Susan Bordo

Eating Disorders: The Feminist Challenge to the Concept of Pathology

In the clinical literature on eating disorders, the description, classification, and elaboration of “pathology” has been the motor of virtually all research. In the leading journals, attempts to link eating disorders to one or another specific pathogenic situation (biological, psychological, familial) proliferate, along with studies purporting to demonstrate that eating disorders are members of some already established category of disorder (depressive, affective, perceptual, hypothalamic, etc.). Anorexia and bulimia increasingly are appearing in diverse populations of women, making the possibility of describing a distinctive profile for each less and less likely [11, 21, 30, 39, 66]. Yet the search for common “underlying” pathologies still fuels much research [24, 49]. As each proposed model is de-stabilized by the actual diversity of the phenomena, more and more effort is put into precise classification of distinctive “subtypes”, and new “multidimensional” categories emerge (e.g., bulimia as “biopsychosocial” illness [36]), which satisfy fantasies of precision and unification of phenomena that have become less and less amenable to scientific clarity and distinctness.

The Tudors, Natalie Dormer, and Our “Default” Anne Boleyn

When I interviewed Hilary Mantel in 2011 while she was still writing Bring Up the Bodies, she described her characters as belonging to “a chain of literary representation.” Her Cromwell, she told me, “shakes hands” with previous depictions, as does her Thomas More, a bold departure from earlier depictions such as the sanctified icon of conscience in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: