I. Personal Bodies. Struggles. Contexts. Legends.

Walking into the women's locker room at the fitness center one Saturday afternoon, I found it deserted with the exception of two young girls who were discussing whether they had worked out long enough or if they should keep going. I smiled to hear what is so often my own internal dialogue spoken out loud. I went to a locker, and as I was pulling off my sweatshirt and substituting my bra top and weight belt, one of the girls turned to me as if she had recognized a kindred spirit and said, "Tell me the truth. The real truth. I want to know. Look at my body. I'm fat. I need to lose weight, don't I?" My response rang hollow as I tried to reassure her that she looked beautiful just the way she was (and indeed from one perspective she did, with her smooth body barely breaking into the curves of puberty, the rounded hips and stomach defining a female shape), hollow because her frenzied questioning and tone of voice sounded all too familiar to me. I had asked the same pointed question of dozens of people countless times, never believing their reassurances as now she did not believe mine: "But I know. Tell me. It's okay. Just say, 'Hillary, you weigh too much. Lose some weight.' Just look at my butt." I already had, and at her stomach too, my internal response divided between the old "Yes, you could lose some weight. You're not quite linear, not quite a straight line. Getting some unsightly bumps and bulges there," and a more sympathetic, politically committed "NO, you are FINE!" After trying to say something nonacademic about the pressure of distorted cultural standards on women and repeating the usual line that weight doesn't matter, that muscle weighs more than fat, I asked her how old she was. Shyly, braces gleaming, she told me, "Thirteen." Trying to quiet the voice in myself that is so much like her own and to present the "older and wiser" perspective that could "save" her from self-condemnation and self-mutilation, I told her she should value herself the way she is. All the while I cringed inside at the familiar tone and the insistence with which she returned to her object of horror, her own flesh. I was a poor savior, for I could only half believe what I was saying myself.

In Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991), the film's hero-

ine, the FBI trainee Clarice Starling, acts as a different kind of savior. She is trying to save female victims from a male serial killer who wants to be a woman, and who starves women in a walled-in pit in order to be better able to remove their skins, which he makes into dresses he wears himself.^[1] An apprentice, Clarice needs the help of the notorious prisoner Hannibal Lecter, known for his cannibalism, in order to find the killer and save the women. She is granted the authority of the father through Lecter at a price: that she reveal painful psychosexual details about her life. Clarice resists this sexualization, preferring the professional mask. Her mask is the face of a woman with something to prove and is all too familiar. Eyes set, teeth clenched, jaw tensed, focus forward, Clarice conquers the FBI obstacle course at least partially to overcome the doubts that this male-dominated institution has about her competency, her ability to perform as well as a man. Here, in the beginning of the movie, Clarice's mission is to prove that she has as much value as "one of the guys," and her toil over the obstacle course in this opening sequence is to gain recognition of her abilities, her purpose, her worth as a human being and as a prospective member of the FBI. The grim determination etched into her face, distorting her lips, curling the edges of her nostrils in a desperate quest for recognition of her mettle, defined as the capacity for steely hardness, is that of an outsider who has a series of nonphysical obstacles to overcome as well: namely, the cultural traditions that equate female bodies with softness, lack of capability and lack of physical and mental toughness. Furthermore, as Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) reminds her, Clarice's working-class origins also make her an outsider to the inner circle of white male privilege and power. Her discussions with Lecter serve as her price of admission, and Clarice discloses one painful detail.

Her revelation functions as a parable for the systematic sexual violence the rest of the movie explores: At ten, Clarice tried to stop the slaughter of a lamb because she couldn't stand the animal's screaming. She ran with the lamb half a mile from the farm before she was stopped. Clarice's later work is an effort to stop the screaming of those lambs, metaphorically displaced onto the female victims of the serial killer. She is trying to track down and put a stop to a source of male violence against women.^[2] The film goes to great lengths to create par-

allels between the "aberrant" violence of a single killer and the misogynist violence of the other cultural institutions that frame Clarice. Her work is an attempt to recover the part of herself that was split off when she faced the senseless slaughter, the part of herself that was slaughtered, the part of herself that still screams inaudibly when she suffers sexual harassment: from her FBI trainer to wardens and inmates of the prison where she goes to interrogate Lecter.^[3] Clarice functions paradoxically in the film as the agent/mind attempting to rescue women who have been literally reduced to flesh while she herself is continually vulnerable to the same reduction^[4]

Aspects of Hillary, aspects of Clarice. As in The Silence of the Lambs , in my narrative what started as a "singular" act of male violence repeated itself in several cultural forms that contributed to and intersected with anorexia and related eating disorders. Facing the sources of my own fragmentation, I remember splitting off from myself and watching fragmentation happen, the body carried into the room and entered while it lay wooden and dead, when, at sixteen, I was raped by my track coach. For a long time after, I screamed in silence, displacing the anger onto the body that had made me vulnerable to attack, and declaring myself separate from it. I was at war with that body, starving it, punishing it by running intervals on the track every evening until I couldn't stand, running ten miles hard each morning and doing half an hour of situps on the back lawn under the apricot trees before breakfast, then making it vomit anything taken in. For two years I lived on spinach and toast during the week, binging on the weekends. With only 6 percent body fat, all I could see was the "fat" on my stomach and legs, this remnant of a feminine, bodily presence that had been vulnerable to attack, a body I desperately denied. And it wasn't just me. Whether or not their dis-ease had its origins in sexual violence, all the women I knew behaved the same way.^[5] Running on a university track team on scholarship, I had chosen to situate myself within an external regime that demanded self-annihilation of a very literal kind in the guise of self-discipline, as had every other member of the team.

Once a month I and my teammates were submerged underwater in a tank to determine our body-fat percentages. The medical establishment says a "normal" percentage of body fat for a woman is be-

tween 22 and 25 percent; our coach wanted us all under 10. It would make us run faster, he said. To ensure we would achieve this, we were weighed twice a week in the university training room, where the trainer was asked to call our weights out loud. In our Bill Rogers shorts, single file, we paraded by closed circles of football players sitting, getting their knees taped, their arms bandaged, watching us as a diversion. We felt ourselves eyed, each inch of flesh scrutinized, our worth summed up, and resigned, we trudged toward the scale as if it were a hangman's noose, waiting for the public exposure of our failures. "One hundred and ten. One hundred and fourteen. Ninety-five. One hundred and two." We all thought we were fat. Every one of us, twenty in all, were anorexic, bulimic, or both. Although I did not recognize it at the time, the violence I had experienced earlier was repeating itself, this time with my wholehearted dedication and consent. The athletic program, which promises to give women a "healthy" sense of our own value and power, functioned, with our enthusiastic cooperation, to make us destroy ourselves instead. Like a flu, the logical strain that unites eating disorders and forms of violence against women had mutated, repeating itself in a different pattern.

So far, I had encountered this violence in the physical, empirical, more easily identifiable dimensions of experience. The next mutation surfaced in what might seem an unlikely place: academia. Like the university athletic program, in postfeminist America the academic curriculum, the ideal of "higher education," also promises to provide women with a sense of subjectivity, dominion. Yet, even here, in the "higher" domain of abstract thinking, of figurative language that does not concern itself with the body, the pattern reappeared.

At about the same time I was eating spinach and toast, running workouts such as twenty repeated half-mile intervals, and parading past football players to the scale, I was an English major reading modernist literature. Like Clarice in her FBI training, running under the signs Hurt, Agony, Pain, Love-It, love it I did. Coaches in the early eighties, including mine, still frequently employed the maxim No pain, no gain. This echoes the signs, nailed to the old pine tree in the opening obstacle course sequence of The Silence of the Lambs , where the love of pain and agony is etched into hard wood as if a testament to its permanence. Clarice trains under such a regime: you love your

agony and pain because they are designated as the price of admission to the upper reaches of white male high culture, the realm of individual achievement, power, and precedence. Through your self-sacrifice, your willingness to offer yourself up to agony, you are given the opportunity to use your mind to discipline your soft body, overcome its limitations, vulnerability, and needs, and to become the self-sufficient male icon offered in American culture as the embodiment of selfhood. Hurt, Agony, Pain, Love-It becomes the symbol of opportunity, the chance to prove your worth. Running under the signs of the dominant cultural logic, Clarice and I were motivated to push ourselves beyond the limitations usually inscribed on the female body and, in doing so, gained respect.

