"This Country Has an Eating Disorder"

The politics of anorexia, bulimia and binge eating.

Emmeline Clein is the author of the forthcoming book Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. She was kind enough to talk to me about her personal experience with eating disorders, and about how we should start seeing eating disorders as a political, society-wide issue.

Tell me about the origin of this book.

I was first diagnosed with an eating disorder when I was 13.  And have been on and off dealing with it ever since. That experience—getting treatment that didn’t really work and that in many ways exacerbated the illness, trying to recover on my own—is so common. 

And then as I was starting to think about this book, it was actually going to be about female hysteria through history, but the more I read, the more I kept seeing eating disorder symptoms in everything I was reading. And I realized that there wasn’t really a book that gave eating disorders the social, political, economic, historical and cultural crit treatment that a lot of other illnesses that don’t primarily affect women get. We hear, “depression is neoliberalism,” or, “opioid addiction is about late capitalism,” but we don’t really hear the same kind of structural analysis for eating disorders. It’s still largely construed as an individual issue. 

Right, so can you talk about the systemic aspect of it? Are people coming around to seeing it that way?

It’s still very much treated as an individual issue, especially in treatment. If we can just shift the thought patterns, or shift the chemistry, then it’ll all be fine. So you see the same things as you do with a lot of disorders—medication, cognitive behavioral therapy. Which is all kind of based on this idea that an eating disorder is a false consciousness in your mind, something that’s telling you that it’s much more important than it is. Which, is, to use an overused word, a form of gaslighting, because of course being thin is being valued by our society. You’re being told over and over again—made to feel more confident, given more attention—that being thin is important, and then you have a doctor saying, “it’s all in your head.” And that also makes the medical world treat eating disorder patients as enemies of each other, vectors of illness that can spread, as opposed to seeing female friendship as a possible antidote. 

We live in an incredibly cruel, fucked up world that’s largely motored by these racist and misogynistic beauty standards. And so what would happen if we were able to admit that eating disorders might be one of the most rational coping mechanisms and responses to the messages you’ve received? They’re still incredibly harmful and help uphold a standard we shouldn’t believe in, but they’re based in a kind of logical response to the world.

I mean that’s similar to how I think of depression. It’s not necessarily rational, but it feels like an expected response given the world around us. 

Both eating disorders and depression—it’s useful to have diagnostic categories so that people can get medical care, but at the same time I think all of these things we’ve called a disease are sort of coping mechanisms. But if we admit they’re coping mechanisms, then we’d have to face how fucked up society is, which no one wants to do. It’s easier to individualize it.

It can feel weirdly empowering in a way to exert control on your own body when everything feels uncontrollable. But then you’re just doing the harm to yourself before the world can do it to you. You’re trying to remove yourself from the system in a kind of act of protest but doing that by upholding this ideal of thinness and also getting close to or actually dying. That urge to control your complicity in the system by attempting to remove yourself from it—it’s more of a short term solution. What we need to do is loosen our white knuckle grip on that control, because the only way we can actually alter society is if we’re not, like, lightheaded from starvation and are nourished enough to fight back.