In the last season of Sex and the City, series regulars Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) attend a gallery to watch a hunger artist. The exhibition was a re-creation of Marina Abramovic’s 2002 performance piece wherein the artist survived for twelve days on water alone. During the exhibit, the gallery was open twenty-four hours a day so viewers could constantly consume (or police) Abramovic’s performance. She lived on a narrow ledge, and the only visible means of escape were ladders constructed of upturned kitchen knives that offered the possibility of a bloody and brutal break out (Westcott 129; Birringer 67). In the Sex and the City episode based on the performance, dialogue between Carrie, Charlotte, and Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov) brings Carrie to state, “There are depressed women all over New York doing the exact same thing as her and not calling it art. I mean if you put a phone up on that platform it’s just a typical Friday night waiting for some guy to call” (Sex and the City, episode 86). Carrie’s statement, although problematic, reveals the poignant connections between Abramovic’s performance and the more everyday actions of contemporary women. The performance piece, and its modified television re-creation, offers an opening to explore the meaning of contemporary women’s intentional hunger in the West. This essay is intended to be the beginning of a dialogue on the meaning of hunger and the starved female body, particularly in relation to what is commonly called ‘anorexia nervosa.’ It will explore the connection between women’s self-starvation, hunger, cannibalism, and art by placing the act of starvation outside psychiatric discourses and into a wider sphere of contemporary culture. By exploring ‘anorexia’s’ historical, discursive construction, I hope to complicate the current, dominant paradigm for understanding women’s self-starvation and provide an opening for seeing it as a potentially political act. By ‘political act,’ I mean a space of action where one grapples with discourses and structures of power to shape and resist dominant paradigms, discourses, and practices. This essay disrupts received notions of starvation and hunger among women and suggests alternative interpretive possibilities, especially those that relate to ideas of politics, hunger, and performance.

Recent feminist work by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn questions the established feminist critique of anorexia and explains self-starvation as an act of protest or subversion. Using poststructuralist theory to study the discursive practices of disciplinary procedures of the body, Grosz and Probyn seek to challenge existing notions of anorexia nervosa from a corporeal feminist perspective. Grosz argues that “the body can be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles” (Grosz 19) and asserts that anorexia is a protest against patriarchal ideals (40). Probyn cautions us that such struggles are shaped discursively and historically. In her 1987 essay, “The Anorexic Body,” she suggests that the discourses that inform anorexia are multiple and varied (116). I want to start from this notion and push it a bit further to test the margins, so to speak, of politics and performance and to highlight the culturally constructed fault lines that persist regarding women’s bodies. Despite the gains theorists like Grosz and Probyn have made in changing perceptions of anorexia, the vestiges of medical model legacies remain in portrayals of the anorexic’s protest as individual, potentially pathological, and misguided. Grosz, for example, has argued that anorexics want to escape the body and that they suffer from a sort of “wishful megalomania” (212n18). I would like to suggest, as one alternative, that some anorexics may perform their bodies and, subsequently, draw into the discussion the participation of the ‘audience’ – those who watch and who participate in the surveillance of the thin body.

Thomas Szasz suggests that “we call self-starvation, ‘anorexia nervosa,’ a hunger strike, a suicide attempt, or some other name, depending on how we want to respond” (40). I have chosen to call the act of starvation, particularly among women, voluntary self-starvation – a term borrowed from Liz Eckermann (159). In discussing alternative readings of self-starvation and hunger apart from the more popular discourses of anorexia nervosa, it became clear that anorexia was a limited and loaded psychiatric diagnosis that foreclosed on the possibility of politically informed interpretations. The term ‘anorexia’ comes from the Latin and means without hunger, which, as a medical diagnosis, precludes the possibility of a struggle with hunger and easily renders a pathological explanation in the absence of appetite. In separate works, both Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott have demonstrated that both subjects and ‘the political’ are formed through historical processes of exclusion (Butler, “Contingent Foundations” 4; Scott 8-9). As we shall see, the exclusionary discursive construction of anorexia has resulted in a singular medical discourse that perpetuates medical/psychiatric treatment for anorexics. Challenging the current practices of treating self-starvation requires thinking outside of the established psychiatric/medical discourse and offering a more engaged cultural reading.

