Starving and Hungry: Anorexia Nervosa and the Female Body Politic

Marxism’s tools were originally designed to chisel meaning out of the military industrial blocks of society. They were rarely rigorously applied to the intimate arena of private life. Because class was considered by many Marxists to be the determining essence of social understanding, Marxian tools could not easily be applied to areas such as gender, emotion, personal life, and race without rendering them secondary. However, the Marxian theory utilized in this book views class, gender, personal life, and race as each having a unique impact on people and society with no one of them more important than any other. Each particular process operates in its own ways. This approach permits us to combine Marxian understandings of class theory with feminist conceptions of gender, psychoanalytic ideas of psychology, social constructions of personal life, and new Marxian theories of race. All of these different understandings may be interpreted so as to complement each other and create unique windows of meaning within a non-essentialist methodology. The result is a kind of Marxism that considers class, race, gender, sociological, psychological, and an infinite variety of other processes as distinct strands in a complex tapestry, each transforming and transformed by all the other strands in the tapestry.