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler elaborates on her earlier (1990:
3578) adaptation of Freuds theory of melancholia to explain gender
performativity in terms of what is barred from performance (Butler, 1997:
145). She argues, contra Freud, that the taboo against homosexuality must
precede the incest taboo since it is the foreclosing of same-sex desire which
inaugurates the opposite-sex object-cathexis of the Oedipal phase (1997:
135). The same-sex object unnameable owing to the ubiquity of the prohi-
bition, and hence ungrievable then becomes incorporated by the ego
such that the gender of the ego is determined by that melancholic identifi-
cation (1997: 13440). [W]hat is most apparently performed as gender,
Butler argues, is the sign and symptom of a pervasive disavowal (1997:
147). In this deft theoretical synthesis of sociocultural, psychic and bodily
spheres, it is not only that sex is always already gender, but the construc-
tion of gender itself becomes a product of the heterosexual matrix of desire.
Might a queering of anorexia through Butlers framework offset determin-
istic readings of anorexia as a synecdochal signifier of sexual difference,
allowing for a rethinking of anorexia in more generative and embodied
terms? And might it be that the anorexics refusal to do her gender right
which meets with such social disapprobation testifies to a refusal of
compulsory reproductive heterosexuality? Following Butler, could one
suggest that the emaciated bodys gender ambiguity in, for example, the
elimination of breasts, hips and buttocks is a parodic proliferation (1990:
138) of the signifying practices of normative femininity which exceeds and
defies its own injunction (1990: 145)? And might this acting out of gender
be understood as the spilling over of an unowned aggression that refuses
the prohibition against grieving certain losses (Butler, 1997: 145, 1613)?
Butlers development of her theory of melancholic gender in The Psychic
Life of Power (1997) addresses a tendency in certain readings of Gender
Trouble (1990) to reduce gender performativity to visual play. Clearly there
are workings of gender that do not show in what is performed as gender,
she clarifies, and to reduce the psychic workings of gender to the literal
performance of gender would be a mistake (Butler, 1997: 144). While this
ceding of ground to the unseen workings of the unconscious does, as Ill
later suggest, open crucial theoretical space to anorexia as non-visual
symptom, Butlers framework still accesses the opacity of the uncon-
scious (1997: 144) via the visual body. Drag, for example, remains quin-
tessentially subversive because it exposes or allegorizes the mundane
psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualized genders
form themselves (1997: 146; emphasis added). It is still visual performa-
tivity, then, through which our knowledge of bodies is mediated. Butlers
sense of incorporation as a fantasy and not a process (Butler, 1990: 67),
and her categorical division of subjects into those who literalize or delit-
eralize this fantasy, not only value loads external perception at the expense
of introception, but returns us to the subversive/hegemonic binary already
so problematic to theorizing anorexia. Drag, she explains, allegorizes the
incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 157
taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go (Butler, 1997: 146). This

slippage between in and on conflates the body with its observable
surface, leaving any sense of gender as a felt interiority symptomatic of
heterosexual melancholia.
In fact, because binarized gender identities are not only reproduced by
compulsory heterosexuality but also reproduce heterosexual cathexes,
Butlers theory of melancholia preserves a psychoanalytic connection
between gender and sexuality such that desire is marked by unconscious
repudiation of object-choice.7 This reductive determination of sexuality
through the gender of object-choice (Sedgwick, 1991: 16) is an ocularce-
ntric one in which a subjects sexuality, if not read off visibly queer
gender/transgender, is read off the culturally intelligible gender of her/his
partner (Hemmings, 1998: 95). As Prosser points out, Butler subtly syllo-
gizes transgender = gender performativity = queer = subversive via a
certain collapsing of gender back into sexuality, in spite of her attempts to
undo this impression (Prosser, 1998: 29, 31). Within this framework, the
anorexic does not count as queer gender that is, as a gender performance
that refuses the ungrievability of heterosexualitys losses because she
does not signify as queer = homosexual. In other words, because the
anorexics asexuality the isolation of self from any sexual encounter
does not convincingly demonstrate repudiation of opposite-sex object-
choice, she is at best unmappable onto either side of Butlers queer/straight,
subversive/hegemonic antithesis, and at worst a hyperbolic (Butler, 1997:
139) form of heterosexual melancholia.
Anorexic body narratives: constructing an embodied self

