Public health messages emphasizing 'healthy weight' link good health to a narrow range of body weights and stress energy regulation to achieve this. We examined whether women who practise bulimia deploy notions of 'healthy weight' in their talk about body management activities. Analysis is based on interviews with 15 women who practise bulimia and on material collected from cultural locations containing 'health promotion' advice. Poststructuralist discourse analysis revealed that slenderness was constituted as healthy in both sites and that the careful regulation of energy intake and output was similarly reified as a healthy practice. We conclude that a discourse of 'healthy weight' cannot be unhinged from a cultural imperative of slenderness for women, and that paradoxically 'health' practices provide a rationality that supports the practices of binge eating and compensating.

This book showcases a selection of current work and debates on weight and body management practices that are being produced from the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Weight issues have become central to Western understandings of health and identity, but analyses of weight and body management have often failed to contextualise weight related issues. This timely book addresses this gap by examining three key areas, namely, representation, identities, and practice, to explore and interrogate how body and weight management, subjectivities, experiences, and practices are constituted within and by the normative discourses of contemporary western culture. Downloads per month over past year Loading... Critical bodies: Representations, identities and practices of weight and body management Research and enterprise Login Related links Related links Information Services

Using a feminist discursive analytic approach this article investigates descriptions of anorexia and bulimia for the purposes of deconstructing some of the hierarchies implicit in them. Data includes interview accounts of women who practise bulimia and of health professionals, and items from popular culture and psychological literature. Analysis demonstrates how a binary logic and discourses of femininity are involved in the inscription of value to the category of, and practices associated with, anorexia. The practices and category of bulimia are therefore often constituted as the eating disordered ‘other’ to anorexia. Potential implications for women who practise bulimia are examined, as is the destabilizing potential of other ways of describing eating disorders.

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