The spectacle of anorexia nervosa

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Abstract
Critical examinations of post‐industrial culture have identified the body as an important site of ideological labor. By questioning the existence of essences and the possibility of a subjectivity untainted by power mechanisms, scholars from numerous disciplines examine various body practices to show that articulations of the body are always positioned in, and productive of, particular cultural, historical, and ideological conditions. Placed in performative terms, Dwight Conquergood, Judith Butler, Sandra Bartky, among others, suggest that everyday body performances, far from being artificial or fictional enactments, represent an active negotiation of the normalizing strategies and categorical schemes of cultural life. This essay examines anorexia nervosa as a spectacle of femininity in contemporary society. The enactment of anorexia is shown to be a spectacle characterized by a crisis of the female body and its quest for identity within a cultural climate that demands of its actors a concealment of performative criteria, thereby preserving the illusion of an essential female identity for spectators. The dynamics of this disease are then placed in historical context to show that the promise of singular identity through consumption and self‐examination emerges in the intersection of modernism and postmodernism, where the spectacle and the confession conjoin to produce sanctioned yet conflicted performances of femininity.

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