Other than obedient: Girls' constructions of doctors and treatment regimes for anorexia nervosa

This paper examines how teenage girls diagnosed with and being treated for anorexia nervosa in hospital construct their anorexia, their identity as patients, medical authority and their doctors. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 25 adolescent girls in two large, metropolitan hospitals in Australia. Using a discourse analytic approach informed by poststructural theory, we elucidate how girls perform as patients, contest the authoritative position of doctors and deploy popular, taken‐for‐granted discourses of femininity to resist treatment regimes and the construction of themselves by others as ‘anorexic’ and ‘sick’. Our analysis indicates that medical discourses in the hospital do not necessarily define or delimit girls' constructions of themselves, of anorexia, treatment or their relationships with doctors. The paper argues that understanding and validating girls' perspectives is essential in building and maintaining a therapeutic alliance in hospitals. We conclude by discussing how insights from poststructural analysis can assist in improving hospital practice. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Anorexic’ Adolescents: Negative and Positive Resistances in Narrative Therapy1

This article draws on notions of negative and positive resistances in exploring alternative understandings of ‘anorexia’, in a narrative therapy based approach for ‘anorexic’ adolescents. In doing so, it posits ‘anorexic’ lifestyles as forms of coping mechanisms against dominant social discourses. Narrative treatment is to facilitate a movement away from subjection of dominant social discourses, and should enable intentional movements towards ethical subjectivities. This means that adolescents should then find no need to embrace ‘coping’ mechanisms that lead to lifestyles of ‘anorexia’, and treatment can shift away from food, weight, and body image, to dealing with ‘problems in living’.     

Reproducing the Motherboard: The Invisible Labor of Discourses that Gender Digital Fields

Within the digital workforce, women are disappearing. While there are many factors that could be ‘blamed’ for this phenomenon, this article takes issue with the sexist and patriarchal discourses that are deployed within the digital workforce. In many ways, sexist discourses are taken for granted within the digital workplace; and in that way, the discourses themselves are rendered invisible through a lack of concerted uncovering of the ways that these sexist discourses produce—and reproduce—women as sexual objects and outsiders in this field of work. The sexist and patriarchal discourses I address in this article validate the gender binary even as there is gendered play. It is this ‘play’ that also makes counter-hegemonic discourse and discursive acts productive (and reproductive), as I argue toward the end of the paper. Schools are a place where counter-hegemonic discourses and acts can be nurtured and, hopefully, affect and counteract the disappearance of women in digital fields.     

‘Pre‐discursive’ racism

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre‐symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing ‘pre‐discursive’ forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti‐racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva's theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva's theory of abjection provides us with an account of a ‘pre‐discursive’ (that is, a bodily, affective, pre‐symbolic) racism, a form of racism that ‘comes before words’, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with ‘pre‐discursive’ processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Entropic Body: Primitive Anxieties and Secondary Skin Formation in Anorexia Nervosa

This paper develops a metapsychological view of anorexia nervosa, including not only its symptomatic presentation but also its etiology and characteristic psychic and relational styles. Because patients with anorexia are understood as not having internalized maternal comforting functions in the period of separation-individuation, they are unable to digest trauma experiences of infancy. I argue that the anorexic patient’s disturbed relationship with food reflects distortions in transitional object usage. Lacking the ability to contain intense anxieties about disintegration and falling apart, patients with anorexia must find other ways to hold themselves together. The fear of getting fat expressed by these patients is one way that this fear of disintegration is expressed. Furthermore, the almost addictive experience of emaciation holds the personality together. Elaborating this idea, I develop the notion of the entropic body, a particular version of the false body (Goldberg, 2004) employed by patients with anorexia nervosa in an attempt to compensate for absent maternal comforting functions. This body-state (Petrucelli, 2014), which develops against a background of profound early trauma, eschews hunger and dependence in favor of omnipotently controlled protection.     