Reading and running, running and reading. Every so often I would pause in my reading, struck by a similarity between longings expressed in these texts and my obsession with food and flesh, my urgent denial of the feminine, and my desire to "get rid of my body." My aesthetics and my longing to transcend this vulnerable body that I was stuck with and that wasn't mine were circulating through those texts, and I read this similarity as an affirmation of my "superior" world, which was, after all, like that described in these "great books." In my junior year I had to stop competing, for the body I had been trying to get rid of broke down instead, grinding to a halt like a rundown machine. My immune system, taking the cue from my mind, had become self-consuming, attacking my connective tissue and swelling my joints until I couldn't turn myself over in bed. But no matter. It was easy enough to transfer the physical drive, that single-mindedness, from the track and endless running to those "great books" and my study of them. I traded in the under-10-percent-body-fat coach for others, "coaches" in books who could promise me no body at all. Books were clean. Pure. Hard. Masculine.

There is a reason why it was so easy for me to slide from one discourse to the next. The very logic I had applied to my body for so many years was articulated in the premises of literary theory, of criticism, in the ways we were expected to write. It was an easy transfer. The similarity of logics made it, for me, a long apprenticeship, longer than Clarice's, since one form blended so easily into the other. It took me a long time to unlearn what the "great books" said, to discover

what I was trying to do—"save" my body—because I identified with what I read. I had to forget everything my "coaches" had told me, or like Clarice, I had to twist what the "masters" had taught to serve my own purposes. Trying to combine the cold, clean abstraction of "theory" with my driving concern to find a way of existing, of justifying the embodiment I denied, I explored the "third space" of gender. Following the academic theories current at the time, I took an indeterminate position, which oscillates between the polarity of masculine/feminine, that promised a subjectivity free from gender, a conceivable space as long as it remains theoretical. "But what about the body?" a professor of mine asked me. My body was precisely what these particular forms of theory allowed me to leave behind once again. I had been forgetting or suppressing the emotional sources of my will to theorize: my flesh. Yet, it's not quite so simple: theory also enabled me to think differently, to articulate the relationship between literal and figurative, text and life, of which this book is a result. It was not theory per se that led me to avoid the problems of my embodiment but rather the way theory can be practiced in some circles: as abstract, "higher" thinking detached from or replacing the "real world."

Once I stopped forgetting I had a body, I found others forgetting the same thing. I found I was still silently screaming every time I sat quietly in the seminar room, listening, not speaking, thinking "No, that's not it. You're leaving it out. You're cutting out the body again. And women." Women, bodies; bodies, women—the two always seemed to appear in tandem. So I started to look for those bodies—what had made them disappear?—my body, the body of another woman on the track team who ate only carrots and drank the water from her boiled spinach, the bodies of all of us who look in the mirror every day and see anathema, despair, the horror of a female flesh. Like Clarice, I am trying to find the bodies before it is too late. The bodies we starve in the walled pit of our souls, voluntarily serving our cultural masters, the bodies sacrificed to textual models, televised images, to airbrushed displays. To linear argumentative structure with its clean, hard lines, the kind I had written in so easily, so well, while I stolidly excised any feeling. I want to salvage those bodies, extricate them from some of those nipple-ringed modernists and poststructuralist theorists who, like the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs ,

would starve them to death in order to cut them away: attraction, repulsion, torturing the feminine in order to try it on. I want the bodies to breathe, I want to heal but not unite the split between spirit and flesh that's been cutting us in two at least since Plato began flinging embodied women off his transcendent ladder toward flying. Like Clarice, I feel compelled to confront the sources of my fears: "It was screaming, some kind of screaming, like a child's voice. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to."^[6] Under the guise of the Feminist Bureau of Investigation, this text culminates my apprenticeship. It is my feeble attempt to fly while firmly grounded in the "ponderous prison" of my flesh.

