Re/Forming the Anorexic “Prisoner”: Inpatient Medical Treatment as the Return to Panoptic Femininity

Abstract

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.

Can Eating Disorders Become ‘Contagious’ in Group Therapy and Specialized Inpatient Care?

“…In a similar ethnographic study as a participant observer in an inpatient unit, Gremillion (2003) wondered ‘whether the (frequently reported) anorexic experiences of isolation and competitiveness are amplified in this treatment setting’ (p. 20) and she suggested that ‘the system itself could play into illness chronicity’ (p. 11). Bell (2006) goes even further by comparing the inpatient anorexic individual to a ‘prisoner of the medical panopticon’, continuously observed and brought under control by means of treatment protocols that perpetuate ‘the social disciplinary control over women's bodies via mainstream medicine’ (p. 283).…”

‘Here, we don't just trade goods, we also “sell” people's lives’: Sari‐sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance in a Philippine fishing community

“…Observing people from stores and narrating their everyday life provide the people in the community an avenue for a ritualistic ‘correcting’ of wrong and narrating ways to solidify the community's moral foundation. Furthermore, they thus come to police (albeit in protracted ways) their own behaviour and penalize their own perpetual failure (Bell, : 291).…”

Allowing harm because we care: Self-injury and harm minimisation

“…Continuous observation is by its nature highly intrusive, as a person is observed throughout the 24 h period and all activities are subject to the professional gaze. One is reminded of an interesting comparison with the work of Bell 38 who writes in relation to the inpatient treatment of eating disorders. She identified parallels between the protocols governing these interventions and the Foucaultian idea of panoptic disciplinary power.…”