In her book The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann briefly recounts the story of an Irish woman in Belfast who survived a political hunger strike while incarcerated but, after her release, died of anorexia nervosa (1). The example raises a number of questions about the difference between a ‘strike’ and an ‘illness.’ Where, for example, does a political hunger strike, as a powerful expression of resistance, end and anorexia nervosa, a psychiatric ‘disorder,’ begin? How do we differentiate between political hunger strikes and anorexia? How is the audience implicated in the performance of hunger? These are fundamental questions that we need to ask if we are going to seriously attempt to engage in a feminist dialogue on voluntary self-starvation. A hunger strike is typically seen as a form of non-violent resistance to historical and contemporary political abuses, especially those related to the project of colonialism. Anorexia nervosa is seen as an individual pathology that typically affects young girls and women who refuse to maintain a healthy body weight (see American Psychiatric Association 583-85, 587). Anorexics are often seen as victims of our culture who take the cult of thinness portrayed through the media too far. Beyond these seemingly irreconcilable definitions, Ellmann’s example seems to suggest some sort of definitional grey area that calls for exploration. As Ellmann suggests, “[It] is not by food that we survive but by the gaze of others; and it is impossible to live by hunger unless we can be seen or represented doing so […] Self-starvation is above all a performance […] it is staged to trick the conscience of its viewers, forcing them to recognize that they are implicated in the spectacle that they behold” (17). The notion of surveillance and how we as an audience react to each type of ‘performance’ is a connection across discourses that shape medical perspectives, hunger strikes, and performance.

The title of Ellmann’s book The Hunger Artists, a take-off of Franz Kafka’s 1922 short story “A Hunger Artist,” points to the thread of hunger narratives in the twentieth century. In Kafka’s story, the self-starver is a male ‘freak,’ performing as a circus wonder, who undertakes an extensive fast that eventually kills him, ostensibly because he can find no food he likes. His starvation draws crowds of people, day and night, who watch his ‘feat’ and try to ensure the authenticity of his starvation (Kafka 268-77). In reality, extremely thin people were mainstays in freak show performances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bogdan ch. 8). More recently, Kafka’s hunger artist inspired American illusionist David Blaine who, suspended in a glass box by Tower Bridge in London, England, fasted for forty-four days. Among the common threads in the knot of hunger and starvation is the desire to see, to watch, and to authenticate. Kafka’s story begins, “At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the night time there were visiting hours” (Kafka 268). Kafka’s protagonist was watched by delighted crowds and also butchers who attempted to ensure he took no food. Both Abramovic’s and Blaine’s performances were met with skepticism as well as suspicion of secret feedings; thus, they required transparency in their acts of self-starvation. Blaine’s starvation, for example, was met with controversy as people questioned why he would make himself into such a spectacle (see Bennett). The fasts also needed audience complicity through the simple act of watching. (Why else would Blaine’s cage have been completely transparent or Abramovic’s performance available for viewing day or night?)

The audience’s simultaneous desire for authenticity in the spectacle and disgust at the ‘grotesquely’ thin body is related to a longer history of starvation as spectacle and the ‘need’ to uncover frauds. The history of women’s use of self-starvation has been documented for centuries, along with changing purposes, outcomes, and explanations in different historical contexts (see, for example, Vandereycken and Van Deth; Bynum “Women Mystics” and “Fast, Feast, and Flesh”; Reineke). Separating the ‘real’ starvers from the fakes in the spectacle of starvation goes back to the early modern period. Into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discussions of inedia prodigiosa and anorexia mirabilis were common among religious men, medical practitioners, and civil authorities. Connected to a longer trend of religious fasting and starvation for religious asceticism, miraculous fasts captured the public imagination. In the nineteenth century such acts continued to be popular exhibits, although there was increasing skepticism concerning their miraculous nature. Surveillance of the miraculous fasters, often women in materially insecure positions who found economic success through the spectacle, was undertaken in the name of a medical science whose explanatory discursive power was rising as religious explanations waned. Under the increasingly powerful medical and scientific gaze, fasters were revealed as frauds who took in small amounts of nourishment (Brumberg 47-57; Vandereycken and Van Deth 31-42). Critics of the contemporary process have linked the accepted clinical practice of the surveillance of anorexic patients to some of these earlier practices.

It was, however, only in the late nineteenth century that anorexia was ‘discovered’ as a ‘disease.’ In 1873 French physician, E.C. Lasegue, published “De l’anorexie hysterique,” and in England Dr. W.W. Gull coined the term ‘anorexia nervosa’ (Shorter 71-72). It is, perhaps, unsurprising that anorexia nervosa was constructed as an illness during the late nineteenth century. The newly constructed middle-class body dovetailed with a professionalizing medical field, and, as a result, a host of physical and psychological complaints were translated by physicians into increasingly specified categories of disease. Women – particularly young, white, middle-class women – were seen as at risk precisely because they were female. Not only was the middle class garnering increasing attention as the social and political motor force of the period, the female reproductive system was believed to cause a number of maladies, including neurasthenia, neuralgia, hysteria, convulsive disease, melancholia, and even insanity (Mitchinson 280).