Stylistically, logically, structurally, there are difficulties with flying when the material—language—you use for wings is an intrinsic part of the problem. For the most part, "good writing" as it is defined academically cuts away all thought and impulse that would lead one astray from the pure linearity of argumentative form. No emotion. No reference to the personal, lived experience of embodied women in late capitalist culture, who are negotiating career expectations and Nike ads, along with the religious right, MTV, and Cindy Crawford. No revelation of underlying motivations, of feelings, of compulsions, of the passions where my interests lie, of the space where I combine theoretical insight with my personal narratives every day.

Yet, with an ear turned toward its screaming, the body I had attempted to forget remained. I couldn't get away. I ended up with a project about precisely that process of cutting away, the mode of thought, the privilege given to rationality, the process of elimination that I have named "anorexic" for its similarity to the logic of the disease. Anorexics enact with their bodies the process that Western logic inscribes: they physically demonstrate its subtext, the horror of the female flesh that is often the unconscious of discourse. Anorexics, as Morag Macsween has shown, "attempt to solve at the level of the individual body the irreconcilability of individuality and femininity in a bourgeois patriarchal culture."^[7] The real of anorexia is the residue of discourses about it. To write about it, I found that my old ways of writing wouldn't fit. I found I had to resurrect the personal, the creative, the feminine, the emotion I had been so busy murdering according to the dictates of the culture I had accepted and used, quite

literally, to shape my flesh. In my "personal" life, textually constituted and bodily lived, anorexia intersected with at least three cultural institutions—athletics, academia, and consumer culture—as a form of violence imposed from inside that is the institutional by-product.

The internal violence that becomes anorexia is dependent on three fully functioning bodies: the ghost body (body image, what we perceive our bodies to be); the real body (biological); and the ideal body (the body image we hold in theory as an ideal that we would like our bodies to become). Like anorexics, in the "construct your body" ethos of contemporary culture, we privilege our ideal bodies over the real to create the ghost.^[8] In so doing, we repeat the haunting within language, the privilege often given in critical discourse to the figurative over the literal, the theoretical over the empirical, even though these are intricately related, rather than opposed. In a reversal of the usual logic about the disembodied nature of the postmodern, the utter detachment of signifier from signified, and the constant slippage from one signifier to the next, what was figurative in the modern has become literal in the postmodern. If we are complicit with dominant culture, we now act out the same hierarchy of figurative over literal on our bodies through the rejection of our existing body and our acceptance and pursuit of an ever-receding figurative ideal.

A striking ad that appeared in British Vogue plays to the developing cultural awareness that we are chasing ghostly ideals. As such, the ad seems to affirm the female body as it is, appealing to a sensibility, like my own, that is tired of constructing the self for the gaze of the other according to the other's terms. The ad (see Fig. 1) shows a line of women, arm in arm, wearing seemingly little makeup, dressed only in light cotton loincloths reminiscent of the Greeks. Their breasts, of strikingly different sizes, are exposed, and the bold text reads, "It's not the shape you are, it's the shape you're in that matters." In smaller print, followed by the Nike logo, the text reads: "Where is it written that unless you have a body like a beauty queen you're not perfect? You're beautiful just the way you are. Sure, improve yourself. But not in the pursuit of an impossible goal. A synthetic illusion painted by the retoucher's brush. Get real. Make your body the best it can be for one person. Yourself. Just do it."^[9] Presumably, the women in the ad are individualist heroines defying "beauty queen" standards, stalwart

