Beautiful, moral, functional : bodily self-alteration in an Italian center for eating disorders

Abstract

Only in the twentieth century, especially since the 1960s, has the slender body replaced other concepts of female beauty in the West (Hesse-Biber 1996 ). Many streams of feminism initially supported this new aesthetic ideal of the thin woman, seeing in thinness a powerful and symbolic way to express a rebellion against domesticity and patriarchy (Brown and Jasper 1993). Paradoxically, however, rather than a statement of freedom, the pursuit of slenderness soon became a straitjacket for women. It is not surprising, therefore, that popular contemporary understandings and representations of eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, often associate such conditions with an obsessive and self-oppressive quest for thinness.