The discovery of anorexia and the slowly evolving strategies used to diagnose it absorbed and reflected gendered discourses of biology, rationality, and logic (Hepworth 27-28). Feminist theorists have demonstrated that the establishment of the central epistemological tenets of modernity rested on the exclusion of the feminine and the maintenance of its position as Other. Thus, the universal rational, logical subject was denoted as masculine while the feminine absorbed the anxieties of irrationality and illogic (Felski 37). Women’s biology played a key role in political discussions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was the association of women with irrationality and emotional instability that helped to keep them marginalized in the political process for decades. One exception of note here are the early twentieth-century suffragettes, particularly those in England, who employed self-starvation as a means of protest (Purvis 119-20, 122-23). Yet these hunger strikes resonate far more with the overtly political nature of the ‘traditional’ political hunger strike than with an allegedly apolitical anorexia, as the women frequently undertook these strikes while incarcerated and were primarily focused on attaining the vote for women – a more explicitly (in masculine terms at least) political project.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the diagnosis of ‘anorexia nervosa’ was made more complex by diagnoses of Simmonds’ disease. Part of a scientific and biological explanation for food refusal, Simmonds’ disease, a malfunction of the pituitary gland due to trauma, was thought to be the underlying cause of ‘anorexia’ (Hepworth 42). By the middle decades of the twentieth century, however, the psychiatric field had consolidated enough power to effectively dominate the diagnosis and treatment of self-starvation. Although ‘anorexia’ went through significant re-formulations in the twentieth century, the current understanding of it has retained much of its Victorian origins. Only recently have feminist critics revealed the race-, class-, and sex- based biases still implicit in the construction and diagnosis of ‘anorexia’. Becky Thompson’s work revealed how contemporary notions of ‘anorexia nervosa’ rendered women of colour, lesbians, and working- class women invisible (14). Racism, classism, and heterosexism thus play a role in delineating the margins of ‘anorexic’ experience.

A reaction to the alleged increase in cases of anorexia and the well-publicized death of singer Karen Carpenter in the 1970s led to increased attention and awareness of the ‘illness’ through the 1980s. A significant amount of feminist scholarship sought to place the anorexic’s experience within a wider socio-cultural context; although, for the most part, writers did not break away from the established medical model (Hepworth 53). These studies were significant. Continuing the feminist rallying call that the ‘personal is political,’ feminists made the case that beauty, the body, and thinness were personal/political issues. Much of the literature focused on social expectations for young women and cultural influences like the media and the family (see, for example, Chernin; Orbach; Bordo, Unbearable Weight; MacSween; Szekely). Yet many of these writers continued to envisage self-starvation as pathological, saw self-starvers as caught up – sometimes unwittingly – in the socio-cultural pursuit of thinness, and continued to pathologize the purportedly perpetually fraught mother-daughter relationship. Overall, they sought to redress the West’s ubiquitous obsession with thinness. The idea of anorexia as a social protest was put forth in a limited fashion, but it was undercut primarily by the maintenance of anorexia’s apolitical character. For example, in an essay entitled “Anorexia Nervosa,” Susan Bordo argued that “we must recognize that the anorexic’s ‘protest,’ like that of the classical hysterical symptom, is written on the bodies of anorexic women, and not embraced as a conscious politics, nor, indeed, does it reflect any social or political understanding at all” (44).

While the issue of consciousness remains pertinent, such an outright dismissal needs to be reconsidered in light of third-wave feminism’s focus on the body and embodiment (Edut xvii-xviv) and the possibility that seeing and giving voice to political consciousness is caught up in relational power struggles. Liz Eckermann, for example, has demonstrated that some women who engage in voluntary self-starvation do so from a consciously subversive standpoint. One woman Eckermann cites savoured “[the] power I felt when asked by Dr K. to register on the body size metre how large I thought I was. As I moved the lever to a ridiculous distance outside I watched his reaction from the corner of my eye. His expression was ‘Boy this kid is wacko!’ and all the time I knew what I was doing was manipulating him and it gave me enormous pleasure” (165). I, like others, however, struggle with employing the idea of the political while insisting that we continue to challenge the foreclosures in the domain of the political. Any alternate view cannot be simply substituted for medical explanation; rather, it must be seen as one possibility in the reinterpretation of voluntary self-starvation. Decentering the political from strictly masculine notions and refusing to see voluntary self-starvers as dupes of the media remain critical aspects of the project to re-envisage voluntary self-starvation around ideas of performance and hunger.

The key to rethinking voluntary self-starvation is shifting the emphasis from theorizing the thin body alone to theorizing the thin body as a product of and performance of hunger. Hunger provides new ways of thinking about voluntary self-starvation. Elspeth Probyn, in Carnal Appetites, writes, “In the West, there are certainly many who are hungry, and who have to live on substandard nutritional fare, but to directly die from starvation is rare: perhaps the only individuals to do so are anorexics and political prisoners” (80). Taking up Probyn’s point in regard to voluntary self-starvation raises a number of questions: How can we rethink the persistent hunger of the voluntary self-starver? How can we reframe the question, what is she hungry for? Not thinness or food but, more radically, the things that drive the voluntary self-starver to the perpetual mode of hunger. What does her hunger mean? At the extreme, the self-starver’s hunger is self-cannibalizing, eating/consuming her own body from within. As critiques of David Blaine’s ‘episode’ revealed, however, self-cannibalizing is, perhaps, almost banal in a country obsessed with dieting. Yet there seems to be something particular around the long commitment to self-starve outside of a diet regime, and surely there is a difference between limiting food intake and almost stopping it altogether. I would like to suggest that in the case of the voluntary self-starver it may reveal the concomitant lack of consumption and the self-consumption of cannibalism. Hunger is then a process by which the starver becomes the cannibal – a dangerous and paradoxical figure in Western culture who needs to be quickly contained (Probyn, Carnal Appetites 81).

According to Probyn, cannibalism is connected to capitalism, sexuality, and colonialism. Revealing appetites for people and goods that show no signs of ending, the cannibal reveals our moral collapse and “recalls in an elemental way that we desperately need alternative modes of organizing ourselves and our relations to others” (Carnal Appetites 80-81). What is clear from the literature on anorexia is that many extreme voluntary self-starvers have experienced some sort of trauma in their past: rape, gang rape, childhood sexual abuse, physical violence, sexual harassment. Thompson’s research revealed that these experiences were often laced with racist, sexist, and classist slurs. The need for alternative modes of organization need not rest on such terrible (and all too common) life experiences; they simply require the recognition of a wider network of people and audiences involved in the context of voluntary self-starvation. Abramovic’s own performance required the viewing public to engage with her silently and ritualistically through “an energy dialogue” (Birringer 67). Watching is indeed relational, but it is also contextual, and the web of cannibalism, performance, and audience must be explored together.

Along with the rising numbers of anorexics in the 1970s came an increasingly corporeally based performance art, invasive body modifications, and a cultural intensification in the context of reading and performing the body in these ways. People who undertake extreme body modification have been referred to as ‘modern primitives,’ an uncomfortable term at best. In regard to modern primitives, Mervat Nasser argues, “The phenomenon is attributed to a universal feeling of being dislocated in a multicultural world that preaches diversity but continues to behave according to a monocultural ethos. It is a reaction of the powerlessness to change the world, pushing individuals to change, instead, what they have power over – their own bodies” (18). The dramatic reshaping of the body speaks to a desire to challenge and re-orientate the systems of power. Such radical physical changes made apparent by self-cannibalizing flesh mark the body as a site of contestation. When tied to sexism and racism, a compelling, self-cannibalizing hunger slowly redefines the limits of traditional cannibalism and relates to the experience and display of power. In “Eating the Other,” bell hooks suggests that “whether or not desire for contact with the Other, for connection rooted in the longing for pleasure, can act as a critical intervention challenging and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance, is an unrealized political possibility” (22). Examining a few examples from performance art may provide another context for the exploration of voluntary self-starvation as a way to challenge dominant codes, particularly for the purposes of the discussion here in relation to the body. While there may be a gap between the creative hunger employed by artists and the hunger of the voluntary self-starver, there are enough points of connection to warrant a discussion, especially in regard to self-consumption. In Abramovic’s 2002 piece, for example, self-cannibalism was certainly apparent. One reviewer noted, “By the end, her flesh fed on muscle, just as in earlier work, of incision into her skin, muscle fed on flesh” (Haber para. 9).

