The Rhetoricity of Fat Stigma: Mental Disability, Pain, and Anorexia Nervosa

ABSTRACT

Scholars in disability studies have recently sought to account for fatness, claiming an inseparable link between disability and fat scholarship. Interrogating the stigmas of fatness as a sign of bad character or lack of discipline, rhetoricians have advanced this thinking, illustrating how to be fat is to be rhetorically disabled. Contributing to these efforts, this essay argues that eating disorders, too, are often framed through deficit thinking, positioned as antithetical to mental fitness—a disparaging view echoed prominently by Hilde Bruch. Challenging normative perspectives of rhetoric centered in her theories, I analyze Bruch’s The Golden Cage, tracing descriptions of anorexia and pain through a feminist materialist lens, ultimately revealing how the rhetoricity of fat stigma can be read not only as a product of cultural, patriarchal norms but also as a complex, lived, felt experience of mental disability, expanding theories of rhetoric to the material intersection of gender and embodiment.

KEYWORDS:

• The bodymind
• eating disorders
• fatness
• feminist disability studies
• Hilde Bruch

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Elisabeth Miller, Elisa Findlay, Amy Vidali, Jacqueline Rhodes, and the two anonymous reviewers for their generative and generous feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Bruch’s research participated in constructing anorexia as a “woman’s disease,” associating eating disorders largely with privileged white women and girls, which led to the continued lack of diagnosis and treatment for men and people of color, in particular, because of this perceptual frame. For a critique of race regarding Bruch’s text, see Brumberg and Jensen. We know today that people who identify with a variety of dis/abilities, ages, races, gender expressions, and class backgrounds experience eating disorders; however, disparities still exist between diagnosis and treatment. For more on these disparities, see “Get Informed.”

² I follow Margaret Price in using mental disability as an umbrella term that accounts for cognitive, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities, brain injury, trauma, a/Autism, m/Madness, and mental illness (Mad at School). In treating eating disorders as mental disability, I recognize the multifaceted experiences that may influence one’s condition.

³ This legacy of ignoring materiality – particularly with regard to bodily difference – holds canonical roots, see Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric.

⁴ How I theorize the material effects of pain as a rhetoricity is informed by Shannon Walters, who considers touch a kind of “potential rhetoric for valuing a wider range of bodies” (41). Though Walters attends to body and skin as hopeful sites for change, she also acknowledges the complications of “abuse, violence, pain, and force,” complications I seek to take up in this essay more critically (200).

⁵ Many thanks to Amy Vidali for pointing me in the direction of fat studies.

⁶ For more on the history of speakers who don’t identify as cis men in rhetoric, see Chávez; Glenn.

⁷ For a history of anorexia that recognizes this diagnosis but also traces anorexia back to the sixteenth century, see Brumberg.

⁸ Today, the DSM-5 identifies nine categories of eating disorders, anorexia nervosa (forced starvation) and bulimia nervosa (binging and purging) being two of the most common (American Psychiatric Association).

⁹ I do not mean to suggest that anorexia is an uncomplicated phenomenon. The struggle to starve can certainly be frustrating, and my own experiences as a straight, white, and cis woman long witness to body image issues attest to this frustration. My point, however, is to underscore how popular and mainstream discourses on eating disorders following from Bruch negate what it feels like to have an eating disorder – the sensations people experience in their bodies from one day to the next – and instead portray the disorder as a failure of control over the mind. Rather than dismissing the frustration—and, thus, reading the disorder only as a mental deficiency—this essay encourages us to dwell with it when deciphering the limits of where rhetoric lies.

¹⁰ In suggesting this point, I recognize that definitions of eating disorders are most certainly flawed because they have historically been based on—although not limited to—weight categories that end up preventing some patients from receiving diagnosis and treatment if not considered “thin” enough.