“Helen Gremillion has presented an intellectual tour de force in this book. She has taken one of the most contentious and resistant expressions of women's and girls' subjectivity, anorexia, and provided us with a dynamic social and political framework by which to understand its perplexing operations.”—Elizabeth Grosz, author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism
“Many have sensed that anorexia makes visible in some way pathologies that are particular to liberal consumer society, but few have grasped its nature and significance as acutely as Helen Gremillion. Her account is as compelling as it is compassionate.”—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago
“This is a wonderful, beautifully written, intelligent account of anorexia nervosa—and I say that as someone in feminist theory, women’s studies, and medical discourse analysis who had hoped she would go to her grave without ever having to read another word about anorexia nervosa. This really is a fresh interpretation, and the ethnographic material is stunning, dramatic, and described with precision, sophistication, and telling novelistic detail.”—Paula A. Treichler, author of How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS
"Time after time in my conversations with hospital patients I was bewildered when they informed me 'I became more anorexic for the doctors!' and when their mothers told me 'They said I shouldn't love my daughter so much!' Feeding Anorexia helps us all to comprehend such unintended consequences of mainstream treatments. It should lead to the reconsideration of anorexia itself and its treatment by professionals such as myself."—David Epston, coauthor of Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia and Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends
