Chapter One
Clarice Got Her Gun
Tracking the Anorexic Horizon

To write "clearly," one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an "ablution of language.".. . Women . . . wallowing in confessions and in personal, narcissistic, or neurotic accounts, are held to be hopelessly inept for either objective, subjective, or universal—that is to say accurate—thinking. Remember, the minor-ity's voice is always personal; that of the major-ity, always impersonal. Logic dictates. Man thinks, womanfeels. The white man knows through reason and logic—the intelligible. The black man understands through intuition and sympathy—the sensible. Old stereotypes deriving from well-defined differences (the apartheid type of difference) govern our thought. . . . To write well, we must either espouse [the white man's] cause or transcend our borderlines. We must forget ourselves. . . . The danger in going "the woman's way" is precisely that we may stop midway and limit ourselves to a series of reactions: instead of walking on, we are content with opposing woman('s emotion) to man('s abstraction), personal experience and anecdotes to impersonal invention and theory.
Trinh T. Minh-ha,
Woman, Native, Other

I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings
Coming down is the hardest thing.
Tom Petty,
"Learning to Fly"

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.

II. Historical Contexts. Limits. Positions. Anorexic Philosophy: Descartes, Plato, Hegel, Freud.

The term anorexia nervosa became a part of medical discourse in 1872. Concurrently, Charles Lasegue in France and William Withey Gull in England described a condition that afflicted "the female sex,

and chiefly between the ages of sixteen and twenty three" in which there was "complete anorexia for animal food, and almost complete anorexia for everything else. . . . the condition is one of simple starvation."^[18] The etiology of the disease, like hysteria, was baffling, since it seemed to have no physiological cause. Instead, Gull reported, "The want of appetite is, I believe, due to a morbid mental state" (310). Initially interpreted as a rare condition that results from a "moral" failure in which the rebellious female subject defies her "natural" status as a woman by refusing to "grow up," today in the United States and Britain the disease affects one woman in ten.^[19] Anorexia nervosa is a common part of our cultural vocabulary and has gained a kind of currency among young women, who openly ask each other how you can "catch" the disease.^[20] Every semester students tell me that "three-fourths of the women on my dorm floor have anorexia or throw up," and agonized women with eyes like extinguished lanterns and bodies dwindling to ghostliness ask for a help I can't give them. Largely because of its mass popularization and because it is seen as a feminine "beauty preoccupation" that concerns adolescent girls, anorexia is not given the serious attention it deserves as a public health problem. According to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, each year 150,000 American women die of anorexia, 17,024 more than the number of deaths from AIDS throughout the world.^[21] While AIDS is on the rise and certainly a major concern, the comparative trivialization of anorexia is striking.

Anorexia is, according to one source, "a structure of facades constructed to hide a central hole of non-being."^[22] It is a disease characterized by the following psychological complexes: a simultaneous refusal to eat and incessant preoccupation with food (attraction to and repulsion from food); a lack of independent personality structure—the anorexic self-image is a black hole, a cavernous nothingness; a disruption of the sense of linear time, so that the present becomes a synecdoche for past and future and all of lived experience; an experience of the mind and body as radically split, with the mind struggling to control the body; an increasing isolation, a sense of superiority to and lack of emotional contact with others; a complete suppression of sexuality, as well as loss of secondary sexual characteristics; and a marked identification with the masculine and simultaneous rejection

of the feminine, along with a paradoxical attempt to accede to beauty standards of thinness.^[23] In one sense, anorexics are paradigmatic Cartesian subjects, and in another, they are exemplary postmodern subjects, the vanishing point where the two discourses come together. To some extent the anorexic is the literalization of the fragmented postmodern subject who has no autonomous self but is the product of a range of heterogeneous discourse, since her inability to establish boundaries between herself and the rest of the world is arguably postmodern. Yet, anorexics also experience themselves very like Descartes, who in his first meditation writes, "I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses," in order to properly think.^[24] They place a similar value on mind, or "soul," which Descartes does not distinguish between, over the body: "The first and principal thing required in order to recognize the immortality of the soul is to form the clearest possible conception of it, and one which is entirely distinct from all the conceptions one can have of the body. . . . we cannot conceive any body except as divisible, while the mind or soul of man can only be conceived as indivisible" (13-14).

Entirely separate, privileging the one over the many, the unified over the disparate, universal over the particular, for Descartes like Western philosophers before and after, the mind in its "indivisibility" has domain and control over the unruly, disunified body. As a means of achieving that detachment and control, Descartes desires that "the minds of the readers should be as far as possible withdrawn from the use of and commerce with the senses" (15), and finds that he can "think" and write his meditations only because "I feel myself, fortunately, disturbed by no passions" (17). "Commerce with the senses" —the bodily, the material, the emotions—establishes a sense of fragmentation that must be controlled or fixed through a split or separation from that body. In this paradigmatic Western philosophical tradition, the "mind" is gendered masculine and the disunified and deceptive senses, feminine. As Kim Chernin puts it, "[A] woman's body . . . stands for all that is inscrutable, unpredictable, and uncertain in life."^[25] The "senses" are the body and the body is female. The senses that Descartes distrusts, all that he labels "uncertain" and therefore casts aside, are the "deceitful mistress." The body, gendered

female, can't be trusted in its inscrutable feelings, needs, and desires: "I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those things which have once deceived us" (Meditations , 18).^[26]

Anorexics are "Cartesian" in the sense of experiencing (male) mind and (female) body as entirely distinct, with the mind set up as the "dictator" of the deceitful flesh;^[27] Descartes's thought is "anorexic" in that its basic tenets are characterized by the same logic: "I doubted the people around me," an anorexic who was a patient of Bruch's says. The patient continues, "I was unsure whether they truly existed."^[28] "My body became the visual symbol of pure ascetic and aesthetics," she explains, "of being sort of untouchable in terms of criticism. Everything became very intense and very intellectual, but absolutely untouchable. . . . you feel outside your body. You are truly beside yourself."^[29] Untouchable, invulnerable, certain, intellectual, aesthetic and pure—this description begins to elucidate the conceptual field characteristic of anorexic thinking, and of the Western literary and philosophical tradition. This field becomes particularly focused in the literature of the modernist period.

While "philosophical anorexia" is perhaps expressed most clearly in Descartes, one of its first written instances can be seen in Plato's Symposium , where women, defined by their bodies, are uniformly equated with the "material" that it is the project of men to transcend. Transcendence is necessary in order to escape the plurality, temporality, and division associated with the material, the "particular" forms inherently subordinate to "universal" Forms or Ideas as Plato articulates them. Perhaps this particular dualism, which equates the female with the transient material and the male with the universal atemporal spirit that has transcended or has the possibility to transcend that material, pervades history and informs and structures paradigms of gender and discourses on the body more than any other.

Plato's theory of Forms is predicated on the idea of a fixed, permanent essence, of which materiality is a copy. The manifold, changing phenomena of the world of sense, as in Descartes, are feminine, deceptive, unreal. The task of the true philosopher is to pass from the "shadows" of the sensible world that are reminders of the Forms to the contemplation of the Forms themselves, and through this process

the material realm is transcended. Love is one of the primary agencies of this process, a mediatory link between the material and eternal world. The mind finds its way toward "truth" through love and through a transcendence of the body. In stages, "love" ascends the "Platonic ladder" that establishes the hierarchy of thought over sense, mind over body, masculine over feminine, and it is this ladder that is the first systematic articulation in Western philosophy to subordinate, if not sacrifice, the feminine flesh. The first step on the ladder is the passage from love of particular examples of physical beauty to the love of physical beauty in general. Individual attachments are important only in that they facilitate the apprehension of this universal beauty.

In The Symposium , the lover is to pass from "one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all" in order to "relax the intensity of his passion for one particular person, because he will realize that such a passion is beneath him and of small account."^[30] Once he has transcended physical love, the lover is free to experience the love of the soul of a particular individual; he is to "reckon beauty of the soul more valuable than beauty of body" (92). Materiality and particularity have been transcended on one level. The third step involves another purgation of particularity, for the love for a particular soul must change to a love for all beautiful souls, the love of moral beauty in general. Throughout this process he becomes freer yet, having liberated himself from materiality and particularity, "no longer ... the slave of a base and mean-spirited devotion to an individual example of beauty, whether the object of his love be a boy or a man or an activity" (93). The fourth step involves the passage to the contemplation of the ultimate Form, to the beauty of knowledge, a beauty that "is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes" (93). This final stage is "the region where a man's life should be spent, in the contemplation of absolute beauty" (94). Contemplation is attainable only after the lover has entirely emancipated himself from the "bonds of sense," an emancipation that allows traffic in or with the immortal.

In its insistence on the need to "liberate" oneself from the "bonds" that both the material and the particular impose, bonds that would conceivably constrict and destroy the spirit, Plato's theory necessitates

the kind of interchangeability of objects late feminists such as Luce Irigaray discuss in "Women on the Market," specifically, the "masculine" construction and appropriation of the "feminine," as well as the material male and female bodies that participate in these transactional constructions.^[31] For Plato, love "objects" logically are male since the pervasive correlation of the female with the material (the non-Ideal) excludes her from any "progress" up the ladder since she is that very particular materiality that needs to be escaped and transcended. Traffic in the feminine is unthinkable. Plato's theory of love presupposes this exclusion, and women are mentioned only once in reference to the process of transcendence.

Having stated that all men are "in love with immortality," Socrates mentions in The Symposium that procreation is one possible avenue for the achievement of immortality. Men for whom the "creative instinct is physical have recourse to women, and show their love in this way, believing that by begetting children they can secure for themselves an immortal and blessed memory hereafter for ever" (90). These men are of a lower order; they are the nonphilosophical sort. The higher category comprises those "whose creative desire is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is by the nature of the soul to create and bring forth" (90). That "progeny" is said to be "wisdom and virtue in general" and, to the extent that this "progeny" explicitly involves writing, the production of poetry, as well as the even better progeny of political and philosophical tracts "concerned with the due ordering of state and families," the question of authorship and who is able to "beget spiritually" in this manner is also raised (90). Here is one of the first metaphors of "literary paternity," the spiritual production of texts. Spiritual production transcends the base form of material production that is consistently associated with women. Material production of texts is the only form of production possible for women (and slaves). Excluded from a theory of love that serves as a vehicle of transcendence of particular materiality, women are excluded from the province of spiritual production as well.

The sacrifice of female flesh on the alter of high philosophy continues in the idealist tradition. Hegel's theory of love, for instance, con-

nected to his theory of the body and its relationship to gender, represents a paradigmatic shift that retains the element of female sacrifice: instead of love as the vehicle that facilitates a progression toward higher things, it becomes the object that must be transcended in order for man to attain full self-conscious spirit. In Hegel's theory love is associated with the feminine, the body, and the family—which must be subordinated to and transcended by the imperatives of the masculine, the mind, and the state. Hegel conceives of "male" and "female" as fixed, given essences that have differing ethical contents. The family for Hegel is a "natural ethical community" in that it is the concept that expresses the ethical sphere in its immediacy or simple being. The family is the "unconscious, still inner notion" of the ethical order, its "state of nature" or base material, and stands opposed to the actual, self-conscious existence and achievement of the ethical order. An individual cannot attain full self-consciousness and being until he has separated himself from the family, for "it is only as a citizen that he is actual and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the Family, is only an unreal impotent shadow . . . in truth the calm and universality of a self-conscious being do not belong to Nature."^[32] Since the family is affiliated with nature, the attainment of universality and self-consciousness that is Hegel's goal for the individual, defined as male, is only possible outside of the family. As I will show, the fact that individuality and maleness continue to be linked is a key component of anorexia.

The sacrifice continues. But if the sacrifice is self-sacrifice (and anorexia is a self-sacrifice), then all the better.^[33] It's cleaner. No one to blame but the victim. Therefore, Hegel is particularly fond of Antigone, who fits into his gender polarities with her unquestioned alliance to "blood ties" and the family, and the self-sacrifice she is ready to perform for that family. For Hegel, Antigone is the feminine paradigm, which, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive awareness of the ethical. However, the sister does not attain consciousness of the ethical, or of its objective existence, because she is affiliated with the law of the family, and that law is an implicit, inner essence "which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the real world" (Phenomenology , 274). Isolated in the private

sphere, "exempt from existence in the real world," the feminine exists in the realm of the unconscious, rather than that of consciousness.

The brother, by contrast, leaves the immediate, elemental, and therefore negative ethical life of the family in order to acquire and produce an ethical life that is conscious of itself and actual, but he needs the supplement of a wife. The difference of the sexes is a difference in ethical content. This gendered opposition of ethical content is an example of the movement of the Hegelian dialectic, a movement of two opposites toward unification, achieved through the husband's movement into the community where he attains his self-conscious being. The universal self-conscious spirit—man—becomes united with its opposite, unconscious spirit—woman—through the man's "individuality." Their immediate union converts the first two syllogisms, man and woman, conscious and unconscious, into the same syllogism, centered around consciousness, and unites the opposite movements into one process: "one from actuality down to unreality, the downward movement of human law, organized into independent members, to the danger and trial of death; and the other, the upward movement of the law of the nether world to the actuality of the light of day and to conscious existence. Of these movements, the former falls to man, the latter to woman" (278). Sexual difference is used to give gender to an oppositional hierarchical structure in which unreality, downward movement, and death fall on the side of the feminine, while upward movement and conscious existence fall on the side of the masculine.

Since for Hegel the body seems largely unworthy of analysis, sexual difference is attributed to the mind. In Hegel's Philosophy of Right the male mind is characterized by conceptual thought, self-subsistence, and volition, while the female mind is concrete, rather than abstract, characterized by its connection to emotion:

Thus one sex is mind in its self-diremption into explicit personal self-subsistence and the knowledge and volition of free universality, i.e., the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the volition of the objective final end. The other sex is mind maintaining itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantive, but knowledge and volition in the form of concrete individuality and feeling. In relation to externality, the former is powerful and active, the latter passive and subjective. It follows that man has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in labour and

struggle with the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself. Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the Family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind.^[34]

An idealist justification for traditional gender roles rests on the much repeated split between male activity and female passivity, male "self-subsistence" and female dependence.

Hegel's account of the founding of civilization is similarly gender specific: "In the sagas of the founding of states, or at least of a social and orderly life, the introduction of permanent property is linked with the introduction of marriage . . . the Family as a legal entity in relation to others must be represented by the husband as its head. Further, it is his prerogative to go out and work for its living, to attend to its needs, and to control and administer its capital" (116). Here the given categories are set and unchangeable for each individual. Hegel offers a dialectic that resolves opposites, but that they are opposites is an assumption related to the essential connection posited between women and the family/body, and between men and the mind/state. Since Hegel has said that legally the family must be represented by the husband, and that it is his place, as the "conscious" individual, to take part in the larger social order so as to provide for the family's "needs," it is clear that in his philosophy and social context the persons "recognized as persons in the eyes of the law capable of holding free property" are men and men only. This point is emphasized in The Phenomenology of Spirit : "the husband sent out by the spirit of the Family into the community in which he finds his self-conscious being" (276) is a "being" explicitly opposed to that of woman as "the unconscious spirit" (278).

There is a paradox here that resurfaces in anorexia. Women are constituted as an embodiment that consigns them to a position of "unreality" or nonbeing. Physical being becomes a form of emptiness. To repeat: "It is only as a citizen that [one] is actual and substantial—the individual, in so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the family is only an unreal impotent shadow. . . . in truth the calm and universality of a self-conscious being do not belong to nature" (270). Since Hegel has asserted that women are not "self-conscious beings," and that they find their "ethical destiny" in the family, this consigns them perpetu-

ally to the status of "impotent shadows," to the status of nonbeing. The same paradox that allows embodiment to express nonbeing operates in the logic of anorexia, where, having internalized nonbeing as their metaphysical status, anorexics struggle to drag themselves into existence through the reduction or elimination of their flesh. Accepting the idealist logic linking masculinity with the mind, state, and self-conscious existence, and the femininity with the body, family, and unself-conscious being, anorexics attempt to become mind in order to exist—which often leads to their literal nonexistence.

In Hegel these designations of the nature and ethical destiny of woman are never subjected to the same dialectical method that other assertions are. There is no conflict or struggle for recognition between man and woman as there is between master and slave; the existing state of affairs, as Hegel reports it, is simply assumed. Confined eternally to the temporal, fragmented world of unconscious spirit affiliated with nature and the family, through their "nature," defined as bodily, women cannot participate in the workings of the state and culture. They therefore must accept a position that is culturally devalued, and subordinate themselves to the "higher" good of the state. Hegel's thought is a monument to female self-sacrifice on which the female body is erased, consumed, and subordinated to the "higher good." Hegel articulates a tradition that expresses itself, among other forms, in anorexia, which is the literalized expression of the cultural devaluation of women—female nonbeing—and which makes the anorexics' cultural status as "impotent shadows" an actuality. I cannot think of a better phrase to describe the anorexic, at sixty or seventy pounds, with sunken flesh and cavernous shadows under her eyes, unable to walk and simply fading away in the later stages of the disease, than "impotent shadow."

Plato and Hegel define men in opposition to women, but Freud initiates a crucial historical turn. In the more practical, "therapeutic" context of psychoanalysis, Freud makes it clear that the masculine is defined in opposition to the feminine, but the psychoanalytic model makes women believe they define themselves in opposition to men. An "anorexic" structure is operational in Freud's theory of sublimation and its connection to the body, where in its basic assumptions the psychoanalytic model replicates the polarity between the male spirit

and the female body that exists in the philosophical models.^[35] I will limit myself here to a discussion of the aspects that lead Freud to the conclusion in Civilization and Its Discontents that aim-directed love (the body and its passions) and the feminine are on the side of nature; and that sublimated or aim-inhibited love (the mind and its restraint) is on the side of the masculine and culture. Drawing on various essays in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , I will summarize how Freud comes to this conclusion: in girls the castration complex precedes the Oedipus complex, and in boys the former initiates the dissolution of the latter. It is only the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and the resulting transference and sublimation of object love that "leads to the creation of the super-ego and thus initiates all the processes that culminate in enrolling the individual in civilized society."^[36] The formation of the superego is grounded on the renunciation of loving Oedipal wishes. For the boy the superego is formed through at least a partial renunciation of his love for the mother. The castration complex, which leads to this renunciation, is "the discovery of the possibility of castration, as evidenced by the sight of the female genital" (198). This interpretation of the female genital as castrated happens only retroactively: "He begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest. . . . it is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that the observation becomes important to him" (187). The paternal function or intervention associated with the father instigates this threat, which the boy then connects to the female genital. An effect of the castration complex is that in addition to renouncing mother love (and thereby the female body), there is "a measure of disparagement in his attitude towards women, whom he regards as having been castrated" (198).

A girl, however, "make[s her] judgment and [her] decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it" (188), so the castration complex comes first. She "acknowledges the fact of her castration" (198), and this leads to three possible outcomes: that she renounce her sexuality; that she form a "masculinity complex"; or that she take her father as a love object and "thus [arrive] at the Oedipus complex in its feminine form" (199). For the girl the castration complex does not destroy but rather creates the feminine form of the Oedipus complex, whose dissolution and subse-

quent creation of the superego is a requirement for "enrolling the individual in civilized society" (198). She therefore lacks motive for the dissolution of the complex, and "only too often a woman never surmounts it at all" (199). In fact, it is part of her "proper femininity" to love the father. Since it is only through a "third, very circuitous path" that she arrives at this "ultimate normal feminine attitude in which she takes her father as love-object" (199), the difficulty of achieving this state leaves her little energy or motive for sublimation, since she is a "good girl" if she loves her father and family as a "devoted daughter." Much like the scenario seen in Hegel, a girl is encouraged to play this role, while the boy is encouraged to break from the family and establish an identity of his own.

Whichever path the girl takes, she is excluded from the public, from "civilization" and "culture." The first path, renunciation of sexuality, is said by Freud to require "all those energies which otherwise they would employ in cultural activity" (28). If she takes the second, she is an anomaly, not fully a "woman," because she wants to be a man and participate in culture. If she manages to follow the third, there is little motivation for her to give up father love, since it is culturally sanctioned. Whatever her "choice," the Oedipus complex doesn't dissolve, the superego doesn't form, and none of the object love/body is renounced and diverted toward a "higher" aim. She later transfers the father love onto a husband, thereby remaining on the side of the body and of love. The primary anorexic symptom is that the woman takes on a "male" position when she renounces her ties to both the body and love. The boy renounces body/love (becomes figuratively anorexic) and attains culture. The girl is stuck with the body, and it is this cultural configuration that the anorexic most tries to rewrite: "It is this difference in the inter-relation of the Oedipus and castration-complexes which gives its special stamp to the character of woman as a member of society" (199). "Women, as the true guardians of the sexual interests of the race, are endowed with the power of sublimation only in a limited degree" (32). For Freud, women, as bodies, can't sublimate. Since it is this capacity for sublimation that enables an individual to "transcend" love and family and move up to culture, we see in Freud a repetition of Hegel's designation of body/love as that which requires transcendence on the way to culture or State. These aspects

of Freud's theory, like Hegel's, are predicated on an unquestioned connection between women and the body, which they can't seem to escape, even though that body is defined as lack: lack of consciousness for Hegel, and lack of a male genital for Freud. The plausibility of Freud's scenario depends on both the girl's and boy's interpretation of the penis as "superior" and of the female genitals as "castrated" or "lacking"—which can be formed only through an intense cultural mediation that transforms the female body into a cipher, a lack, an absence. The anorexic physically performs this transformation upon her own flesh in order—ironically—to prove she is not the lack, the cipher, the nothingness that, influenced by the tradition, she truly believes that she is. Without her body, she thinks, she will finally be. Exist. As she nudges herself toward nonexistence.

The political message derivable from these aspects of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Freud helps to situate the anorexic paradox. In their relentless process of designating the soul, the mind, subjectivity, and civilization as masculine, these "figures" have formed a tradition that some women, to whom the tradition is newly accessible, internalize in an attempt to enter the magic inner circle of culture and become something other than the bodies, sexualities, loves, and flesh with which this tradition equates them. Paradoxically, they do so in order to become the subjectivities denied them. Ironically, in the attempt to gain access to that subjectivity through male identification and an acceptance of male terms, women literally become the "impotent shadows" of Hegelian or Platonic discourse when, by internalizing that discourse, they become anorexic. As Naomi Wolf writes of the admission of women into the elite circles of higher education, "They admitted their minds, and let their bodies go. Young women learned that they could not live inside those gates and also inside their bodies.... the anorexic may begin her journey defiant, but from the point of view of a male-dominated society, she ends up as the perfect woman. She is weak, sexless, and voiceless, and can only with difficulty focus on a world beyond her plate. The woman has been killed off in her. She is almost not there" (Beauty Myth , 181, 197). The situation is further complicated by the struggle of anorexic women to incarnate the individuality of the "masculine mind" while simultaneously incarnating an ideal femininity represented by the thin body.

Granted institutional access not as women but as "minds," many women try to manipulate, to get rid of, the bodies that define them, to become disembodied, "not there." Clearly, women obsessed with the control and maintenance of their bodies, an obsession common to many, "can only with difficulty focus on a world beyond [their] plate[s]." Such women would be calm, quiet, tractable, and supportive of the status quo, that is, of a masculinist tradition as it currently operates. In The Beauty Myth , Wolf writes, "If anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called . . . mental anorexics. . . . Girls and young women are also starving because the women's movement changed educational institutions and the workplace enough to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness of power itself. . . . the worldview taught young women is male" (183, 210).^[37] That worldview is very "white" as well.

The anorexic, physical and mental, is usually a male-identified woman who has accepted white male philosophical ideals and standards while simultaneously rejecting the traditional gender roles that go along with those standards or if she or he is a member of an ethnic minority, rejecting traditional cultures in order to assimilate to what is perceived as the norm. The white male-identified woman defines herself in terms of her achievements, which she thinks are independent of any particular group. Yet she defines herself according to standards and prizes she strives to fulfill and win, standards and prizes that function as rules telling her how she must change and what she must become. Paradoxically, part of the "achievement" that is required of her if she is to accord with the dominant culture is the physical appearance of an acceptable feminine beauty usually defined as white. A male-identified woman (even though she may look like the feminine ideal), defines herself as a cipher, a lack, a black hole or empty shell. She is continually struggling to fill this shell with both her attainment of ideal feminine beauty and her collection of masculine achievements, affirming daily that she is not good enough, that she must fight to overcome herself, to cancel herself out, to go beyond herself. This is anorexic thinking, and it applies to women and men who identify with dominant cultural ideals of masculinity and achievement. In The Golden Cage , Bruch reports that for many of her an-

orexic patients, the fathers treated the anorexics "intellectually as sons; [one] was particularly proud that [his daughters] all knew how to throw a ball 'correctly' (namely, like a boy).... It is significant that the fathers value their daughters for their intellectual brilliance and athletic achievements [and] rarely if ever do they pay attention to their appearance as they grow into womanhood, though they will criticize them for becoming plump" (26). Taking the cue from Daddy and the world defined as his tradition, the anorexic identifies with those aspects of herself that are termed "masculine" and therefore valued. She struggles against those aspects of herself designated "feminine" in a struggle that becomes articulated in bodily terms. Yet, in her emptiness, in her desire to please and to succeed at pleasing, she struggles to attain ideal physical femininity, even as she strives to cancel it out. Her thin body is her masculine achievement that, until her anorexic artistry goes too far, is the embodiment of cultural standards of female beauty.^[38]

III. Consumer Culture. Nike. The Relentless Logic of the Gym.

Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? Don't your eyes seek out the things you want?
Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs

The tradition that values women only for their "masculine" attributes is not limited to the households of anorexic patients. As Irigaray writes in je , tu , nous , "Value is what matters. . . . whatever has it must be masculine" (70). As Hegel appears and begins to stroll (or perhaps jog with Hannibal?) down Madison Avenue, the tradition that values only the masculine is so common that Nike made use of it in a successful ad campaign launched in the summer of 1992, which I, a lapsed anorexic, keep on my bathroom wall. "Did you ever wish you were a boy?" the ad asks, in italicized white letters surrounded by a black block. "Did you? Did you for one moment or one breath or one heartbeat beating over all the years of your life, wish, even a little, that you

could spend it as a boy? Honest. Really. Even if you got over it."^[39] The ad cleverly makes use of the sense of female insufficiency internalized through the very male identification that makes women feel the need to achieve athletically and wear Nike shoes in the first place. In this way they prove, like Bruch's anorexics, that they are closer to boys than other women (and are therefore superior to other women): "Only a few [anorexics]," Bruch writes in The Golden Cage , "admit frankly that they would have preferred to be a boy. Some will talk about it when they start to express their disgust with the female body." An anorexic "feels that her slenderness makes her look more like a man, and she wants to be equal to men, in particular to prove that she has the same stamina" (73). Like Clarice, who in her FBI training grinds her way through a torturous obstacle course with gritted teeth and determined eye, passing signs nailed to a pine tree reading Hurt, Agony, Pain, Love-It, women may find the athletic arena the perfect place to prove their worth, and thereby their identity, by demonstrating their physical capabilities. The Nike ad makes use of this feminine preoccupation, historically determined, by trying to appear to affirm women as women, pointing out later in the ad that "you wake up. . . . and you learn to stop beating yourself over the head for things that weren't wrong in the first place." That women are women and not men is supposedly the premise for the Nike Women's Products line "in the first place"; however, what the ad can't take into consideration but makes use of is the confusing malleability of subject positions (a biological woman can occupy the subject position of a biological man and vice versa). This "choice" of position is mediated by a culture that acknowledges on the one hand that gender is gender (sexual difference is constructed, not innate), while it takes gender back with the other. As in this ad, our culture is willing to offer the idea that sexual difference is a construct if it will make us buy products but does not allow us to live accordingly. Instead, most people's daily lives are still largely constructed according to traditional gender roles. But in advertising, gender is offered as a choice that you buy, a fanciful construction, with no examination of the real limitations imposed on those choices and no questioning of how limitations are imposed. For even if you do "wake up," as the Nike ad puts it, and stop renouncing

yourself through male identification, stop "beating yourself over the head for things that weren't wrong in the first place," you still need to struggle for the self-definition that Nike wants to help give you.

For what "are" you after all? It's quite easy to say "a set of competing heterogeneous discourses," but that doesn't quite provide a satisfactory answer to this grim daily struggle with embodiment. If you are still your body (cultural residue), but your body is okay (we're all "with it" and know that there's no longer any problems with being a woman, that such problems were all "back then"), why do you then have to work on that body incessantly, day after day, for hours and hours, wearing Nike shoes and Nike running tights and Nike bra tops and Nike warm-up jackets and Nike wristbands and headbands and Nike socks and Nike baseball hats? Why do you have to spend a significant portion of your daily life shaping, molding, sculpting that body, as well as a significant portion of your disposable or even your indisposable income on Nike products to enhance that body? In consumer culture the textual logic of linearity, clarity, and revisable, improvable form becomes a bodily logic. We are trained to shape our bodies as works of art that resemble minimalism rather than rococo ("Body by VH-1 on VH-1." "Body by Sports Connection." "Body by Soloflex."). The segment of the female population, including myself, that attempts to shape itself according to aesthetic principles is the target of this advertising campaign. The compulsive workouts that are so much a part of so many women's daily lives, and that define them, keep them constantly striving toward an unattainable physical perfection that is part of contemporary culture's definition of the strong, successful woman. This regime sells Nike products.^[40]

It is no coincidence that this ad campaign, undoubtedly written by a woman, plays on that definition of strength and presents it as if it were internally defined, based on an internal sense of strength and self-acceptance, which is perhaps the most elusive and important goal for women today.^[41] When Barbara Ehrenreich said in a talk on third-wave feminism that the stumbling block for feminism at this point in history is women's self-esteem, she hit upon the problematic central to anorexia, physical and mental.^[42] This problematic sells not just workout apparel but also gym memberships, diet programs, liposuction, psychotherapy, low-fat cookbooks and ice cream and popcorn

and soda—and thousands of accoutrements it seems to take to sustain a "successful" woman's sense of well-being. Such a subjectivity seems a precarious, ghostly construction, sharing some affinities with the character of Beloved, whom I evoked in the preface, who is never certain when "she would fly apart. . . . pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once."^[43] This is a fragmentary sense of well-being, eternally in need of reinforcement, of new products, of props to hold it together. Advertising rhetoric can promise its attainment through the purchase of the product, mainly because that sense of well-being is not something that's really granted in the first place. Nike, consumer culture, and the relentless logic of the gym are further mutations of the dominant cultural logic that connects anorexia, embodiment, violence, and female subjectivity.^[44]

Many of us growing up in the United States, Latina and Caucasian, black and Asian, heterosexual and homosexual, rich and poor, have suffered from some form of physical anorexia and the poverty of self-definition connected with it. If we have "gotten over it" or never had it, we may still suffer from a form of "mental anorexia," the preoccupation that leads one to incessantly engage in mental monologues like this: "It's only 11:15 in the morning. You just ate at 7:00. You can't have a bagel until after 2:00, especially since you only ran three miles this morning and haven't been to the gym yet, and you spent all day yesterday systematically consuming a bag of low-fat nacho-flavored tortilla chips, which despite the fat content have undoubtedly added to your girth, bulk, and general sense of slovenliness. As a matter of fact, you shouldn't have anything at all, you don't deserve it, but that's not supposed to be a healthy attitude, so I won't say it." While mental anorexia like this is not as time consuming, intensively focused, and energy consuming as the real thing, it still makes a significant difference. Anorexia, mental and physical, is central to the self-definition of most women, particularly educated women attempting to gain access to the "white male power" that requires them to cancel out their bodies. If, as an inheritor of the canonical Western tradition, she internalizes a worldview that is male, a view spelled out clearly in Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Freud, among others, a woman almost cannot do otherwise than develop a preoccupation with her body since that body has made her the negative other of culture. According to canoni-

cal cultural sources said to embody all that is valuable, her body is the base materiality that is deceptive and destructive to the empowered philosopher on a quest of cultural advancement. "I am not that body," she wants to insist unless she is confident enough to define herself according to standards different from those of a dominant cultural logic that now encompasses racial and class difference. This logic tells her she is that body; and because she is, she is lacking, insufficient, flawed, as well as fetishized, commodified, loved, and sexually desired—a devastating set of contradictions that virtually ensures that any real confidence a woman may possess is canceled out. She can only be someone, according to this logic, if she is not herself, if she identifies with the masculine while simultaneously maintaining the appearance of the feminine: "Raised to compete like men in rigid male-model institutions, [young women] must also maintain to the last detail an impeccable femininity" (Wolf, Beauty Myth , 211). This is the legacy of the generation of women born in the sixties and later. The legacy requires the mind/body split which characterizes not only Cartesian subjectivity but also the logic of eating disorders that affect (if you include those who worry about calories, fat, exercise, and eating) virtually every woman and increasingly large numbers of men. And these cultural standards do not discriminate in terms of race and class. The ads are relentlessly democratic: anyone can attain a great body if she or he works hard enough.

If the concluding text (which follows) of the Nike ad on pages 30-31 corresponded to an existing "reality," it would be something I could say, shout, scream, whisper, and not feel ashamed of: "And one day when you're out in the world running, feet flying dogs barking smiles grinning, you'll hear those immortal words calling, calling inside your head Oh you run like a girl and you will say shout scream whisper call back 'Yes. What exactly did you think I was?"' (Vogue [June 1992]). The feminine subject position would exist as a position one doesn't have to escape or transcend or suppress or annihilate through bodily manipulation or the purchase of products. There would be a respect for the female body, and thereby the self-respect that Ehrenreich named as essential to the "third wave" of feminism.

Because that respect does not exist, the anorexic logic continues to function. It operates in a recent body phenomenon that has drawn

widespread attention, and that is often thought to represent the opposite of anorexia and therefore the idea of hopeful progress for women's struggle with embodiment. Female bodybuilding, often read as the obverse of anorexia, is a sport in which many anorexics participate after their recoveries. Concerned with building up the body, rather than eliminating it, and said to present an image of female power, the female bodybuilder seems to offer a hopeful alternative to anorexia and the anorexic logic. I use a brief analysis of a recent pictorial article in Flex magazine to explore this possibility and to show that an apparent alternative is often consumed by the structure it most seeks to subvert.

Taking the name from one of Madonna's concert tours, the magazine titles its central pictorial "Blonde Ambition." The title in itself has come to signify a form of disruptive female power, a subversion of the old norm of the stereotypically feminine blonde who exists only to attract a man. The blonde's "ambition," as in Madonna's, is read as the blonde taking matters into her own hands, displaying herself in a way that "takes the power back." She is no longer defined by a man, she is defining herself—powerfully. That the reference comes from the phrase "blind ambition," which is, among other things, the title of a best-selling book on the Watergate scandal, shows a short cultural memory, since the slippage between "blonde" and "blind" isn't part of the way this term culturally functions. What this construction of female ambition may be "blind" to is the way in which her self-construction still functions within the terms and context of the norm.

The "Blonde Ambition" pictorial features the female bodybuilder Debbie Muggli, formerly a kindergarten teacher from Texas, who placed third in the recent Ms. Olympia contest, the most prestigious bodybuilding contest for women. In the pictorial, Muggli poses both completely naked and wearing traditionally pornographic accessories like lace gauntlets, black high heels, leather, and using such props as Victorian sofas and stools. These poses are traditional in cheesecake, but Muggli, with her pronounced muscularity, presents a different body image from the nonmuscular feminine norm. She thinks she is unsettling the old stereotypes and defies anyone to criticize her for posing as she has. In a quotation that appears next to the pose with her legs spread over the Victorian stool, she says, "I've worked ten

No photo rights

2. The bodybuilder Debbie Muggli posed as part of  Flex  magazine's 
pictorial series dedicated to showing women bodybuilders "offseason 
[when] they carry more bodyfat, presenting themselves in a much more
 naturally attractive condition. To exhibit this real, natural side of women
 bodybuilders, Flex  has been presenting female competitors in softer 
condition. We hope this approach dispels the myth of female-bodybuilder masculinity." Femininity, then, is associated with higher body fat and, 
apparently, with lace, leather, and high heels accompanying 
the all too familiar phallic prop. The more things change .  .

years to create my physique, and I'm proud of my accomplishment: I'm a woman, I'm muscular, I'm feminine, and I'm sexy—it's liberating to feel this way and I have chosen to display that liberation."^[45] She finds the combination of femininity, sexuality, and muscularity "liberating," presumably since that muscularity mimics the ideal for the male body in a way that undermines the old norm for the female body—an ideal not based on a power aesthetic.

Yet, if that muscularity is cloaked by the dominatrix leather, thigh-high stockings, elbow-length lace gloves, and six-inch black heels, to what extent can this be an image of "liberation"? The shot in question (see Fig. 2) has Muggli posed, head slightly down, mouth pursed, and eyes looking beyond the camera, with legs spread apart, standing holding the neck of a guitar at crotch level, so that it rests phallically between her black-stockinged legs. If one considers the context or horizon these images belong to—that of the woman defined by her sexuality, not defining it—how does this image "display liberation"? "Liberation" from what? As Foucault points out,

There may be a reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker's benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, non-existence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom.^[46]

Muggli makes use of the "speaker's benefit" when she claims that the mere fact of displaying a female body with muscles is a "deliberate transgression," that she is "outside of the reach" of the "established law and power," simply because she has "worked ten years to create her physique." She "anticipates the freedom" of a self-created female form without paying any attention to the cultural ideals and ideologies that have contributed to the making of that form, that have determined the particular form her body takes. She sees herself as the sole author of her body, but what forces have contributed to the text of her flesh, the "ideal" she represents?

Her body is a testimony to the contradictory ideals of male identification and conventional femininity, and in this way it is very similar

to the anorexic body. Her body manages to hold up both norms without mixing them. Rather than deconstructing the opposition between masculine and feminine, her body, as the bodies of other female bodybuilders who combine conventional female attractiveness with muscles, holds them both in place. She doesn't redefine desire but replicates it, combining the conventional props of desirable femininity, signs of weakness, the veils that in the traditional construction are supposed to cover "lack" in order to reveal it, with a body that in the traditional masculine construction signifies not lack but strength. This reduplication makes it seem as if she is putting on the masculine for the purposes of seduction, since she is using her body in the conventionally seductive way, explicitly sexualizing it. Putting on the masculine is in fact seductive since it reveals that her attempt at strength, at a masculinity untainted by the female sexuality that signifies weakness, is a failure, that her muscular body is a fraud, a prop, that renaturalizes the masculine as strength and presence and the feminine as lack. Self-created weakness is seductive since it says, "Look, I will perform for you and assure you of your own strength."

Muggli's pose is a direct performative of a "willing (and often eager) participation in cultural practices that objectify and sexualize [women]," an instance of "individual self-surveillance and self-correction to norms" that is performed in a fundamental misrecognition of power. What Muggli asserts and perhaps even genuinely feels is "liberation" is a reduplication of norms that sexualize women, so that the source, as in the perennial backlash myth of the femme fatale, of her feelings of strength and self-determination is still her gendered body: "I'm a woman, I'm muscular, I'm feminine, and I'm sexy." Why can't her body simply stand as a body—"a work of art" as bodybuilders put it—without having to insist that it is still "sexy," still "feminine," and thereby still desirable? Ironically, a shot of Muggli completely naked seems more disruptive to expectations regarding the female body and its purpose (see Fig. 3). Without the leather and lace, the focus of the photo on the dense ropes of muscle lining her back and legs, her body may be read in a context less saturated with traditional assumptions. Still, this image is only one in a series that insist on Muggli's accordance with normative femininity. A female body that doesn't have some relation to male desire is simply too devi-

3. Debbie Muggli in the same  Flex  magazine pictorial—does this shot 
exemplify an alternative to the conventional femininity in the previous shot?

ant, too fundamentally out of sync with the networks of desire as they currently exist in the dominant culture, so Muggli feels "liberated" and that she "displays liberation" only if she has a body that is "sexy," still pleasing to males. Yet, if the network she plays to is still that of male desire, what, exactly, is she liberated from? Her assertion of liberation in the context of the same old scene helps to collude with and reinforce the very norms that sustain that scene. She willingly, actively, contributes to her own disempowerment through defining "power" in the same old way, as the ability to attract male desire. She doubly dehumanizes herself: first through "passing," through sculpting her body in such a way that it approximates the norm of the male body and accepts that body as the standard, and second, through self-correcting that body to conform to the norms of conventional femininity. Like anorexia, her resistance erases itself twice, a gender schizophrenia, a schizophrenic liberation that cancels itself out.^[47]

Muggli's contradictory pose of self-erasure is compelling to me be-

cause it is a scenario I have acted and continue to act. The weight lifting I did with the track team grew into a lifelong habit of self-construction, so that I have at this point been a bodybuilder for sixteen years. The "ideal" body she claims to have created, and the power and "liberation" she feels as a result, are feelings I struggle with daily—ideological fetishes I participate in despite knowing better. As Slavoj Zizek writes, "Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. "^[48] Despite my ironic distance from Muggli, my ability to deconstruct her assertions and poses, I am still doing what she is doing. Long after the passing of the disease itself, I am still a vital participant in the anorexic logic of a protest that cancels itself out: I live my life according to the norms I criticize. My life is still structured by the contradictory promise of male identification coupled with ideal femininity. I continue to identify with a structure that cancels me out, to construct myself in accordance with its terms. And yet. As Derrida suggests, there is always the remainder. The system never functions completely intact. The letter never arrives.^[49]

IV. Philosophical Anorexics: The Flip Side

Indisputably, women's internalization of "anorexic philosophy" contributes to anorexia. While there is no direct causal relation between passages of Hegel and Plato and women on college campuses, in corporate America, or in Iowa kitchens, there is a striking similarity in the logics expressed in these philosophic texts and in texts written by anorexics. Bordo makes the distinction clear: "Anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating affliction. Yet quite often a highly conscious and articulate scheme of images and associations—one could go so far as to call it a metaphysics—is presented by these women. . . . in the anorexic's 'metaphysics' elements are made explicit, historically grounded in Plato or Augustine, that run deep in our culture."^[50] For women who have internalized the dictates of the philosophical tradition and accepted them as truths, whether the source is the philosophy itself or its numerous forms of enactment in popular culture, they will dedicate their lives, as Glück puts it, to hunger. They attempt to identify themselves with the masculine and exist,

as Chernin writes, "from the neck up," engaged in a daily battle with food and the desire to become something else (white male), instead of writing or philosophizing, culturally producing, themselves (Obsession , 55). As Wolf argues in The Beauty Myth , "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. . . . women's bodies are not our own but society's, and . . . thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community" (187). Some women writers such as the contemporary American poet Glück and the Irish poet Eavan Boland, writers I term "philosophical anorexics," use literature as a way of articulating the anorexic logic by which hunger becomes a communal function and a central agency in the constitution of female subjectivity. Glück and Boland clearly articulate how the communal imperative affects women in general physically and emotionally, and how it affects women writers in particular, deflecting them from individual development and poetic production to an all-encompassing obsession with their bodies and food. As Ellen West, one of the most famous anorexic case histories (who is known, perhaps, because of her unusual degree of literary competence), writes, "I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul."^[51] When one can only worry about calories, how much one has worked out, how much one eats, one runs on an endless treadmill that absorbs most of one's productive energy, indirectly assuring that aesthetics and culture will remain primarily a "masculine" province.

Contemporary women writers like Margaret Atwood write specifically about effects of the masculinization of aesthetics on women.^[52] In her work, anorexia becomes the locus where cultural anxieties intersect in the cultural construction of the female body, and her prose enacts the struggle to imagine a different construction. Similarly, Glück writes about the living in a cultural context where the female flesh is rejected as unaesthetic and intrusive. "Art" is defined in opposition to the materiality the female body represents despite its fetishization as a subject for art. The ways in which actual women internalize this dialectic and use it to form and constitute their own bodies is something that Glück's poetry makes explicit, thereby producing an "alienation effect" to that process.^[53] The 1980 poem "Dedication to

Hunger" begins with the focus on what Noelle Caskey sees as a "unity with the father against the mother and all that the mother represents," that is, the maternal body as circumscribed and projected by cultural codes that reduce women to body and reproductive capacity.^[54]

In the opening image of "Dedication to Hunger," the identification of daughter with father is central. The mother watches this identification, rather than takes part in it, but because she has internalized the codes that encourage that identification, she takes pleasure in it. I quote the first section of the poem:

1.  From the Suburbs 
They cross the yard 
and at the back door 
the mother sees with pleasure 
how alike they are, father and daughter—
I know something of that time. 
The little girl purposefully 
swinging her arms, laughing 
her stark laugh: 

It should be kept secret, that sound. 
It means she's realized 
that he never touches her. 
She is a child; he could touch her 
if he wanted to.^[55]  

Here the mother's pleasure is derived from a likeness, a similitude between the father and daughter that negates the daughter's femininity, and by extension the mother in that it removes her from the equation—she is watching, not participating. The daughter is valuable—from the mother's point of view—only to the degree that she is not like the mother. The mother in Glück's poem is self-negating in that her pleasure is dependent upon her own cancellation, upon the daughter's apparent lack of feminine qualities associated with the mother.

"I know something of that time," the narrative voice breaks in, beginning an identification between the speaker and the young girl in the poem, who as the poem progresses becomes an anorexic in training: the identification with the father that leads girls to reject their

bodies as the agency of femininity, since their bodies destroy the identification when they are therefore seen as essentially different from their fathers. The father "never touches her" because according to cultural configuration she is different from him, feminine, and the speaker has seen this. Her realization breaks any unambiguous identification with the father and makes it something unattainable and therefore perpetually desired. The poem is about this moment of realization: that the feminine, figured as difference, is the basis for rejection. Through this realization the girl also begins to reject what is most obviously feminine in herself: her body. Wanting to define herself as different from her mother so as to gain back the likeness with her father, she rejects her mother as feminine and what in herself resembles her mother.

This leads to the poem's second section, which presents the female part of male/female relations as a position of powerlessness:

2. Grandmother 
"Often I would stand at the window—
your grandfather 
was a young man then— 
waiting, in the early evening." 

That is what marriage is. 
I watch the tiny figure 
changing to a man 
as he moves toward her, 
the last light rings in his hair. 
I do not question 
their happiness. And he rushes in 
with his young man's hunger, 
so proud to have taught her that: 
his kiss would have been 
clearly tender— 

Of course, of course. Except 
it might as well have been 
his hand over her mouth. (30)

Rejection and powerlessness become linked in this second section. Her grandmother's voice reports what the speaker of the poem sees as her grandmother's victimization. The grandmother's voice reports

that "often I would stand at the window—/your grandfather/was a young man then—/waiting, in the early evening." The speaker interprets the grandmother's waiting as an essential passivity that she wants to avoid, for it encodes the grandmother's cancellation. "That is what marriage is," asserts the narrative voice. "And he rushes in/ with his young man's hunger,/so proud to have taught her that:/his kiss would have been/clearly tender." According to the speaker, the grandfather teaches the grandmother that marriage means waiting for him, suppressing herself in order to validate him. "His young man's hunger," his sexuality as demand, teaches her that, and when she internalizes this lesson, it makes him "tender." Tenderness or love is bought at the price of self-suppression: "Of course, of course," the speaker ironically states, "except it might as well have been his hand over her mouth." Here, from the speaker's perspective, the only way the grandmother can gain acceptance and love is through voluntary self-cancellation. The grandmother's husband "might as well have" put "his hand over her mouth," silencing her words and, by implication, preventing her from eating. The grandmother's self-suppression is the same kind of cancellation the mother exhibits in the pleasure she takes in the likeness between father and daughter, the same kind the little girl internalizes in her "stark laugh," and the same kind the speaker chooses in the self-cancellation through the flesh that is anorexia: a "dedication to hunger" or perpetual desire for a male body and position, which the father's initial rejection of her initiates.

That her rejection of the mother and the rejection of self is painful and not at all "natural" is something the third section of the poem comments on, invoking the bond between the maternal body and the children it bore:

3. Eros 
To be male, always 
to go to women 
and be taken back 
into the pierced flesh: 

     I suppose 
memory is stirred. 
And the girl child 
who wills herself

into her father's arms 
likewise loved him 
second. Nor is she told 
what need to express. 
There is a look one sees, 
the mouth somehow desperate— 

Because the bond 
cannot be proven. (31)

Through heterosexuality, the male is "taken back" into the flesh he had separated from. The girl child gravitates toward the father only through an act of will, coming to identify with him as she does in the first section only after cultural mediation. But the telos of that act of will and how it manifests itself physically is made explicit in the fourth section:

4. The Deviation 
It begins quietly 
in certain female children: 
the fear of death, taking as its form 
dedication to hunger, 
because a woman's body 
is  a grave; it will accept 
anything. I remember 
lying in bed at night 
touching the soft, digressive breasts, 
touching, at fifteen, 
the interfering flesh 
that I would sacrifice 
until the limbs were free 
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt 
what I feel now, aligning these words— 
it is the same need to perfect, 
of which death is the mere byproduct. (32)

Here the speaker identifies the cultural narrative of female flesh as decay and death as deadly to women. Certain female children dedicate themselves to hunger, that is, to starving away their flesh, in an attempt to thwart the death with which the cultural narrative has equated them. In that narrative "a woman's body/is a grave." Yet, the

speaker brings into focus the status of that story as a story, rather than a "truth," in the connection that she makes between this narrative, her attempts to write, and her anorexic impulses. Here the anorexia is a remedy that removes the flesh that is perceived as the cause of the implicit criticism that the young girl experienced in the first section of the poem when her father would not touch her. Her body, which made her untouchable in the first place, also makes her untouchable now but in different terms. Her anorexic body can't be rejected, because it is now perfect, stripped of its femininity.

Anorexics perceive themselves as beyond reproach, because they think they have defeated that aspect of themselves that equates them with the grave ("a woman's body/is a grave"), but in becoming anorexic, they align themselves with death. The speaker in Glück's poem experiences her body as "interfering flesh" that she "would sacrifice/until the limbs were free/of blossom and subterfuge," of "soft, digressive" breasts that would falsely identify her with the passivity of her waiting grandmother. She sacrifices the "blossom," the feminine that she experiences as "subterfuge," as something that deceives and conceals her "true" masculine self by its flesh. This is an ironic reversal of the common interpretation of anorexics, who are seen as attempting to escape and evade their "true" adult sexuality as women. But through this irony, which marks her attempt to align herself with the father, what she really does is to align herself with her mother and grandmother in a position of powerlessness. She participates in a fetishistic structure in that her denial of her body that results in a more "masculine" body becomes a fetish intended to cover what she perceives as lack, her female body. She makes herself indeterminately gendered. The anorexic body functions as a disavowal of gender or as a postponement of a choice between masculine and feminine. It gives her the illusionary horizon of an ungendered space, which destroys her, and which, because of cultural mediation, can only postpone the inevitable "fall" into the female body. Rather than using anorexia as a strategy of protest, she leaves the definition of female body as lack firmly in place. Contrary to interpretations of the disease like Sandra M. Gilbert's that describe anorexia as a parodic strategy that protests the social order, anorexia cannot function as a form of self-assertion but rather as a fetishistic structure that leaves

women believing the cultural narrative of female as lack.^[56] Glück's poem enacts the alignment of three generations of women—grandmother, mother, and daughter—in an alignment of its words that articulates a complicated awareness of their parallel processes of self-cancellation.

Most significant, the speaker experiences the purgation of her flesh as an artistic process equivalent to the artistic creation of poetry: "I felt/what I feel now, aligning these words—/it is the same need to perfect." "Perfection" is defined as the successful elimination of female flesh. The speaker of this poem has internalized this logic, but in making it her subject she brings it to the level of consciousness. She begins to rewrite the narrative about how we conceive of bodies. In Glück's work the definition of anorexia as "heroic" is ironized in such a way that we can see the destructive paradox such a definition necessitates.

The last section of the poem shows how art is a process necessarily based on the renunciation of the feminine as flesh, making that awareness part of a conscious, painful deliberation:

5. Sacred Objects 
Today in the field I saw 
the hard, active buds of the dogwood 
and wanted, as we say, to capture them, 
to make them eternal. That is the premise 
of renunciation: the child, 
having no self to speak of, 
comes to life in denial— 

I stood apart in that achievement, 
in that power to expose 
the underlying body, like a god 
for whose deed 
there is no parallel in the natural world. (33)

Here the speaker's achievement of a "self" is the denial of self, which both sets her apart and constitutes her identity. Renunciation enables her both to align words and to stand apart as different, as something other than the female body that if stripped away leaves the more authentic, male "underlying body." It removes her from the mortal, material, feminine realm of nature, making her "like a god/for whose

deed/there is no parallel in the natural world." This achievement gives the speaker a new identification, makes her godlike because she has transcended the natural world. The denial of feminine flesh makes her godlike both in her difference from other female corpses invoking death and decay and in her ostensible participation in the "eternal." The transcendence of flesh is related to the poetic transcendence: "Today in the field I saw/the hard, active buds of the dogwood/and wanted, as we say, to capture them,/to make them eternal." Making the buds eternal through poetic language invokes the topos of transcending the material dimension of flux and change, but it does so explicitly in reference to gender and how gender codes create a narrative of female flesh that the anorexic then responds to in her self-creation. "The hard, active buds of the dogwood" are contrasted to the passivity and softness of the feminine flesh she experiences as "soft, digressive breasts," as "blossom and subterfuge." The poetic impulse to make eternal is similar to the anorexic impulse to constitute oneself through the renunciation of female flesh, thereby evading the "fear of death, taking as its form/dedication to hunger." "Dedication to hunger" constitutes both poetry and evasion of the woman's body that by an anorexic cultural logic "is a grave."

The fierce control of Glück's poetry, the suppressed rage in the narrative voice, enacts on a formal level the anorexic's self-suppression, even as she makes that suppression her subject. By connecting masculinity, activity, and aesthetics on the one hand and femininity, passivity, and bodily flesh on the other, Glück calls attention to a narrative we all have too readily accepted. The fierce detachment of the narrative voice is the expression of an equally fierce pain, which comes from what the logic of renunciation has encouraged us to will into our flesh, what it has encouraged us to shape our bodies into. In accepting the cultural narrative that makes bodily renunciation heroic and masculine, we try to make ourselves more powerful, "godlike," in a way that destroys us. Glück's poem admits and shows that we still constitute ourselves as gods or heroes through masculinization along the thin side of the thin/fat divide. In doing so, however, the poem evokes a different consciousness about the way we tell stories about ourselves, the way we create ourselves through gendered patterns of language.

The poet Eavan Boland connects anorexia, masculinity and femininity, and the Western philosophical and religious, rather than literary, tradition in her poem "Anorexic":

Flesh is heretic. 
My body is a witch. 
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching 
her curves and paps and wiles. 
They scorch in my self-denials.

How she meshed my head 
in the half-truths 
of her fevers

till I renounced 
milk and honey 
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited 
her hungers. 
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless. 
I am skin and bone. 
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib 
I turn in sleep. 
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia 
a sensuous enclosure. 
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum, 
once by the song of his breath 
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more, 
only a few more days 
sinless, foodless,

I will slip 
back into him again 
as if I had never been away.

Caged so 
I will grow 
angular and holy

past pain, 
keeping his heart 
such company

as will make forget 
in a small space 
the fall

into forked dark, 
into python needs 
heaving to hips and breasts 
and lips and heat 
and sweat and fat and greed.^[57]

In Boland's poem the anorexic narrative is spelled out from a distinctively female subject position—the black hole, to which history, symbology, and her own efforts have consigned her. Enacting the internalization of the logic expressed in the witchcraft trials in Puritan New England, the anorexic differs from those "witches" in that she burns her own body, consumes her own flesh, by refusing to take anything in. Boland's poem creates a voice, a female subject position involved in the process of canceling herself out, which clearly articulates the logic that the historian Carol F. Karlsen describes in her work on the place of gender and ideology in the Puritan "witch" scandal. In Puritan ideology, based in the European tradition of Institoris and Sprenger's well-known treatise Malleus Maleficarum , "Women were by nature more evil than men: in their wickedness, they imitated the first woman, Eve. Created intellectually, morally, and physically weaker than men, the argument continued, women were subject to deeper affections and passions, harbored more uncontrollable appetites, and were more susceptible to deception."^[58] Through a process that seems like ventriloquism, the voices of this European tradition speak in Boland's poem. They speak in the voices of actual anorexics, like another patient from Bruch: "My soul seemed to grow as my body waned; I felt like one of those early Christian saints who starved themselves in the desert sun. I felt invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette."^[59]

And yet it is not entirely ventriloquism. Self-starvation is a process anorexics have decided for themselves, a subject position they have chosen , paradoxically, as a means of self-definition. The starved body becomes their identity, their identity  is the process of self-cancellation. This is not something willed upon them by culture—everyone around them becomes united in an attempt to facilitate a "cure." Still, there is something strange in these torturous twists. If anorexia is a choice, why do so many women choose it? But if it is the result of a convergence of historical forces, of a certain form of Christian logic, of philosophic logic, of psychoanalytic logic, of rhetorical logic, if it is the subject position offered to women as redemptive to "cure" or to supplement their "lack" as nonmale, then why don't all women have anorexia? These are questions an analysis of Boland's text can begin to answer.

For anorexics the body is experienced as entirely distinct, as "other"; the body is not the self. The body is gendered female, while the mind that attempts to control it is gendered male.^[60] Bruch writes in The Golden Cage that

many [anorexics] experience themselves and their bodies as separate entities, and it is the mind's task to control the unruly and despised body. Others speak of feeling divided, as being a split person or two people. . . . when they define this separate aspect, this different person seems always to be a male. . . . They had felt throughout their lives that being a female was an unjust disadvantage, and they dreamed of doing well in areas considered more respected and worthwhile because they were "masculine." Their overslim appearance, their remarkable athletic performances, with perseverance to the point of exhaustion, give them the proud conviction of being as good [as men]. (58-59)

"Flesh is heretic," says Boland's anorexic speaker. "My body is a witch./I am burning it." Speaking a synthesis of attitudes expressed in Plato, Institoris and Sprenger, Hegel, Descartes, and Freud, she splits herself off from her body, labels it "heretical," a "witch," and "burns" it. To combine flesh and heresy collapses the literal and the figurative in the way characteristic of anorexic logic. "Heresy" is defined as "an opinion of doctrine contrary to church dogma; dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice; an opinion, doctrine, or practice contrary to the truth or to generally accepted

beliefs or standards."^[61] When the speaker says, "Flesh is heretic," she describes her body as a deviation from "truth," from "church dogma," from the "dominant theories" of subjectivity and being. Her body asserts an alternative subjectivity "contrary to generally accepted beliefs and standards" that she herself works to annihilate. Her body is not a "natural" object; it is a set of discourses, of dogmas and their contraries. It is a competing set of definitions, in which she cancels the second alternative, the embodied female subject, in order to reinforce the traditional dualist masculine subject.

In the embodiment that the poem's speaker struggles to overcome, she identifies her body with a "witch" upon whom she is imposing her own version of "burning" at the stake. The heretical burning body is witchlike in its dissent from the dominant disembodied tradition, just as "witches" dissented from the dominant religious tradition that consigned them to the social position of a man's "helpmeet." As Karlsen writes in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman , "Puritans defined discontent as thinking oneself above one's place in the social order," and they defined "witches" as those who were dissatisfied with the status quo: "It was [women accused of witchcraft's] perceived dissatisfaction with the religious system—and by extension with the religiously defined social system—that linked them to their sister witches. . . . By treating female dissent as evidence of witchcraft as well as heresy, the authorities may have effectively silenced Puritan women's opposition [to the religious system]" (127, 125, 197). Paradoxically, the anorexic is both dissenter and prosecutor, the accused and the judge. In her unconscious protest against an ancient logic that defines her by her body, this protest is nonetheless at war with an identification with that logic, an internalization and acceptance of that logic's standards: Yes, I am an evil body. Yes, I am a witch. Because I am this, I will destroy myself, this part of myself. I will become something else. I will become male, or at least not-female. Prelapsarian identity is for me a space without sexual difference, a space where there are no demarcations between masculine and feminine, between his world and mine. Ellen West, a famous anorexic case study, wrote that "I feel myself quite passively the stage on which two hostile forces are mangling each other." ^[62] With West's self-conception, characteristic of most anorexics, she cannot experience herself as anything but "passive," as

a stage on which "two forces," detached from her own will, "mangle each other." Those "forces" are the struggle between an identification with the Western tradition and a rejection of it. Her anorexic obsession with her body is the convergence of those forces. As Chernin writes, "Obsession is, in fact, a drama, in which that inner being one has hoped to dominate and control keeps struggling to return" (Obsession , 190). That "inner being" Chernin identifies with emotion, passion, creative potential: "Thus, from Ellen West we learn how a young woman invariably rejects, along with the female body, the passionate, 'feminine' side of her nature, from which her creative development would arise" (186). Anorexic obsession takes the place of creativity, of thought, of activity, of the "world beyond her plate."

In Boland's poem, the speaker's anorexia is the act of "torching," through the venerable religious tradition of "self-denial," the body which is, presumably, self-indulgent: "her curves and paps and wiles." The speaker splits off from her body, designating that body first "it" and then "she" and "her," so that the gender of this flesh is clear. For the speaker, "curves" are equated with "wiles," which are defined either as "a trick of a stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive . . . to lure by or as if by a magic spell," or as "to pass or spend pleasurably." Furthermore, "pap" is defined as "nipple," "a soft food for infants or invalids," "political patronage," or "something lacking solid value or substance."^[63] The "curves" are the female flesh traditionally thought to lure men from their important, culture-/state-based sublimated activities and into the fleshly self-indulgence of sexual gratification and love. The female body is the "lure" into pleasure, and the speaker, through  "self-denial" (the "self" defined  as hungering  body), "torches" and "scorches" that flesh in a violence that reflects and internalization of the larger cultural attitude of violence toward that flesh. Like Plato and the biblical tradition she later explicitly draws upon, the speaker identifies this hungering female flesh as a distraction from truth, for "she meshed my head/in the half-truths/of her fevers/till I renounced/milk and honey/and the taste of lunch." Her "fevers," her bodily desires, are a distraction from truth and can only be conquered by a renunciation of "milk and honey," which in the biblical tradition signify the plenty and prosperity of God, who smiles down upon you and provides if you are "good." Defined as the other

of "good," the speaker denies herself this plenty, the reward from which she knows she is by definition excluded. The self-inflicted violence toward her desires, femininity, and flesh continues, through violence, toward hungers succumbed to: "I vomited/her hungers./Now the bitch is burning." The hungers are vomited; the burning continues; "she," the body, has been properly punished: "I am starved and curveless./I am skin and bone./She has learned her lesson."

