IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v62y2006i4p793-804.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Disciplining the feminine: The reproduction of gender contradictions in the mental health care of women with eating disorders

Author

Listed:
  • Moulding, Nicole

Abstract

This paper provides insights into the way gendered assumptions operate within health care interventions for women with eating disorders. A multidisciplinary sample of Australian health care workers were interviewed about their approaches to treatment, and discourse analysis was used to uncover the discursive dynamics and power relations characterising their accounts of intervention. The paper demonstrates a contradictory positioning of anorexic patients in relation to autonomy and control within the two common psychiatric interventions of bed rest intervention and psychotherapy. The paper argues that this is based on gendered assumptions about selfhood and femininity in eating disorders that are reproduced in the therapeutic relationship through the operation of a gendered parent-child dynamic, with the health care worker as father or mother, and the anorexic patient as daughter. One of the main effects of this is to re-inscribe rather than challenge the discursive 'double bind' of femininity that has been widely implicated by post-structural feminists in producing eating disorders in the first place. The paper also considers the widely acknowledged problem of resistance to treatment in anorexia as a function of controlling treatments, and discusses psychiatrists' perspectives on addressing this dilemma. Finally, the paper examines the potential of feminist-informed understandings of eating disorders for overcoming the gendered dilemmas inherent within the dominant psycho-medical treatment paradigm.

Suggested Citation

  • Moulding, Nicole, 2006. "Disciplining the feminine: The reproduction of gender contradictions in the mental health care of women with eating disorders," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(4), pages 793-804, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:62:y:2006:i:4:p:793-804
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(05)00355-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gaines, Atwood D., 1992. "From DSM-I to III-R; voices of self, mastery and the other: A cultural constructivist reading of U.S. psychiatric classification," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 3-24, July.
    2. Lester, Rebecca J., 1997. "The (dis)embodied self in anorexia nervosa," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 44(4), pages 479-489, February.
    3. Gremillion, Helen, 1992. "Psychiatry as social ordering: Anorexia nervosa, a paradigm," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 57-71, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lynlee Snell & Marie Crowe & Jenny Jordan, 2010. "Maintaining a therapeutic connection: nursing in an inpatient eating disorder unit," Journal of Clinical Nursing, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 19(3‐4), pages 351-358, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alean Al-Krenawi, 1999. "Explanations of Mental Health Symptoms By the Bedouin-Arabs of the Negev," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 45(1), pages 56-64, March.
    2. Judith Zur, 1996. "From PTSD to Voices in Context: From an "Experience-Far" to an "Experience-Near" Understanding of Responses to War and Atrocity Across Cultures," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 42(4), pages 305-317, December.
    3. Fried, Talia & Plotkin-Amrami, Galia, 2023. "Not all diagnoses are created equal: Mothers’ narratives of children, ADHD, and comorbid diagnoses," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 323(C).
    4. Musolino, Connie & Warin, Megan & Wade, Tracey & Gilchrist, Peter, 2015. "‘Healthy anorexia’: The complexity of care in disordered eating," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 18-25.
    5. Coker, Elizabeth M., 2005. "Selfhood and social distance: Toward a cultural understanding of psychiatric stigma in Egypt," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 61(5), pages 920-930, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:62:y:2006:i:4:p:793-804. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.