No photo rights

1. This Nike advertisement appeared in British  Vogue  in spring 1994. Its cynical adoption of a feminist rhetoric, which 
suggests disruption of the gender status quo while reaffirming it, is characteristic of sophisticated advertisements today.

in their self-acceptance. The butch figure on the far left who looks into the camera with sarcastic defiance, her large breasts in contrast to her short, dark hair and her boyish features, seems particularly in opposition to the standard type her body most resembles—the buxom Loni Anderson blonde that Dolly Parton pushes to parody. No false eyelashes here, the woman seems to hold to her own terms, anchoring the line of women defiantly in the "real." Not "illusion[s] painted by the retoucher's brush," these are "real women," the ad claims, naked, honest, unadorned. They don't have to change themselves to please anyone—except themselves: "Make your body the best it can be for one person. Yourself." Here, however, is where the ad betrays its best intentions.

The ad is constructed with the assumption of bodily plasticity and

change. You may be "beautiful just the way you are," the ad tells women, but that every woman wishes to "improve herself" is something this advertisement counts on. From this premise, it then offers them a seeming diversity of body types for identification or as models of "improvement." Yet these bodies have two things in common: they are all thin, and they are all white. Even the woman on the end, whose body structure could be described as "heavyset," has no extra meat on her bones. "The shape you are" is fine, as long as your skin is white and "the shape you're in" is thin. Under the guise of diversity the advertisement offers the tyranny of uniformity: a white, thin female body. A woman isn't supposed to desire a body that is "a synthetic illusion painted by the retoucher's brush." She is supposed to "get real" in her desires by "mak[ing her] body the best it can be for one person. [Her]self." The ad claims to invoke individual desire and choice for each woman as to her bodily configuration, while it offers a monolithic thinness as the standard for that "choice." Even though the ad openly confronts the idea of the figurative ideal, it cynically reinstitutes that ideal while seeming to question it. As this sophisticated advertisement so strikingly shows, our ideal body is a figure. Like the precedence given to figurative speech over common vernacular, that ideal body is more "artistic," more worked upon, than the "raw material" of the body that doesn't work out. In giving privilege to that figure by constantly working against the real body to transcend it, to change it, to overcome it by shaping it into the figurative ideal, we literally inscribe the methodology of modernist critical thinking into our flesh.

A confusion of the literal and figurative? Perhaps. Such accusations have been made before. But these terms were always "confused," implicated in each other, bound together. In view of my subject matter, I can no longer repeat the privilege given to the figurative in my own text. Like many new forms of writing currently gaining wider acceptance, the "original" work that I was expected to produce could not be clear, hard, linear, pure, uncontaminated by the network of concepts coded "feminine." Traditionally, a "feminine" style has been the name given to writing that shows some form of passion, and prohibitions against it are evident in commonplace injunctions against emotion or "the personal" if you are engaged in critical, analytical writing.

And any half-dead corps , starved for a long time, begins to walk again with tiny steps. The fissures, gaps, discontinuities, as well as the inordinate structural employment of the very logics I criticize, are all part of my clumsy attempt to restore the starved female text/corps and return to her the emotion and validity of a personal, embodied life that is intuitive as well as logical, emotional as well as analytical, part of lived experience as well as theoretical speculation.^[10]

Like the thinking of many writing today, mine is informed by post-structuralism. I believe in splits. I believe that the terms paired in the previous paragraph are intricately related, rather than opposed. I believe that the subject is primordially divided, formed in relation to acquisition and lack, at least at this moment in history. I believe that the "masculine" and "feminine" are subject positions not necessarily referring to biological male and female bodies, and that these terms are positions constructed, taken up, and occupied in relation to the dominant cultural logics characterizing a specific historical period. I believe the body is a cultural construction, as much a product of cultural forces and discourses as it is biological, and that any biology is culturally mediated. I believe these things because without a notion of the constructedness of the body and gender, no change in configurations would be possible. But I also believe that a subject position is necessary to facilitate political action, however divided, and that theory in and of itself does not constitute political action but rather a point of departure. And I believe the "choice" of subject position is always mediated through a culture that on some level still imposes—including increasingly complex manipulations like the Nike ad analyzed above—a determined polarity between masculine and feminine, white and black, despite the fictiveness of those determinations, and despite, particularly in our current montage-style, little-of-this and little-of-that culture, what looks like radical indeterminacy. As soon as we are articulated as a male or female body, a raced, classed, or sexed body in the context of the larger culture, a subject position construed hierarchically is not far behind, due in part to that means of articulation, our language. We take up a position according to a dialectic of presence and lack in terms of our relative proximity (still generally connected to our biological bodies) to the monied white male as signifier. If we are in the position of lack, we try to find ways