In what follows, I explore some possibilities for thinking anorexia as an
embodied subjectivity. Following a theoretical trajectory that takes inspi-
ration from Elspeth Probyns (1993) positioning of embodied experience
between the ontological and the epistemological, Prossers (1998) trans-
sexual body narratives, and Tina Takemotos (2001) theorization of self-
inflicted wounds in terms of unfinished grieving, I try to build an
understanding of anorexia which is sensitive to affective experience
without taking experience as evidential, and which begins from the intro-
ceptive body without relying on biological determinism.
Probyn (1993: 45, 1617) suggests a way in which representations of the
self (experience at the discursive level) can be tempered and modified by
the sense of self rooted in the body (experience at an ontological level).
The tension between these two levels of experience or doubledness of the
self (1993: 5) acts as a check both on the ontological tendency to speak as
though from some ground of authenticity (which runs the risk of subsum-
ing others experiences under ones own) and on the tendency at a purely
epistemological or discursive level to stifle the critical reflection that
embodied experience can engender (1993: 1617, 256). The critics medi-
ating position between the two levels can be employed imaginatively by
using a kind of feeling-through-the-body to deconstruct re-presentations of
subjectivity (1993: 9, 18).

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 158
While Probyns framework provides for an epistemological recuperation

of experience, Prosser suggests how to read individual corporeal experi-
ence back into theories of the body (1998: 7; emphasis added). In
showing how transsexual bodily transitions are enabled by narrative tran-
sitions (1998: 45), Prosser enables a theoretical shift away from the body
as surface-sign towards a sense of body image as felt, as both derived from
and productive of physical experience (1998: 82). Is there a substance to
gendered body image that it can motivate somatic transition? (1998: 67)
he usefully asks. Further, Prosser actively addresses the ocularcentrism of
much feminist and queer theory which is particularly promising given a
certain correspondence in effect on knowledges of transsexuality and
anorexia of gender performativity-inspired theories of the body.8 While I
certainly do not wish to reproduce the transsexual as trope, I am inter-
ested in whether Prossers objections to polarized constructions of subjects
as literalizing/deliteralizing, subversive/hegemonic (1998: 16) might be
productively taken up in relation to anorexia. In this sense, I am engaging
with Prossers wish that the trouble transsexual body narratives pose for
contemporary theory might be deployed to initiate transitions in our para-
digms for writing bodily subjects (1998: 12).
Prossers critique of Butlers emphasis on the body as signifier suggests a
way into thinking an anorexic embodied subject. He notes that what allows
Butler to figure any feeling of being sexed or gendered . . . [as] phantasmatic,
symptomatic of heterosexual melancholia (Prosser, 1998: 43; emphasis in
original) and to juxtapose this with the queer performativity of gender as a
deliteralization of material sex via surface parody (1998: 44) is an inversion
of Freuds description of the relation between the ego and the body. In
relation to a widely cited passage from The Ego and the Id, in which Freud
states The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface
entity, but is itself the projection of a surface, a footnote in the English trans-
lation (authorized by Freud) clarifies: I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from
bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body.
It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body
(Freud, 1961: 26, cited in Prosser, 1998: 401). Butler, however, reversing
the emphasis, images the body as a psychic effect (Prosser, 1998: 41). She
returns in The Psychic Life of Power to explain this psychic effect in social
terms, but still as in/on the body. Here she suggests that our very ability to
speak of a distinction between internal and external is not prior to but effect
of the melancholic turn of subjection (Butler, 1997: 171). That is, the ideas
of the psyche and of a boundary between the psychic and the social, as in
notions of internalization and incorporation, are byproducts of our
ambivalent constitution as subject-effects of unavowable loss where the
sociocultural origins of that loss are displaced onto the psychic sphere
(1997: 1704, 17782). This reduction of the body and the psyche to a
surface cannot account for the generative power of felt gender identity over
the material body (Prosser, 1998: 43). The transsexuals sense of the imagin-
ary body as more real than her/his sexed materiality and her/his need to
change sex to be able to feel the bodily ego in conjunction and conformity
with the material body parts confirm, as Prosser puts it, the material reality

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 159
of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of
material reality (1998: 44). It is the imaginary anatomy with which the
bodily ego is identified, and the imaginary anatomy that motivates the
transformation of the flesh (1998: 6970).
Refusing a sense of body image in which image is privileged at the
expense of body (1998: 79), Prosser follows Didier Anzieus non-Lacanian
trajectory to Freud (1998: 65). Anzieu disputes Lacans idea of the uncon-
scious as structured like a language (cited in Prosser, 1998: 66) and, in The
Skin Ego (1989), Anzieu develops Freuds model of the bodily ego in
which, as Prosser explains, the ego
derives not so much from the perception of the body (an external perception),
that is, from what can be seen, but from the bodily sensations that stem from its
touching touching here in both an active and passive sense (an internal
perception). (Prosser, 1998: 43 quoting Freud; emphasis in original)
Anzieus term skin ego, Prosser explicates, emphasizes precisely this

Freudian sense of the ego as derived from the experience of the material
skin (1998: 65). As an interface or nexus between the psychic and the
somatic, the skin is the locale for the physical experience of body image
and the surface upon which is projected the psychic representation of the
body (1998: 72). For the transsexual who experiences her/himself as in the
wrong body and who desires to materialize her/his body imaginary, the
skin is a site of traumatic conflict between sentient body image and insen-
tient visible body (1998: 70).
The immense suffering involved in transsexual accounts of being in the
wrong skin further explicates the epistemological effects of ocularcentrism
in poststructural theories of the body informed by Lacanian psycho-
analysis. When one re-members that subjectivity is not just about having
a physical skin; its about feeling one owns it: its a matter of psychic invest-
ment of self in skin (1998: 73), theoretical frameworks that read the
emotive aspects of embodiment off the bodys surface appear rather more
serious. In contrast with Butlers sense that inner and outer constitute
a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject
(Butler, 1990: 134), Prosser, drawing on Anzieus case histories, maintains
that the subjects inability to distinguish inside from outside is most
often responsible in borderline conditions for acute psychic suffering
(Prosser, 1998: 80). In contrast with Weisss neo-Lacanian celebration of
multiple contradictory body images as health-inducing (Weiss, 1999: 100),
Prosser argues that [t]he lability and confusion in the post-Lacanian
subject are in Anzieu profoundly negative disturbances (Prosser, 1998: 80).
Once the vital significance of being at home in ones skin is appreciated,
visual body image reveals itself to be altogether less significant distinctly
secondary, in fact (1998: 789). For the transsexual, the specular image of
the changed body merely confirms the reintegration already materialized
by the felt body image (1998: 83).
This demoting of the visual register makes space for the subjective
experience of anorexia. If, in contemporary theory, the transsexual has been
made to signify the (de)literalization of sex (1998: 1315), the anorexic, one

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 160
might argue, has been made to signify the (de)literalization of gender.

Whether as an overassiduous absorption on/in the body of phallocentric
images of thin-ideal femininity or as a subversive reaction to those images
through an identification with the self (associated with masculine tran-
scendence) over the hated body (associated with feminine immanence),
anorexia is always read as a signifier of gender oppression. Prossers non-
visual sense of body image as derived from the feeling of the body actually
defies this Cartesian logic onto which anorexic subjectivity is predomi-
nantly mapped. If the anorexics sense of self is derived from the mutual-
ity of touch in both a physical and an affective sense and if the body
imaginary9 the psychic representation of the body is materialized on
the skin, then anorexia cannot be understood as identification with body
over mind or mind over body. The symbolic antithesis between mind =
masculine and body = feminine does not map onto subjective anorexic
experience. I dont see my mind as split, Karen Margolis re-members,
rather as clearly combining the sexes; and when I sought to reform my
body, I wanted to create the physical echo of that mental state (1988: 88).
In his recuperation of bodily materiality within transsexual accounts of
trans-embodiment, Prosser draws on two mutually reinforcing concepts
derived from neurologist Oliver Sackss work on severe body image disturb-
ances. Agnosia refers to the forgetting in the body image of somatically
attached, functioning parts, while its inverse, phantomization, relates to
a sensory memory of a lost body part or, paraphrasing Grosz, a psychic
nostalgia for somatic wholeness (Prosser, 1998: 78, 84). Using transsexual
narratives to remould these ideas, Prosser explains that it is the correlation
of agnosic alienation from being in the wrong body and the phantomiza-
tion of sex, narrativized as a return to a body lost, which forcefully moti-
vates the restorative change of sex (1998: 845). In a further remoulding of
sense, I want to suggest that, in anorexia, an agnosic experience of the
bodys surface a sense of the flesh of the body (especially those areas
where the flesh is deep: stomach, thighs, buttocks, breasts) as not me in
correlation with a phantomized image of the bodys transformation moti-
vates the starvation of the body to a painful emaciated state, yet one that is
reconciliatory as the redrawn lines of the flesh are realigned with the
sentient body imaginary.
As another aspect of this remoulding of sense, I want to reverse the
impression left by Prossers development of Anzieu that sexual difference
precedes the experience of the material skin. Commenting on the change in
one transsexuals skin tone following hormone treatment, Prosser remarks:
It is startling to grasp the extent to which the skins appearance determines
gendered reading, to which skin is a gendered text (1998: 75). In this
moment, the skin is a priori and substantially gendered, and the experience
of the wrong body is contingent on that prior sexual differentiation. In
contrast, I want to suggest that the anorexic bodily ego derived from the
sensations of the material skin only comes to be experienced as sexually
differentiated later, once it has been made sense of as such. In other words,
sexual difference doesnt precede the experience of self, but follows as a way
of making sense of it; the anorexics wrong body comes to be known as

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 161
wrong in sexually differentiated terms. This understanding of sexual

difference seems to me important if anorexia is to be contextualized within,
but not determined by, discourses of gender and sexuality. Feminist
cultural and corporeal frameworks, as Ive suggested, contain a central
problematic derived from predetermining anorexia as a signifier of gender
oppression: these theories require an understanding of anorexia as coex-
tensive with the experience of all western women, but they cannot explain
why all western women are not anorexic, nor why some men identify as
such. In what follows, I want to suggest that it is a particular making sense
of experience as gendered that motivates the anorexic transition. This idea
of gender as intelligible through the experiencing of it opens up space for
the specificity of anorexic body narratives. Many anorexic auto/biographers
explain the wrong bodys alienation as a response to trauma; to assaults
on or penetration of the skin in sexual, physical or emotional violence.
While acknowledging the life-shattering significance of these accounts of
trauma as gendered, I also want to suggest an understanding of gendered
experience more generally as traumatic. If, following Bernice Hausman,
gender is taken as merely one historically specific and very modern kind
of regulation of the category sex (1995: 179) as a kind of myth, in other
words, that naturalizes its history as the truth of the present, thereby
masking the discursive process through which it came to dominate
readings of sexual difference (1995: 18490) then it may be only as a
living corpse that the subject can maintain itself in the myth of gender
(1995: 191). I suggest that, as one such living corpse, the anorexic refuses
the living death of gender.
Phantomization/fantasization
The epigraphs at the start of this article clearly show the de-feminized body
as disburdened. The flesh stripped away is precisely female. Sexual matu-
ration was terrifying to me, Marya Hornbacher recalls: It was as if people
could see, just by the very presence of my breasts, that I was bad and sexual
and needy. I shrank back from my body as if it were going to devour me
(Hornbacher, 1998: 53; emphasis in original). For Claire Beeken, sexually
abused by her grandfather from the age of nine, puberty brought to a terrible
culmination the sense of her body as not her own: I hate my boobs because
he likes to touch them, and my periods because they excite him. My body
feels infected and dirty, and when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, I am
disgusted by it (Beeken, 2000: 26). The refusal of the anorexic body ego to
own the female body results in a de-sexing of the body in which the contours
of the skin are realigned with the anorexics de-gendered body imaginary.
The body becomes asexualized, disowned so that the alternatively gendered
imaginary can survive. So the anorexic becomes embodied as she starves off
the flesh through which her body is experienced and read as feminine and
sexual. While taking a very different trajectory from transsexuality, anorexia
corroborates Prossers argument about transsexuality as supporting the
material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imag-
inariness of material reality (1998: 44).

