Book Review
The Social Construction of Anorexia Nervosa
Julie Hepworth
ISBN: 0-76195-30-9; 1999; 146 pages; Sage Publications;
Kay Price
Senior Lecturer, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of South Australia, Adelaide SA
There are many benefits for people to take a topic that has received an amount of exposure and to (re)-present this topic to readers. Anorexia Nervosa has been the topic of so many texts and this new text by Julie Hepworth continues to add to the conversation about 'anorexia nervosa'. The book, states Hepworth, is a challenge to the dominant conceptualisation of anorexia nervosa as a psychopathology. Hepworth examines how understandings of anorexia nervosa have been produced, presenting a view as to how she has come to understand how anorexia nervosa has become an object of medical science.
While I recognise that this was not a book about describing postmodern and poststructural thinking, a concern I have is the lack of attention allocated to what is meant by postmodern and poststructural analyses. Hepworth makes many assumptions and given the lack of troubling these, Hepworth does not make the point strongly enough that the book is Hepworth's interpretation of postmodern and poststructural analyses - and in turn anorexia nervosa. There is no one poststructural perspective and Foucault allowed his work to be published for others to interpret. Hepworth is not presenting Foucault, she is presenting her interpretation of his work.
After reading the book, I was left with a 'So What!' response. It is important to understand how dominant approaches contribute to the maintenance of dominant discourses, but not from the perspective of only arguing this, or to suggest replacing one approach with another. That is, problematising taken-for-granted assumptions, or how assumptions have come to be accepted as a given, allows exploration of ways in which discourse enables and constrains what is spoken, written and thought about anorexia nervosa to open up possibilities for change. While it may not have been Hepworth's intent to add more than a challenge to how anorexia nervosa has been constructed, it is my view that an analysis, like that offered by Hepworth, also be positioned to offer to readers why so such analyses are useful. That is, to offer possible ways of thinking that leads to understanding what may happen if a person is complicit to dominant views (there may be advantages for the person to be complicit) and also where resistance may be appropriate and why.
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