Hur mycket plats får kvinnor (ä)ta upp? Mat, rum och kroppshyddor

Abstract

Women's sense of threatened or threatening boundaries, bodily and psychological, are implicated in complaints such as anorexia and bulimia, on the one hand, and agoraphobia and claustrophobia on the other. Like agoraphobia, anorexia is a predominantly female complaint. Affecting around five to ten percent of American women and leading to contemporary death råtes at around 150,000 ayear in America alone (Brumberg), it is reportededly on the increase, and has been so since World War II. Is there some relation between feminism's bid for independence and the rise in anorexia? It is theorized that anorexics, after a period of (futile?) protest and clamoring, succumb to the family's critical attitude and shift strategies in their struggle toward independence: instead, they become anorexics. Possibly, the increase of anorexia after World War II cotdd be related to the transformation of women's situation and the concomitant changes in expectations. This has led some antifeminists, unaware of the history of anorexia, to blame feminism for the rise in anorexia. At the same time, most women in the Western world, in my view, are bulimarexics to some degree, something that is reflected and compounded in women's magazines with their continuous and contradictory parades of feasting and fasting. On one leve), anorexia can be seen as a retreat from the world and a shrinking in space - a centripetal contraction of oneself, perhaps in defense. In its insatiability, bulimia, on the other hand, appears to be anorexia's centrifugal opposite. I do not, however, think of these complaints as opposites. Rather, I think that there is both in anorexia and bulimia, and in bulimarexia, a desire to break out of the boundaried space that is the female body as defined in Western culture: a paradoxical refusal to curb one's voracity. If spaciousness and freedom are interimplicated, as I would like to suggest - open spaces associating to freedom and freedom presupposing space in which one can tnove without restraint - then anorexia, like bulimia and bulimarexia, is a way of requesting more space - hut a differently constituted space.