Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia

By Megan Warin and Professor Megan Warin

Book Overview

Abject Relations presents an alternative approach to anorexia, long considered the epitome of a Western obsession with individualism, beauty, self-control, and autonomy. Through detailed ethnographic investigations, Megan Warin looks at the heart of what it means to live with anorexia on a daily basis. Participants describe difficulties with social relatedness, not being at home in their body, and feeling disgusting and worthless. For them, anorexia becomes a seductive and empowering practice that cleanses bodies of shame and guilt, becomes a friend and support, and allows them to forge new social relations.

Unraveling anorexia's complex relationships and contradictions, Warin provides a new theoretical perspective rooted in a socio-cultural context of bodies and gender. Abject Relations departs from conventional psychotherapy approaches and offers a different "logic," one that involves the shifting forces of power, disgust, and desire and provides new ways of thinking that may have implications for future treatment regimes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813546907
• ISBN13: 9780813546902
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"