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 162
What does de-feminization feel like in a historical and sociocultural

context in which gender is constructed as binarized? In aligning body with
body imaginary, anorexics materialize a phantomization/fantasization of
androgyny that is often recounted in terms of a movement towards (but
never becoming) the only other culturally intelligible gender identity:
masculinity. Like the transsexual, the anorexics driving emotion is I am
not my (this) body, but, unlike the transsexual, the anorexic seeks not to
change sex, but to strip the body of its sex. A refusal to be a woman and
yet no desire to become a man constitutes a kind of nomadic, (non-)gender
identity that finds its embodiment only through emaciation. Karen
Margolis puts it like this:
I wanted to recreate myself in the image I held in my mind. . . . My image was not
of the pre-pubescent girl; she is too unrefined, too earthy, longing for the curves
of womanhood. . . . I went further with the body-taming for another reason to
transcend sex, as my mind was transcending physical reality. My image was of
the physical type I admire most, the combination of male and female that is called
androgynous. . . . The boy element in my fantasy was very strong. . . . When I
looked at myself, hips slimmed to straightness, thighs trimmed to muscle, the
mirror smiled with pleasure at my own double and dubious sexuality. . . . Above
the male/female divide, I could harmonise the beauty of both sexes. (Margolis,
1988: 868)
Note that the mirror phase of this fantasization is after the event of
materialization: confirmation of rather than motivation for transformation.
The materialization of the androgynous phantom body is often expressed
as a return to a childs body. My periods have stopped!, Aimee Liu
exclaims: I dont suppose the reprieve will last forever, but for the moment
it delights me. And the more weight I lose, the flatter I become. Its wonder-
ful, like crawling back into the body of a child (Liu, 1979: 41). Symbolic
of a pre-feminized or even prior masculine body, the figure of the childs
body completes the narrative transition, recuperating and reintegrating the
loss inaugurated by the bodys traumatic feminization. So the expression
of the body-becoming in terms of a return to a prior body is not a literal
re-membering, but a nostalgia for the purified version of what was, not
. . . [a] return to home per se (nostos) but to the romanticized ideal of home
(Prosser, 1998: 84). The anorexics transition is not, then, a pathological
reversal or arrest of psychosexual and physical development, as is so often
assumed by psychiatrists (for example, Bruch, 1988: 122), nor is it the
literalization of a return to a Lacanian imaginary of unity with mat(t)er
(Grosz, 1994: 40). Anorexia, Hornbacher clarifies, is not a scramble to get
back into the nest. Its a flying leap out (1998: 68; emphasis in original).
Agnosia/melancholia
In transsexual agnosia, the lost body is the wrong body, the pretransi-
tional insentient skin that sex-reassignment realigns with the sentient body
image or nostalgic body lost. In anorexia also, the pretransitional femi-
nized flesh is lost through being refused a place in the body imaginary,
and the emaciated body is recounted as the recuperation of a romanticized
02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 163
body lost. In what follows, I want to develop a sense of the anorexic body
as the embodied culmination of both these losses, that is, as the melan-
cholic expression of an ungrievable loss (a body lost) which both re-lives
and relieves the unlivability of the agnosic lost body. In this, I take Butlers
theory of melancholia in a different direction to her project, reshaping it
through the skin ego theoretical framework so as to open up a space for a
non-queer challenge to the delimitation of sex-gender-sexuality.
Unlike the process of mourning inaugurated by the death of a loved one
in which the ego is able to relinquish attachment to the lost object to come
to terms with the loss because of its conscious and definable nature,
melancholia speaks of a different kind of mourning in which the subject
does not know for what s/he is grieving and is therefore unable to sever
attachments to the lost object (Takemoto, 2001: 115). For Freud, Takemoto
usefully summarizes: melancholia is characterized by a conflict of ambiva-
lence that is either constitutional to the relationship between subject and
object or related to the threat of losing the object (2001: 116). This love/rage
ambivalence, because it cannot be consciously acknowledged, becomes
incorporated by the ego and emerges in acts of self-punishment, both in the
form of ruthless self-reproaches and as physical self-harm (2001: 11617).
While Takemoto is primarily concerned with self-inflicted wounds as the
somatic rerouting of unconscious ambivalence in relation to the anticipated
loss of an ill friend, I am more concerned here with the psychic and somatic
absorption in anorexia of a conflict of ambivalence constitutional to a
relationship. Following Butler, I want to suggest that this conflict of ambiva-
lence that characterizes melancholia may be inaugurated through the prohi-
bitions of a social ideal as much as it may be the product of a relationship
with an actual loved one (Butler, 1997: 1815). Anorexia, then, may be the
melancholic expression of loss inaugurated through the social compulsion
to be a given gender or, to borrow from Butler, the embodiment of an
ungrieved loss which reiterates a gendered idealization and its radical unin-
habitability (1997: 145). Since gender-as-myth conceals the process through
which it came to interpret sexual difference, we cannot know ourselves
outside its terms. The self-directed violence of anorexia may be the refrac-
tion of anger intended for the social ideal of gender, but which cannot be
acknowledged as such. Where the anorexics traumatic experience of
herself as gendered is sharpened exponentially through abuse, the psychi-
cally/somatically rerouted anger is ever more violent. Such an understand-
ing of anorexia as a psychic/somatic bearing of the melancholic trauma of
gender resonates powerfully with experiential accounts in terms of an
internal voice berating the self (see, for example, Paterson, 2000: 51), with
the assault on the flesh itself, and with the ritualistic, repetitive behaviour
of the sufferer. Quoting Cathy Caruth, Takemoto suggests that trauma speaks
of an event that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully
known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself
again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor
(Caruth, 1996: 4, cited in Takemoto, 2001: 119).
Here I want to return to reconnect the narratives of body and text. Freud,
as Takemoto points out, returned to reassociate melancholia with mourning

