A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating ProblemsThe first of its kind, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep challenges the popular notion that eating problems occur only among white, well-to-do, heterosexual women. Becky W. Thompson shows us how race, class, sexuality, and nationality can shape women's eating problems. Based on in-depth life history interviews with African-American, Latina, and lesbian women, her book chronicles the effects of racism, poverty, sexism, acculturation, and sexual abuse on women's bodies and eating patterns. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep dispels popular stereotypes of anorexia and bulimia as symptoms of vanity and underscores the risks of mislabeling what is often a way of coping with society's own disorders. By featuring the creative ways in which women have changed their unwanted eating patterns and regained trust in their bodies and appetites, Thompson offers a message of hope and empowerment that applies across race, class, and sexual preference. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Culture Race Class and Sexuality | 27 |
3 Ashes Thrown up in the Air | 46 |
4 Hungry and Hurting | 69 |
5 A Thousand Hungers | 96 |
6 In the Mourning There Is Light | 107 |
Biographical Sketches | 129 |
Notes | 137 |
Index | 157 |
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A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems Becky W. Thompson No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
acculturation addiction Adrienne Rich adult African-American alcohol Anorexia Nervosa Antonia appetites began to binge bingeing and dieting black women Black Women's Health body bulimia bulimic child Child Sexual Abuse compulsive eating cope cultural daughter Dominican drug Eating Disorders eating patterns eating problems Elsa emotional abuse father feelings felt Feminist Therapy gender Gilda girls healing heterosexual Hispanic identify identity immigrant incest injustice Jackie Jewish Johnnetta Cole Joselyn Journal of Eating Julianna Latina lesbian lives Maria P. P. Root Martha memories mother Nicole Overeaters Anonymous pain parents physical abuse pounds psychic psychological Puerto Rican purging race racial racism rape remembers Rosalee Ruthie says sexual abuse social stop stress survivors of sexual talk thin tions told trauma twelve-step programs wanted white women woman Women and Therapy women I interviewed women of color women with eating women's eating York young
Popular passages
Page 11 - THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Page 19 - I know no woman virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves - for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.
Page 5 - In this age of feminist assertion men are drawn to women of childish body and mind because there is something less disturbing about the vulnerability and helplessness of a small child - and something truly disturbing about the body and mind of a mature woman.
Page 1 - In fact, eating problems begin as survival strategies — as sensible acts of self-preservation — in response to myriad injustices including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
Page 84 - My home life is not working. My old man is an alcoholic. My kid's got babies. Things are not well with me. And the one thing I know I can do when I come home is cook me a pot of food and sit down in front of the TV and eat it. And you can't take that away from me until you're ready to give me something in its place.
Page 18 - Please make me disappear." She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were...
Page 154 - Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge. Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 202. 38. See Lisa Belklin. "Bars to Equality of Sexes Seen as Eroding Slowly.
Page 144 - KEYS, J. Brozek, A. Henschel, O. Mickelsen, and HL Taylor, The Biology of Human Starvation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1950.
Page 17 - ... humanity. For in slavery her body is not only treated as animal body but is property, to be taken and used at will. Such a body is denied even the dignity accorded a wild animal; its status approaches that of mere matter, thing-hood