The extreme form of body modification in relation to self-cannibalizing connects to the infamous work of performance artist Orlan (sometimes Saint Orlan), whose videotaped surgeries have fascinated museum-goers and feminist theorists alike. In recent work, Orlan subjected herself to an extensive number of facial surgeries in order to attain the perfect (in masculine terms) face based on famous Renaissance paintings and other historical ‘idealized’ female representations (O’Bryan 50-53). As Grosz has argued in regard to anorexia, the absolute compliance with the ideal can be seen as a renunciation of it (40), and performance pieces like Orlan’s and Abramovic’s have been accepted in feminist literature as part of an ongoing discussion of gender politics (Lovelace 19-20; Birringer 68-69). In particular, Orlan’s graphic performance pieces take viewers into surgical theatres to witness the cutting, opening, and refashioning of her own flesh. She has gone as far as to sell bits of her removed flesh – a radical act of putting pieces of one’s self up for consumption. Among many other ideas, Orlan’s performances revel in the notion of the grotesque and its implicated twin beauty. In attempting to make herself perfectly beautiful, Orlan subjects herself to cuts, bruises, swelling, and literal defacement. The exposure of the grotesque and the turning of the body inside out as an “exaggeration of its internal elements” (Stewart 105) are significant aspects of Orlan’s art, and its symbolic qualities. The line between the grotesque body and the beautiful body is blurred. Like Orlan’s more obvious surgical interventions, starvation turns the body inside out as it disturbs the beauty-grotesque divide, all the while existing and surviving in a state of self-consumption. In trying to achieve ideal beauty, she becomes its other and forces those who witness the transformation to come into visual contact with it.

The connection between anorexia, performance art, cannibalism, and gender politics is also linked in Canadian artist Jana Sterbak’s piece Vanitas. Vanitas was a self-cannibalizing meat dress made of salted, raw flank steak that desiccated over time and, when exhibited, needed to be ‘changed’ regularly. Sterbak’s piece recalls the self-cannibalizing, inside/outside anorexic with its subtitle: “Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic.” Fashion – the frequently blamed ‘promoter’ of the anorexic aesthetic – was certainly a part of Sterbak’s art, as the various dresses incorporated contemporary design, but the underside, the internal elements of the piece, were far more complex. Vanitas was the reduction to the very essence of flesh – in this case animal substituting for human – and a troubling of the grotesque in which art was the instantly rotting, aging, self-consuming muscle. It also suggested hunger and the refusal of food, which is left to rot and cannibalize itself. Feminist art critics have concluded that Sterbak’s work “becomes a form of viable resistance to patriarchal oppression by disrupting a masculine signifying economy” (McLerran 540). Sterbak’s work called up the relationship between anorexia, consumption, and self-cannibalizing, but it did so in subtle and interesting ways. The self-cannibalism was apparent in visual stages, but the transformation happened slowly and, over time, required extended or frequent gallery visits. Far more noticeable was the smell as the meat slowly wasted away. Each incarnation of the dress became smaller, and perhaps more thinly stretched, as it was consumed. In this way, viewers were left with visual and olfactive remnants of a process from which they were largely excluded. Like Abramovic’s performance piece, Sterbak’s installation had little intended aural stimulation.

Written on the body, the act of voluntary self-starvation is often analytically troubling, given its ritualistic and often silent forms. Such a form of corporeal speech gives rise to the risk of psychiatric appropriation and erasure of the subject. Butler argues that “if the subject speaks impossibly, speaks in ways that cannot be regarded as speech or as the speech of a subject, then that speech is discounted and the viability of the subject called into question. The consequence of such an irruption of the unspeakable may range from a sense that one is ‘falling apart’ to the intervention of the state to secure criminal or psychiatric incarceration” (Butler, Excitable Speech 136). It is the combination of the unspeakability of experience, the grotesque, cannibalism, and hunger that renders the anorexic ready to be re-inscribed with psychiatric discourses. Psychiatric discourses are difficult to avoid even in the sphere of performance art. Orlan’s body work has inspired L.A. Raeven (identical twins, Liesbeth and Angelique, who perform under a single name) to present their perpetual starvation. Unlike Blaine’s much discussed starvation, Raeven’s work has received little popular or scholarly attention. In an article in the Guardian, the discussion of their Intitute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) performance revolved around anorexia nervosa. While the artists reject the term, discussions within the gallery and in the public focused on their alleged anorexia and the potentially harmful normalization of self-starvation. A Guardian reporter argued that the perpetual starvation of the twins, based on the length of the period of starvation, was radically different from other performance artists’ use of hunger (O’Hagen), despite the fact that the ICA’s director, Philip Dodd, argued that the work was related to political hunger strikers. Further, Liesbeth was quoted as stating, “If you can label us anorexic, you can be relieved. Without the label, the work is more challenging of you.’” Raeven’s challenge speaks to the complications of reading the performative body, which extends beyond art to the everyday and also implicates the audience. What was key in the discussions regarding Raeven’s work was the fact that some critics refused to take seriously the artists’ descriptions of their work and the work itself and instead slipped into diagnosing the women as anorexics and interviewing doctors and psychologists on the dangers of anorexia. Many of the commentators also seemingly missed or ignored Dodd’s statement that art was supposed to challenge; instead they positioned themselves in connection to a medical gaze.