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 164
in that both . . . are driven by the need to progress from the stage of identifi-
cation with loss to that of detachment and exclusion (2001: 117). Melan-
cholia, like mourning, is a healing process that only appears pathological
because the process of grief . . . takes a detour through the body (2001: 117;
emphasis added). Paradoxically, Takemoto suggests, it is through the
active debasement of the ego (enabled by the ability to objectify loss and
then to act against it) that the subject eventually breaks free from loss
(2001: 117), so the injurious acts of melancholia are a necessary form of
detachment through which an unknown loss becomes known (2001: 119).
It is only after loss has been inscribed on the surface of the body that the
subject can overcome it (2001: 117). The anorexic body, therefore, far from
pathological or disembodied, testifies to an acting out of genders unliv-
ability precisely in order to go on living. If we arrive at a sense of self a
skin ego through the bodily sensations stemming from the surface of the
body, then it may be that self-inflicted pain serves a restorative purpose in
allowing us to reknow and reown our bodily selves (Prosser, 1998: 40, 74).
If . . . self-harm is read as a testimony to the will to survive pain and
trauma, Jane Kilby suggests, it can be understood as a means of marking
the difference between dying in life and death in all its finality . . . a
momentary means of living beyond the deadening touch of trauma (Kilby,
2001: 127). Since melancholic losses cannot be dealt with as fully as those
in mourning, melancholic grieving is rarely overcome: for many anorex-
ics, the conflict of ambivalence over the object/ideal is so overwhelming
that the ego will destroy itself in the attempt to detach from it (Takemoto,
2001: 117). The need to tell ones story, then, testifies both to traumas
endless impact on a life (Caruth, 1996: 7, cited in Takemoto, 2001: 119)
and the function of narrative in furthering the healing process of grief as
an expression of loss (literally onto the page).
Anorexic auto/biographies often construct anorexia as both effect of and
solution to trauma. Narrating is therefore profoundly ambivalent, enacting
both a painful re-counting of past horrors and enabling a translation of
trauma into language in which the bodily transition can be recuperated,
made sense of. As a means of making connections, narrative enables the
transition itself (Prosser, 1998: 9). Making sense of her anorexia within a
narrative of appalling abuse by her father from the age of three, Helen
expresses both the (twofold) loss of another life that might have been I
now wish I had never been born a girl (Helen, 1997: 102) and the loss
incurred through the profound inadequacy of translating pain and emotion
into words: It is very difficult to put down on paper (1997: 102). But this
very expression of loss erupting onto the surface of the page, paralleling
and re-enacting the (de)fleshy eruption of the anorexic body imaginary
through the skin, actually surpasses and transmutes its terms. Grief, fore-
closed in anorexia due to the radical unspeakability of trauma No one
knew that he was abusing me . . . I just couldnt bring myself to say it (1997:
103) becomes avowable through the telling. The ungrievability of trau-
matic melancholia is translated through the anorexic body narrative into
mourning, a state in which both past events and self can be recognized and
in which a further transition becomes possible.