National piety: Religious equality,freedom of religion and national identity in Finnish political discourse

This paper analyses the legislative discourse regarding a Members' Initiative to enact a law which was discussed in the Finnish parliament in 2006 and which proposed changes to the constitution and several laws, the purpose of which was to balance the privileged position that the Lutheran Church of Finland enjoys. The author uses critical discourse analysis to examine four different discourses emerging from the debate: inequality of religions in the eyes of the law; the ‘completeness’ of the freedom of religion in Finland; the justified hegemony of the ‘folk church’; and the church as a value base in a pluralising world. He argues that the discursive struggle between the different positions is a struggle between ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ definitions of freedom of religion and that the discussion represents a case of ‘national piety’, a conflation of discourses of religious equality, freedom of religion and national identity that reproduces the status quo.     

‘It's like there are two people in my head’: A phenomenological exploration of anorexia nervosa and its relationship to the self

This study explores the lived experience of anorexia nervosa from the perspective of those who use pro-recovery websites for eating disorders. Fourteen people participated in an online focus group or an e-interview. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Participants described their disorder as a functional tool for avoiding and coping with negative emotions, changing their identity and obtaining control. A central theme was the experience of an ‘anorexic voice’ with both demonic and friendly qualities. This voice felt like an external entity that criticised individuals and sometimes dominated their sense of self, particularly as anorexia nervosa got worse. Applying dialogical theory suggests a new model of anorexia nervosa, where the anorexic voice is a self-critical position, which disagrees with and attempts to dominate the more rational self. It is suggested that to move on from anorexia nervosa, the individual needs to address his/her anorexic voice and develop a new dominant position that accepts and values his/her sense of self.     

‘You've got to grow up when you've got a kid’: Marginalized young women's accounts of motherhood

Teenage motherhood has been a source of considerable debate in policy and media circles in recent years. This paper explores the meanings of teenage motherhood for young women who were mothers before the age of 21, who were living in economically deprived areas of England and most of whom had been in residential or foster care. Qualitative interviews were carried out at several sites across England, with a total of 33 young women taking part in group interviews and one‐to‐one interviews. The accounts of the young women suggest that they talk about motherhood in three main ways: as ‘hardship and reward’, ‘growing up and responsibility’ and ‘doing things differently’. It is argued that these ways of talking about motherhood present a different picture of teenage motherhood from that of dominant discourses. Furthermore, the young women are active in negotiating and constructing their own identities as mothers, carers and women. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Femininity, Mental Weakness, and Difference: Male Students Account for Anorexia Nervosa in Men

The purpose of this study was to examine how men account for the diagnosis in men of anorexia nervosa (AN), a condition commonly associated with women. Male students participated in focus group discussions of topics related to AN. Discussions were tape-recorded with participants' consent, transcribed, and then analyzed using discourse analysis. The participants spontaneously constructed AN as a female-specific condition. When asked to account for AN in men, they distanced AN from hegemonic masculinities in ways that sustained both dominant masculine identities and gender-specific constructions of AN. These findings show how issues of health and gender are interlinked in everyday understandings of AN. Future researchers might usefully consider how the construction of gender-specific illness implicates wider notions of both feminine and masculine gender identities.     

Resisting anorexia/bulimia: Foucauldian perspectives in narrative therapy

Foucault's analysis of unseen power as it operates in discourses that construct 'practices of discipline' and 'technologies of the self' has been a central conceptual resource in the development of narrative therapy. Narrative therapists take the view that 'unseen' aspects of power work to construct both how a person understands their situation, and how their relation to 'the situation' they find themselves in has been constructed through the discursive resources available to them. If the consequences of the operation of these discursive resources can be brought into view, then new resources may be mobilised to resist the problems that have been created by the 'power' of the discursive resources that are available in the status quo of people's cultural milieu. Narrative therapists work to disentangle the person from the problem, against the grain of the common constructions available in the resources of Occidental cultures that work to identify the person as 'the problem'. This is demonstrated in the assistance they offer to people in finding ways to resist anorexia, by identifying anorexia as the problem, and not the person as anorexic. In this perspective, other apparent tactics of resistance—such as the tactic termed 'pro-ana'—are revealed as counterfeit, and ultimately supportive of the problem situation.     