At this point in the poem the violence stops, and the tone shifts to a tenderness bound up with masculine identification. The speaker is an Eve who has accepted the male definition of herself as inherently evil, desiring, fleshly, and thereby responsible for the Fall and death of the human race. This punitive Eve longs to redeem herself through the loss of sexual difference and of the body that has caused all the problems in the first place. In a reverse parody of the psychoanalytic account of male self-differentiation from, and womb-longing for, his mother, here Eve wants to rejoin Adam, to literally become him again, to fit back into the rib from which she has ostensibly come, a fit accomplished by the "burning" of her body that she performs in the earlier stanzas of the poem. "Thin as a rib," Eve says, evoking the second and more widely taught creation myth in Genesis: "I turn in sleep./My dreams probe/a claustrophobia/a sensuous enclosure./ How warm it was and wide/once by a warm drum,/once by the song of his breath/and in his sleeping side." Like the psychoanalytic myth of the child's longing for the warm womb, here the "sensuous enclosure" is Adam, since he has mythologically given birth to Eve. Her desire is a regression to this undifferentiated state where she is literally part of him and thereby male. Sinless, fleshless, beyond need, she will forget her own hungers, her own designation as fleshly evil: "Caged so/I will grow/angular and holy/past pain,/keeping his heart/such company/as will make me forget/in a small space/the fall/into forked dark,/into python needs/heaving to hips and breasts / and lips and heat/and sweat and fat and greed." The renunciation of her flesh allows her to "forget" herself, to become male, to become Adam, apparently a subject position that is beyond "python needs," since it does not partake of, or at least is not defined by, "hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed." She attains this subject position only through self-starvation and the resulting dis-

appearance of the body: "Only a little more,/only a few more days/ sinless, foodless,/I will slip/back into him again/as if I had never been away." The lack of food leads to the lack of body, which leads to the lack of sin, which leads to a male subject position, or least to that prelapsarian state of gender identity before sexual difference—before the inevitable split and rejection when "us" is not necessarily different from "them," when the boys will still play with us at recess.^[64]

Boland's poem remarkably details the anorexic logic. At the same time, it gives that logic a specific historical and cultural context, connecting the current manifestations of male identification in women that help define anorexia, the Puritan witch scandals and the subject positions relegated to women therein, and the biblical tradition of the Fall, so important in structuring gender and power configurations throughout Western culture. It brings together religious, philosophical, and historical strands that help form a reading of the disease, its logic, its passions, and the cultural conditions that have helped produce it, as well as a reading of those who suffer from it. Boland's poem decodes and enacts the very set of presuppositions that can be traced to the literary ideals of the early twentieth century. Identifying these ideals locates another missing element in the emerging picture of the cultural determinants of anorexia.

These literary ideals are the focus of the pages that follow. I situate myself differently from the little work that has been done on the relation between literature and anorexia, although the goals of my work might be the same. A common interpretation of anorexia offered by feminist literary critics like Sandra M. Gilbert who "want urgently to examine what we might call the feminist implications of anorexia" is that it reflects a strategy through which "women . . . have consciously used literal hunger as a means of protesting the metaphorical starvation in their lives" ("Hunger Pains," 11), starvation for meaningful life choices.^[65] These critics see a parallel between the anorexic and the woman writer: "Denied all other means of self-creation, both the starved woman poet and the starving anorexic transform self-denial into self-assertion, a hunger/pain into a hunger/strike" (Gilbert, "Hunger Pains," 12). "Starved poets" include Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, and the Brontës, and these critics examine their texts for anorexic behavior among characters, which they interpret as a protest

against the patriarchal order. They draw an analogy between the political activities of suffragists like the Pankhursts, who went on hunger strikes as a means of obtaining the vote, and the behavior of anorexics.^[66] While this interpretive model raises anorexia as an important issue for feminist literary study, it is problematic in that it gives artistic status to a "strategy of resistance" that is only self-destructive, and that ultimately affirms the very order it protests.

Furthermore, this model is too gender specific in that it cannot account for a common occurrence in many modernist texts by male authors—anorexic male figures like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, Conrad's Marlow, or Faulkner's Joe Christmas. Nor can it account for the curiously "anorexic" strategies of revision in modernist literary manifestoes, such as imagist poetics, that mandate the radical reduction of textual bodies. As recent theorists have repeatedly insisted, anorexia needs to be examined in relation to the gendered context that produces it.^[67] For white male modernism  a dominant aesthetic was anorexic. Theories of creativity relied on an ideology that posited the necessity to renounce "the feminine" as flesh, a "necessity" that functioned as a "higher truth" that the artist alone apprehends. In contrast to the Gilbert thesis, these writers used the disease to refute the very female self-expression referred to above. In short, female disease was transformed into male textual practice, but both disease and textual practice had a grounding in specific cultural and historical contexts.

Bordo has named these contexts "psychopathologies" and argues that they express some of the most vexed points of tension in our culture. Eating disorders, she writes, "reflect and call our attention to some of the central ills of our culture—from our historical heritage of disdain for the body, to our modern fear of loss of control over our futures, to the disquieting meaning of contemporary beauty ideals in an era of female presence and power" ("Anorexia Nervosa," 88). The way the various forms of anorexia—mental, physical, and textual—work to cancel out "female presence and power" will be the focus of the pages that follow. I will attempt to track some of the ways in which an anorexic, male-identified logic is still characteristic of our basic processes of reading and writing in institutions of higher education. Thus, along with many others, I begin to recover the female bodies, the murdered subjects that tradition has so relentlessly skinned, dis-

membered, and generally done violence to in its imposition of a white, upwardly mobile, masculine worldview that explicitly defines itself in opposition to the emotional, the personal, the bodily, the feminine.^[68]

As a version, then, of Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs , as a member of the Feminist Bureau of Investigation, I have a kind of mission to complete. Speaking of the serial killer and his victim, Clarice says, "If he sees Catherine as a person and not just an object, it's harder to tear her up." Her mission is to keep women and herself from being torn up; mine is to help keep them and myself from tearing ourselves up. But also like Clarice, whose career as a federal investigator is emotionally motivated by an identification with her policeman father, I have my own identifications and engagements with the tradition I analyze. In a relation like Clarice's to Catherine, I am bound up in the same problematic structure as Hillary, the desperate thirteen-year-old in the gym. During the film's agonizing showdown, when Clarice shouts to Catherine, "You're safe," at precisely the moment she herself is in the most danger, Clarice shows her vulnerability to a tradition of male violence in which one is never "safe," and in which one can function as only the most tenuous form of "savior." Even as I attempt to make Hillary and others like her "safe," bound up in the very structures I analyze, as a lived female body in the cultural matrix, I reveal my own vulnerabilities.

By positioning some of the sources of the hatred of the female body that becomes a hatred of the self, I hope to help dismantle the macabre sisterhood of self-hatred that exists on a daily basis between myself and thirteen-year-olds, twenty-two-year-olds, and thirty-nine-year-olds in the women's locker room in the gym, each of us tensely huddled over her own body as we change clothes, silent in shame, sucking our stomachs in, each hoping that the other women will not "see" the bulges "disfiguring" our bodies. I hope to work toward a strategy in which the literal and the body need no longer function as the vilified others of discourse.^[69] If, in the cultural narratives that constitute the gendered body, there could be a reconfiguration of the hierarchical relationship between the ideal, figurative body and the biological, literal body, this reconfiguration would affect the problem of subjectivity as well. Such a reconfiguration might help inoculate us

against the first strain of anorexic logic, which I encountered in university athletics parading past football players toward the scales. But the second might prove tougher—a kind of Beijing flu. It infects that group of women (and some men as well) who sit in self-imposed silence in the margins of the classroom, or who freeze in frustration and self-abasement in front of computer screens. These women and men feel inadequate to the task of mastering discourse, of "rising" to the occasion of academic debate that is articulated in terms of conquest, domination, or simple one-upsmanship. In order to bring them from the "shadows" of academic discourse into embodiment, we need to change the paradigm that dictates education in general—the ways of reading, writing, and thinking about ideas—so that women and men who are uncomfortable articulating themselves according to male models can really feel they have entered the academy as more than masculine imitations, more than Hegel's "impotent shadows."

I will argue that the persistence of high modernist literature and literary ideals is central to the contemporary quest to reconfigure learning. If we are to change the ways we imagine literature, ideas, the bodies of people in classrooms as well as bodies represented in texts, we need to reexamine modernism and some of its less-discussed assumptions. I hope to show an affinity between "anorexic thinking" and "modernist thinking," and that anorexic logic that produces both. If we are to reclaim the body and recode the systems of logic, the abstract registers we work within, in ways that are integrative rather than exclusionary, we need a pedagogy that has a place for the nonlinear as well as the linear, the literal as well as the figurative, the personal and emotional as well as the logical and the abstract, and the feminine as well as the masculine. We need a pedagogy that values both modes of discourse and that allows persons of both sexes to articulate both in peaceful conversation.^[70] Currently, we remain either locked in the "body" and its registers, "the empirical," or locked in abstract logic, the "theoretical." Good modernists in this particular sense, we have not practically deconstructed the opposition between the empirical and the theoretical. In the academy there remains a violent scar, always in danger of retearing, bifurcating into "girl books" and "boy books," "the canon" and "black books," "women's and minority's issues" and "issues," the practical and the theoretical. As Bordo

emphasizes in "The Feminist as Other," "theoretical" issues are often considered the "real thing," while gender, race, or class issues are considered extra, special, something else, very like the medical school models of the body that designate parts specific to the female body as extra.^[71] There is still an insufficiently questioned relationship of hierarchy and subordination between these registers, a hierarchy that has real effects on real bodies sitting in classrooms every day, as well as on bodies outside of the classroom. It is still a war zone, and there are still political prisoners.