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 165
When you first fall ill you dont really know what is happening to you or why it
is happening. Looking back on it now I am certain that, to an extent, I was trying
to get rid of my feminine characteristics. By reducing my body size I hoped I
would no longer be seen as a sexual object that could be used and abused. Losing
weight made me look more asexual, more boyish. (1997: 102)
Anorexic body narratives further the regenerative grieving work of the

transitioning body itself. At some indeterminable point in an unfinishable
transition, both body and narrative are the embodied culmination of past
and future, trauma and recovery, melancholia and mourning, femininity
and masculinity. The work of the body/narrative is, therefore, always duo-
directional: the phantomized/fantasized body is always already a return to
a nostalgic pretraumatized lost body; the agnosic/melancholic body, while
compelled to remain retrogressively in the past, is always already a
movement towards future regeneration.
Reading anorexia through body narratives generates an understanding of
anorexia in which the experiential and corporeal are not only recentralized
and reintegrated, but function as critical tools with which to trouble
existing epistemological frameworks. As a subject in transition to embodi-
ment, the anorexic of authorial accounts reappropriates the traumatically
lost body, reconciling flesh with future body imaginary. In the process, she
refuses to be reduced to someone elses visual image of her. Neither a patho-
logical surface-sign of cultural inscription nor a paradigm case of the
female bodys disembodied relation to representations, the anorexic of
body narratives defies the Cartesian-structured problematic self/body and
its multiple reified forms interior/exterior, representation/materiality,
subversive/hegemonic. If anorexia is a melancholic expression of genders
radical uninhabitability, then reading the visible anorexic body as a
synecdochal signifier of sexual difference constitutes a form of epistemic
violence. By filtering melancholia through the skin ego theoretical frame-
work, I have tried to create a theoretical space for anorexia that does not
privilege the surface of the body at the expense of the experience of the
material flesh; a space, in other words, that might sustain anorexia as a tran-
sitional embodied subjectivity. In the process, I have taken Butlers theory
of melancholia in a direction that might allow for a non-queer challenge to
gender as sociocultural imperative. I suggest a theory of melancholia in
which corporeality is both lost through the traumatic experience of gender
and reappropriated through the grieving of body and narrative.
Notes
1. Following Prosser (1998), I use the term ocularcentric rather than, say,
scopic or specular in order to convey two senses in which sight
dominates thinking about anorexia; first, that anorexic bodies are judged
through the others gaze and, second, that anorexia is assumed to be
induced either through overexposure to the wrong kind of representations
(anorexia as a narcissistic image-reading disorder) or through the
introjection of a visualized image of the body (Lacanian interpretations).
2. My thanks to Clare Hemmings and two anonymous referees for their

