Through a theoretical and discursive text analysis, medical protocols for the inpatient treatment of anorexia nervosa are exposed as part of a disciplinary regime that enforces women's embodied conformity to normative femininity. Although anorectic practices are read as a threat to the patriarchal social apparatus because they represent women's autonomous manipulation of their bodies, medical protocols are read as a means of returning the female body to masculinist control. From a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, treatment mechanisms of surveillance and routinization function as a medical panopticon constructed to re/form the anorexic woman. Her return to the broader social panopticon is achieved only through her disciplined conformity, whereas her “recidivism” is deemed an individual failure. Medicine's collusion with the subjectifying force of normative femininity is thus laid bare: For her failure to conform to the punitive identity of “woman,” the anorexic individual becomes a patient/prisoner of the medical panopticon.

The pro-anorexia movement (which advocates eating disordered practices as a legitimate lifestyle and identity choice over the internet) has provoked intense public furor since it emerged in the late 1990s. This concern hinges on the status of anorexia as a disease, situating pro-anorexic discourse as not only diseased but dangerous. A critical feminist and Foucauldian reading of this material analyzes the complex negotiations of medical surveillance undertaken by participants in the movement. Disrupting medical knowledge and usurping the medical gaze, participants produce a virtual clinical space that elides medical authority over anorexia and individual anorexic bodies. By intervening in the pattern of medical gaze-diagnosis-treatment in order to teach individuals how to perform a 'normal' body, pro-anorexic discourse exposes both the instability of diagnostic criteria and the limits of medical surveillance.

No abstract