The Integration of ‘Bottom‐up’ Approaches to the Analysis of Race Talk for the Future of Discourse Analytic Research

Current understandings of racism and race talk within discourse analytic traditions have largely focused on the discursive construction and perpetuation of dominance, prejudice, and racism within majority and privileged groups. Although minorities are often the objects of these studies, these research traditions have not extensively studied the language of race talk in minority groups. This article aims to integrate ‘bottom‐up’ approaches of minority and marginalized groups' discourses to discursive psychological and critical discourse analysis theory and research on race talk. The paper begins with a short review of the current discourse analytic frameworks utilized in the analysis of race talk. Next, the paper outlines several ‘bottom‐up’ research examples and concludes by offering several important insights. It is argued that the absence of minority discourses runs the danger of reproducing and reinforcing the very things discourse analysis aims to uncover and problematize. The main conclusion of this paper is that the insights from the ‘bottom‐up’ point to the necessity of broader theorizing around the discursive construction of race talk.     

Duty of Care,Safety, Normalisation and the Mental Capacity Act: A Discourse Analysis of Staff Arguments about Facilitating Choices for People with Learning Disabilities in UK Services

The benefits of having choice and control for people with learning disabilities 1 are well documented, and front‐line carers often make efforts ensuring that these are facilitated. However, despite this, government policy reports that disempowerment within learning disability services in the UK is a persistent problem. Using critical discursive psychology, 15 interviews with support workers about empowering people with learning disabilities were analysed. Interpretative repertoires about ‘duty of care’, ‘safety’ and ‘normalisation’ and discursive strategies involving ‘comparative evaluations’ were found, which opened speaker positions of granting or withholding choice, assuming responsibility for those in care and constructing service users as lacking capacity. These resources also allowed speakers to regulate the choices of service users and to normalise limited choice in ways that undermined taking up more empowering practices. The findings may explain the persistence of disempowerment within services by indicating how such discourses are deeply entrenched in service talk and are invoked to justify disempowering practices. This is discussed in view of the implications for empowerment and also current legislative frameworks such as the Mental Capacity Act. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Investigation of the Discourses Children Draw on Their Constructions of Gender

The mechanisms behind children's constructions of gender are examined in an attempt to identify the various narratives that children draw on. The ways in which these narratives are used in children's talk about gender are analyzed in order to provide a greater understanding of discursive resources available to children. The different types of discourse evident in children's discussion of gender are listed. The discursive contradictions in children's speech and discursive resistance to the construction of gender dichotomy are examined. It is concluded that the children in the sample drew on a wide variety of gender discourses, suggesting that they have a more developed understanding of gender issues than has been recognized previously. Finally, the paper considers the possible methods for deconstruction of dominant gender discourses.     

Recovering Identity from Anorexia Nervosa: Women's Constructions of Their Experiences of Recovery from Anorexia Nervosa Over 10 Years

There is little consensus about the meaning of recovery in anorexia nervosa with most studies focusing on researcher selected variables of weight gain and improvement in eating disorder symptomatology. There is also a paucity of research that focuses on how the experiencing person themselves define recovery and whether this term is useful to them to depict their journey of reclaiming their life and identity from anorexia nervosa. This article explores 21 Australian women's experiences of anorexia nervosa (AN) over 10 years and the ways they negotiated their identities in relation to the question of recovery. The research interviews sought to provide a context for these women to speak on their own terms, terms not confined to the medical discourse. The discursively constructed category of recovery was troublesome for the majority of these women, despite the researcher inadvertently taking up this category in lines of questioning, particularly in the earlier interviews. Most troubling for the women was the assumption that recovery erased their experiences with the expectation that they should return to a pre-illness state. On the other hand, speaking on their own terms—including the use of metaphor and (re)authoring their experiences as an identity journey—was significant in scaffolding the women toward narratives of reclaiming their lives and identities from AN and its effects. The women in this study refused to confine the terms of their speaking to a recovery discourse; instead, they honored the narratives of their experiences and histories as profound in their identity formation. The implications of this research are significant given that the majority of research and many treatments to date confine the terms of speaking to the “anorexia” discourse.