02 brain (jk/d) 19/6/02 3:29 pm Page 166
insightful critiques of and suggestions for the development of such ideas in

earlier drafts of this article.
3. Deauthorized is borrowed from Butler (1992: 13) to convey the sense in
which anorexia has become the abject of the embodied subject.
4. In using the term feminist cultural theorists, I do not mean to imply a
uniformity of content, but rather a certain consistency of effect in theories
that privilege a reading of the anorexic body as sociocultural or discursive
text. In what follows, I discuss these theorists constructions of anorexia as
a kind of limit to their theoretical frameworks rather than presenting an
account of those frameworks.
5. The extent to which assumptions about the harmful effects of media images
on womens bodies go unexamined is also striking. Space limitation here
does not allow for detailed analysis of the numerous texts from popular
feminist accounts like Wolfs The Beauty Myth (1990) and cultural feminist
works like Bordos Unbearable Weight (1993) to medical reports like the
BMAs recent Eating Disorders, Body Image and the Media (2000) that
reproduce this idea. Suffice it to say that the role of representation in eating
disorders has recently enjoyed a certain mainstreaming. At the June 2000
Body Image Summit in London, government ministers, fashion editors and
health experts joined forces with the aim of restricting contaminating
images of superwaifs in fashion magazines, advertising and on television.
6. My critique of anorexia in corporeal feminism here and in the following
paragraph on Grosz broadly follows Bray and Colebrook (1998), although I
am less convinced by their Deleuzian resolution to the
representation/materiality split because, in focusing on what anorexia does
rather than on how it is experienced, their framework reoccludes the felt
aspects of embodiment.
7. The heterosexual man wants the woman he would never be. He wouldnt
be caught dead being her: therefore he wants her. She is his repudiated
identification (Butler, 1997: 137).
8. See, for example, Finn and Dells reductive elision of anorexia and
transsexuality as body management strategies that are about
normalization and invisibility (1999: 470).
9. Here, and in what follows, I use the term body imaginary to refer to the
felt body image that the anorexic strives to materialize because the phrase
body image seems too bound up with its visual connotation.
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Address: Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: J.R.Brain@lse.ac.uk


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Feminist Theory

Unsettling 'body image': Anorexic body narratives and the materialization

The online version of this article can be found at:

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Unsettling body image

Abstract This article critiques contemporary feminist theorys frequent

My anorexia is a form of self-knowledge. People think that anorexics imagine

This article is inspired by what I perceive to be the irreducibility of

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152 Feminist Theory 3(2)

Deauthorized3 anorexic bodies

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Brain: Unsettling body image 153

capitalism. Sexual difference becomes the primary and indispensable lens

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154 Feminist Theory 3(2)

with corporeality which actually reproduces rather than challenges Carte-

The pernicious effects of reducing corporeality to representation emerge

Whats the matter? Anorexia and body image

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Brain: Unsettling body image 155

By implication, therefore, the anorexic identifies with a singularly alien-

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156 Feminist Theory 3(2)

Anorexia as psychic incorporation: still nobody there

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Brain: Unsettling body image 157

taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go (Butler, 1997: 146). This

Anorexic body narratives: constructing an embodied self

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158 Feminist Theory 3(2)

While Probyns framework provides for an epistemological recuperation

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Brain: Unsettling body image 159

Anzieus term skin ego, Prosser explicates, emphasizes precisely this

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might argue, has been made to signify the (de)literalization of gender.

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wrong in sexually differentiated terms. This understanding of sexual

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What does de-feminization feel like in a historical and sociocultural

Brain: Unsettling body image 163

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164 Feminist Theory 3(2)

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Anorexic body narratives further the regenerative grieving work of the

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166 Feminist Theory 3(2)

insightful critiques of and suggestions for the development of such ideas in

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Brain: Unsettling body image 167

Bray, A. (1994) The Edible Woman. Reading/Eating Disorders and

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Liu, A. (1979) Solitaire: A Young Womans Triumph over Anorexia Nervosa.

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