Feeding anorexia: gender and power at a treatment center
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mpts to trace the origins of exploitation and oppression are extremely relevant. However, it is also important for both the colonized and the colonizers to locate the multiplicities of oppression from within and beyond and from the nation to the Empire. And so, when we in India try to trace alternative democracies in our past, we not only read Gandhi (pp. 101–104), Tagore (pp. 106–108) or Sri Aurobindo (pp. 108–110), but also try to understand thinkers like Phule, Periyar or Ambedkar1 for their contributions towards making India meaningfully democratic. In India, religious politics have done more harm than good to its unity. And that is why whenever Indian nationalism’s imagined community stood for ‘unity in diversity’, India’s poor, women, tribals and dalits fought for diversity – whether in Tamil Nadu, North East or Kashmir. For the white people in the West and for the upper caste in the East, a major contribution by the anti-racist/anti-casteist feminist politics will be, as Eisenstein illustrates, a humanitarianism that is polyversal. Quoting Toni Morrison, Eisenstein points out, ‘Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined’ (p. 188). The attempts by the West to define the Black or the Muslim belonged to the Westerners; it doesn’t belong to the defined. And equally problematic has been the attempts of the East (living in the West or the non-West) to define the dalit or the subaltern. If the polyversal world, as Eisenstein explains, wishes to have a ‘view from everywhere’, then feminists across the world will have to see and think more on many other fundamentalisms beyond the Muslim. Or to be more precise, Western feminists will have to tell the West to open their eyes towards Christian fundamentalism. Yet, how do third-world feminists confront the Empire? Eisenstein shows a very rarely visible passion and honesty to say that it is important for feminisms today more than ever to think polyversally and to see human bodies beyond colour and language. Yet, I was left wanting more specificity about exactly what such a polyversal account would entail and for whom. What her book contributes to is the hope that polyversal feminisms of the West and the East will see beyond boundaries created between empires and nations and the definers and the defined by capital and power.
M.S. Sreerekha doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400295
Feeding anorexia: gender and power at a treatment center Helen Gremillion; Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2003, 280p, ISBN 0-8223-3133-0 (Hbk) d69.00; ISBN 0-8223-3120-9 (Pbk) d16.95
Feeding Anorexia is a refreshingly original and insightful account of how anorexia is (re)constituted. Through careful ethnographic investigation and astute critical book reviews
feminist review 83 2006
177
analysis, Gremillion shows how the regime of a leading treatment centre for eating disorder sufferers in the west of the USA regenerates the very power relations that it identifies as part of anorexia’s conditions of emergence. Gremillion’s analysis marks a welcome shift away from much feminist soci
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