Some of the arguments against seeing anorexia as a potential hunger strike rest on the assumption of young women’s separation from the realm of the political and the resilient investment in maintaining the category of disease. As with the case of Raeven, this has happened despite women resisting the label. Scholars and self-starvers have added their voices to the literature on anorexia (Probyn, “The Anorexia Body” 111-19; Mukai 613-638), and beyond academia pro-ana websites have cropped up on the Internet. These websites provided a virtual space for women to share stories, ideas, and even tips on voluntary self-starvation. Since 2000, however, Internet service providers have been pressured to, and in some cases did, shut down pro-ana websites. While much of the media controversy that led to the censoring of the sites focused on what many saw as the promotion of anorexia, feminist scholars, performing careful readings of the sites, pointed to how they provided voluntary self-starvers with a sense of community (as opposed to the sense of isolation often experienced in medical treatment), information on survival, and respite from the “relentless surveillance in the public sphere” (Dias 31). The sites allowed women to express the ambiguities and ambivalences they felt about a range of issues related to their hunger, self-starvation, and performances. The virtual community also provided a space for women to point to different cultural contradictions regarding critiques of beauty and issues with disgust and mortification (Ferreday 285-89); yet the response was censorship, an outright denial of the complicated and perceptive ideas the women were discussing.

Maintaining women’s voluntary self-starvation as apolitical also involves seeing their prolonged hunger strikes as pathological and irrational. One may question how rational any hunger strike is – how does a hunger strike seek to effectively dismantle the political and economic dislocations of colonialism in Northern Ireland or in India, for example? The power comes in part from the public’s reaction and the urge to not let these protestors die and perhaps martyr themselves. There is a legitimacy given to the hunger striker that is not afforded to the anorexic. The difference lies in audience participation beyond a medical regime of surveillance. Such is not the case with anorexia, for, as Szasz suggests, when we call it another name we inform our own reactions to it. ‘Anorexia’ suggests both how we want to categorize and construct illness and how we want to understand and react to the body, femininity, womanhood, and the Other. Classified as a psychiatric illness – and the most deadly one at that – we place anorexics under surveillance in hospitals, encourage resistance to treatment as a form of negotiation, and refuse to re-examine our own preconceptions as the patients ‘relapse’ or die (Gremillion 394-95). Even in the wake of statistical evidence that suggests current treatments are not effective, we stay the course. But what makes us – the audience – so uncomfortable with the self-cannibalizing body? Why do we often insist on discursively erasing ourselves as participants in the performance of hunger? What if, instead of measuring them and weighing them and negotiating caloric intake and censoring their attempts at dialogue, we read their hunger and performance in light of other accepted cultural discourses? The acts of embodied speech we recognize would have to be radically altered – perhaps in the same way as performance art – away from psychological discourses of deviance and towards a feminist dialogue of multiple meanings in multiple forms, including ambiguities and ambivalences. If we are capable of reading performance art, can we not read similar, although more everyday, acts?

While there is no wholesale inherent political truth in the act of voluntary self-starvation, we need to continue to test the boundaries of what we are willing to recognize as potentially political. In order to recognize the radical possibilities, we need to reflect on our own implication, and, perhaps more importantly, we need to question the shaky but surprisingly durable foundation that places women’s bodily acts beyond the margins of the political. This requires a new strategy for the negotiation of meaning, one that would confront the peculiar matrix of voluntary self-starvation that meets, in some cases, around hunger, corporeality, performance, and the subsequent implication of the audience. Hunger may be a political act, but it is a disallowed discourse for women in the West. To open up new possibilities, we need to refuse to accept the implicit constructions that persist in underscoring the construction of voluntary self-starvation as illness, as ‘anorexia nervosa.’ At the very least we need to keep questioning them, testing the limits of the political, and, following Ellmann, recognizing our implication “in the spectacle that [we] behold” (17).