Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle As a Metaphor For Our Age: The Classic Account of the Social and Cultural Phenomenon Underlying Anorexia ... Other Eating Problems (Penguin Psychology S.) - Softcover

Orbach, Susie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140169784 ISBN 13: 9780140169782

Publisher: Penguin, 1993

Synopsis

Anorexia used to be called 'the slimming disease'. The cure was to take the young women primarily afflicted with it into hospital and keep them there until they gained weight again. The result was that that they immediately starved themselves on leaving. Many died. Children as young as seven or eight, both girls and boys, now succumb to this life-threatening illness. In HUNGER STRIKE, first published in a new edition by Penguin in 1993, Susie Orbach explains why teenagers try to control their lives by controlling their bodies.

About this title

Review:

'A much-needed antidote to the unsympathetic views often aroused by anorexia nervosa.' - The Times Literary Supplement'Ms Orbach extends the feminist analysis systemically, convincingly and movingly to portray the anorexic struggle as a "metaphor of our age".'- The New York Times Book Review

Synopsis:

In her examination of the anorectic's struggle, Susie Orbach sees women's eating problems as symbolizing the battle for autonomy in which every woman is engaged by identifying the first and most important arena of contention, a woman's body. As the author demonstrates, a woman's obsessive monitoring, severe reduction in food intake and the accompanying bingeing are a reflection of society's demands that she does not take up too much space, that she looks a certain way in order to be acceptable and that she curtails her needs in general. Yet anorexia also expresses a rebellion againts such ideas. It is, at another level, a cry of protest, a hunger strike against the contradictory and intolerable demands women face in contemporary society. In a new introduction, Susie Orbach discusses current attitudes towards eating problems and how they have changed over the last several years, and in a newly revised final chapter, she proposes an innovative approach to residential treatment that utilizes the meanings of anorexia to the sufferer as a basis for a therapy. The author also wrote "Fat is a Feminist Issue".

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140169784
• ISBN 13: 9780140169782
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224