of formulating another choice. We try to find a way out or to attain that which we "lack." Anorexia is a failed attempt to create an alternative, to avoid lining up on one side of the male/female, rich/poor, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual divides.^[11] Because it is an attempt to articulate a different space and so clearly a failed attempt, anorexia is an object of fascination in a culture uncertain in its polarities, boundaries, differences, uncertain even as that culture definitively imposes boundaries and differences in specific configurations of power.

Anorexia, once a disease of the few and known only to a few, is now a disease of the many. Recent work that is attentive to a multicultural context, like Becky W. Thompson's A Hunger So Wide and So Deep , has focused attention on working-class women, women of color, and lesbians previously absent from consideration.^[12] Analysis continues to grow more complicated and multidimensional. Among others, Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight and Morag Macsween's Anorexic Bodies have contextualized the debates by providing connections between philosophy, popular culture, sociology, and psychology.^[13] Although anorexia is no longer a hot media topic, and there is some indication that beauty ideals are shifting to larger, more voluptuous women, this is not an indication of political progress or that anorexia is a thing of the past but that history is repetitious.

From the size fourteen Guess? model to the character Valerie on Beverly Hills 90210 to the New York cafés opened by supermodels, body ideals in the midnineties and the politics those ideals reflect seem to repeat the reactionary political history of the 1920s and 1930s that is a context for anorexia. As Ellen Wiley Todd writes, "[T]he revised 1920's 'feminist' emphasized individual rather than collective goals and embraced female and domestic occupations" (131), and this revision corresponded to a revised body image of the anorexic flapper to the more matronly, voluptuous siren. Todd describes how journalism of the period advocated the abandonment of "the boisterous energetic behavior practiced by the flapper because all her rights were now won. The siren was to renew her covenant with femininity and strive to nurture and please men rather than competing with them" (145).^[14] The pages of Cosmopolitan and Vogue make similar arguments today, and the more voluptuous body ideal corresponds to

those arguments. The demonized character in the January 1995 movie Disclosure , played by Demi Moore, is a successful career woman who works out on the StairMaster and claims to have only "oranges and champagne" in her refrigerator. By contrast, the "good guy" Michael Douglas has a "good wife," who is a lawyer but is only shown at home, and references to her well-stocked refrigerator are paired with references to the weight she never lost after the kids. Her refrigerator and her body are represented as sustenance for the Douglas character, giving him the kind of stability that, according to the movie's logic, we all need. The underlying assumptions readable in contemporary cultural texts like Disclosure about body weights, gender roles, and social power are an integral part of the anorexic logic this book traces.

The backlash against feminist advancement and what looks like a correspondent shift in body ideal does not mean that cultural values have significantly changed or that anorexia is forgotten. From a recent front-page article in the Los Angeles Times to documentaries (The Famine Within ) and novels (Lifesize ), eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia have entered the mainstream of popular culture.^[15] Perhaps due to overexposure or the cultural fascination with the new, eating disorders have come to seem somewhat passé. Like alcoholism or drug addiction, these once hidden afflictions are now part of an everyday vocabulary, part of the discourse of disorder that seems to characterize so much of late twentieth-century cultural phenomena. But anorexic values, today as well as in the past, are everywhere. More widely than in the fin de siècle culture of the previous century, anorexia has emerged as a point of convergence between the literal and the figurative; between the artificiality of gender constructions that mark an unstable cultural system and a medical discourse that appeals to an essential "truth" of the body to shore up weaknesses in the cultural model of gender. Like anorexia, medical discourse is an attempt to establish control that simultaneously demonstrates a lack of control. As the historian Thomas Laqueur has shown, in its instability the Victorian ideology of separate spheres turned to biology in an attempt to solidify its constructions of gender; thus, the medical discourse provided a kind of control over a construction that had proved itself too malleable, too indeterminate for comfort. That this indeterminacy required control called attention to the artificiality of con-

