Tracing a matrix of gender: An analysis of the feminine in hospital-based treatment for eating disorders

Malson, Helen; Ryan, Victoria

Abstract

Numerous studies have elucidated how a multiplicity of contemporary western cultural ideas and values that constitute 'normal' femininity are enmeshed in and central to the discursive production and regulation of girls' and women's 'eating disordered' subjectivities, bodies and body management practices. In this article, we seek to build on that work by exploring how discursive constructions of 'the feminine' are articulated in nurses' accounts of nursing in-patients diagnosed with 'eating disorders'. We have used a feminist post-structuralist, discourse analytic, interview-based methodology to explore how gender and gender power-relations are articulated not only in constructions of 'eating disorders' and of those diagnosed as 'eating disordered', but also in constructions of nurses and their relationships with (and to) patients. Our analysis illustrates how 'the feminine' persistently appears and reappears as a multiplicity of binarized gendered subject positions that constitute, delimit and regulate 'pathology', patients and nurses, suturing nurses and patients into a matrix of dichotomously structured femininities and a complex circulation of gender power-relations. © 2008 SAGE.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2008
• Journal: Feminism and Psychology
• Print ISSN: 0959-3535
• Electronic ISSN: 1461-7161
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 112-132
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353507084955
• Keywords: anorexia, bulimia, nursing, patients, femininity, discourse, body image
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1020157
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959353507084955