Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse

Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse
ISBN-10
9813362952
ISBN-13
9789813362956
Category
Social Science
Pages
293
Language
English
Published
2021-03-29
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Author
Lisa Hodge

Description

This book takes up the challenge of examining women’s understandings of eating disorders and child sexual abuse away from a framework focused on pathology. The central argument is that women’s distress is an enactment of their engagement with certain discourses and practices, rather than a reaction triggered by child sexual abuse. Guided by a contemporary feminist framework and Mikhail Bakhtin’s sociological linguistics, to substantiate the argument, women’s own poetry and drawings are used as evidence to develop, support and supplement research findings. The book establishes that an eating disorder is ‘an understandable response’ to sexual trauma and shifts the focus away from ‘a damaged personality’. Even more importantly, it demonstrates that women with eating disorders are using their bodies as a form of resistance to express silenced traumas that remain in the silenced female body. This is an active way of making sense of experiences of child sexual abuse.

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