Anorexia, Bulimia, and the Embodiment of Capitalist Consumer Culture
Authors: Weinreb Alice 
Published: March 2024

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa became major health concerns in the 1970s and 1980s, attracting particular attention from second-wave feminists because the conditions were perceived as women’s illnesses. Because these illnesses were thought to exclusively strike prosperous and educated women of the middle class, critics hypothesized that there was something particular to middle-class identity that made these girls and women distinctly vulnerable. Industrial capitalism was newly framed as a cause for the development of eating disorders. Historians traced the origins of anorexia to the Victorian era—the disease first appeared in the medical record in the 1870s—seeing it as a reaction to the pressures and struggles women faced in the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Although anorexia was itself an obscure diagnosis in the 19th century, late-20th-century literary critics and historians traced anorexic aesthetics and ideals in art and culture of the time, and industrial capitalism was thought to delineate a particular, and pathological, relationship between consumption and bourgeois women. Anorexia became a way to conceptualize the harms of capitalism on middle-class women and to articulate their lives as simultaneously prosperous and deeply oppressive, if not incapacitating.

The idea that early industrial capitalism primed middle-class women for eating disorders was revised by contemporary cultural critics who were struggling to understand why such unprecedented numbers of girls and young women were developing and being diagnosed with eating disorders during the 1970s and 1980s. This unprecedented and inexplicable epidemic implied that postwar consumer growth had specifically gendered harms. Thus, second-wave feminists, including historian Joan Brumberg, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, and philosopher Susan Bordo, analyzed anorexia and bulimia as a way to articulate the dangers posed by postwar consumer capitalism for girls and women. For them, consumer capitalism was perceived as a primary driver of anorexia and bulimia. The analysis hinged upon the paradoxical meaning of consumption in postwar capitalism, which was the cause of and symbolized by the deadly self-denial of the anorexic and the irrational gorging and purging of the bulimic. Eating disorders thus expressed the gendered and destructive impacts of late-modern capitalism on the female body, combining the demand for unbridled consumption and individual empowerment with expectations of female self-denial and physical smallness. These new ways of thinking about the relationship between economic systems and the health and appearance of individual bodies, particularly though not exclusively female bodies, had profound consequences that shape 21st-century conversations around obesity and the neoliberal market. These attempts to contextualize and historicize anorexia and bulimia by exploring their relationship to consumer capitalism not only made material the link between economic systems and women’s lives and bodies; they also suggested that affluence itself could be a source of sickness.