structions that claimed to be based in "nature."^[16] Similarly, the anorexic's gender confusion or conflicted gender identity is symptomatic of her feeling that she lacks control over her life and body, a confusion inextricably linked to the raced, sexed, classed discourses that produce it.

Anorexia has recently been read as everything from a prototype for the discourse of liberal humanism (Gillian Brown) to a feminist strategy of resistance to a still-patriarchal culture (Sandra M. Gilbert), and perhaps because of its malleability as a trope, it still remains, in the words of Hilde Bruch, an "enigma."^[17] Bruch, still the most influential medical doctor and therapist to write about the disease, was the first to connect anorexia to its cultural and historical context, thus raising issues that, from a late twentieth-century feminist perspective, make the disease intelligible. While anorexia cannot be pinned down to one determinate meaning or function, one can isolate some of the ways the disease functions culturally to express a set of antagonisms central to the often contradictory construction and performance of female bodies in the late twentieth century.

I attempt to negotiate the critical and analytic impasse between the bodily and the textual. I will argue that anorexia and the related eating disorder bulimia have developed as diseases that affect large numbers of women as the result of at least four interrelated cultural factors: the Western philosophical, religious, and literary tradition that defines femininity and materiality as its principal "others"; the ways in which gender "otherness" is compounded by a sexual orientation or race or class position that is deemed "other" by the dominant culture; the beauty industry and its central position within a consumer economy; and the "first and second wave" feminisms of the early twenties, late sixties, and early seventies, in their relation to a popular culture that co-opted their discourse through the presentation of androgyny and masculine identification as ideals for women attempting to rewrite the restrictive roles related to traditional conceptions of "femininity"—a presentation many of us, myself included, swallowed whole. Furthermore, cultural ambivalence toward women's professionalization situated a paradox that requires women not to choose between traditional femininity and "progressive" professionalization or masculinization, but that they enact both simultaneously. Stretching across the historical divide that separates those two waves of femi-

nism and levels of discourse between high and low culture, I further argue that anorexia functions figuratively to structure the unconscious logic of a number of male-authored high modernist texts, establishing a field of discourse within which the ideals of high modernism are traceable to those levels modernism most tried to distinguish itself from: the personal, historical, emotional, and feminine—the unaesthetic body and materiality (always gendered feminine) of everyday life. Anorexia can be read as a figure for modernism's engagement with its social and historical context, as one of the ways "high art" served to structure the very registers of discourse it tried to erase.

What is at stake in this reading is an understanding of the ways in which a series of common oppositions—such as art and life, the political and the personal, the figurative and the literal, the masculine and the feminine, the discourses of literature and those of the body—can be read in indissociable relation. These oppositions provide a context for rethinking the function and importance of gender within literary modernism, and the importance of literature in creating, reinforcing, or reflecting cultural norms. Because these norms are presented in the guise of the literary universal, they seem unquestionable when encountered by the reader who searches for a ground for identification, for the formation of a raced, gendered, and sexed subjectivity, a set of principles by which to "shore up the ruins" of a fragmented culture/self/discourse and to stabilize a universe where everything, including seemingly unquestionable categories like the body, present themselves as questionable. Contemporary readers, perhaps particularly the women who negotiate the paradox of individuality and femininity in relation to race and class positions, still look to the "great books" for the answers they seek. Those answers, I will argue, are based on a logic no different from anorexia's own.