‘My anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube

The phenomenon of pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emerge – whether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – and such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of ‘My anorexia story’ which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity within the digital media landscape, with particular attention paid to the ways in which such practices compare, speak back to, or challenge the existing representational discourses of ‘dominant’ media and wider relations of social power. In this regard, this article explores questions of agency in gendered self-representation, examining what kinds of self-narratives the girls are producing about anorexia. In doing so, it examines how the stories seek to ‘author’ and regulate the meanings of the anorexic body; how these constructions intersect with dominant constructions of anorexia (such as those offered by medical discourse and the media); as well as the implications of the aesthetic strategies they employ. In considering how the narratives visualize, display and ‘expose’ the anorexic body, I draw upon a growing area of work which examines the selfie in relation discourses of surveillance, visibility and selfhood.     

Drug War Politics: Governing Culture Through Prohibition,Intoxicants as Customary Practice and the Challenge of Drug Normalisation

This article on the American administration’s war on drugs policy uses an interdisciplinary approach to assess the assumptions of drug prohibition. It applies a historical and contemporary analysis to the issue of drugs in society. It will explore new ways of thinking about drug war politics, aiming to address drugs as a source of political state repression. American foreign policy has sought to use the war on drugs to reduce human suffering; but instead, the age of prohibition has brought financial opportunities for criminal syndicates and clandestine political operations and causes. I will seek to show that prohibition faces serious challenges as a result of changes in contemporary culture and communication. I will argue that prohibition has been concerned with more than drug control and through drug war policy, it has wider ambitions to govern culture through prohibition. The paper explores the growth of drug normalisation and questions whether drugs can be understood as a customary practice across social groups in different communities and asks to what extent the United Nations policy of ‘cultural sensitivity’ can fit alongside an aggressive war on drugs policy.     

We Don't Need Your Help,But Will You Please Fix Our Children

A Bowen Family Systems therapist employs concepts of triangles and the family projection process to view a child's symptoms as embedded in the broader family patterns. This article will examine the dynamics of two family therapy cases where parents anxiously asked for their children's symptoms to be fixed. These cases will be used to explore the common presentation in child and adolescent mental health, where the parents are concerned for their children but are also keen not to open their own ‘can of worms’. The presenting problem in the first case was violent hostility between adolescent sisters and in the second case was an adolescent's anorexia. Drawing on client feedback, I reflect on the therapy process behind the divergent outcomes. In case one, the parents were willing to address their own troubled relationship and family of origin, while in case two, the parents discontinued therapy when family of origin dynamics began to be explored. The article suggests how the therapist can evoke parents' curiosity about their role in anxious family patterns, without them feeling blamed.     

The anorexic body: Reading disorders

ABSTRACT

This article examines the feminist interpretation of self-starvation or anorexia nervosa as a pathology brought about by women's consumption of media images of thin femininity. The anorexic subject is presented as a synecdoche for the alienated female body in general; female corporeality is damaged by the consumption of phallocentric representations. This negative view of women's uncritical ‘consumption’ of media texts can be connected to nineteenth-century discussions of the causes of hysteria, revealing a similar pathologization of women's reading practices. An alternative framework for conceptualizing eating disorders is outined. First, closer attention to the biomedical identity construct of anorexia nervosa reveals it to be contested by the very subjects it names. Second, a consideration of the continuum between the disordered practices of self-starvation and weight-loss regimens more generally suggests that both are informed by the biomedical discourse of metabolism, as a framework which inscribes the body as a calculable source of energy. The practices of anorexia nervosa are thus situated within a genealogy of weight-loss regimens which in turn produce narratives about the female body.     

Social and family responsibility or self-interest?

Mothers’ increasing labour market participation is posed as a key aspect of a growing trend towards individualization — both for ill and for good. In ‘for ill’ versions, mothers’ employment is regarded as undermining commitment to family relationships and leading to a loss of community. In ‘for good’ versions, family and community relationships become contingent upon values of equality and respect. ‘Preference theory’ modifies the individualization thesis, with a posited distinction between mothers in full-time employment with ‘work-centred’ identities and those with part-time work who want ‘adaptive’ or ‘home-centred’ identities. This paper examines such issues, drawing on qualitative case study research on mothers employed full and part time in a hospital and an accountancy firm in the UK. It considers how the variable work ethos of organizations, and the ways mothers engage with these, can interact with their engagement in family and community relationships. In particular, it suggests that employment can be as much about social obligation in a local community, and commitment and obligations to family, as about individualized self-provision and options.     

READING THE FUTURE

This essay asks how cultural studies practitioners can begin to found a critical practice that responds to the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Using Theodor Adorno' concept of ‘semi-erudition’, as developed in his analysis of horoscope readers in ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, together with Homi Bhabha' arguments about the links between racial stereotyping and fetishism, it is argued that those working in the discipline of cultural studies must respond to the multi-layered address of the official discourse regarding the ‘war on terrorism’ without becoming complacent about our own position vis-à-vis this discourse. The author connects this argument with a reading of Herman Melville' novella Benito Cereno to discuss the problem of American ‘innocence’ in this context. The concluding question is how, in the face of the current crisis, to begin to practice a truly responsive ‘criticism’, in the full sense of the term, one able to provide a different reading of the present and in turn affect the future.     

The Centrality of the ‘Family Dispute Resolution’ Process to the Separating Family,the Community and the Administration of Justice

The International Convention on the Rights of the Child sees family as the fundamental unit of society and aims to ensure that children grow up in ‘an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.’ Incorporated as an object of the Family Law Act 1975, the Convention guides the outcomes and informs the way that the Family Law Act should be interpreted and applied. Wherever possible, adherence to the Convention requires not litigation, adversarial contest, and determinative processes, but facilitative dispute management and dispute resolution processes. This is because ‘happiness, love and understanding’ can only be provided by parents and by families themselves – not by a court. In this address I examine the extent to which the family law system supports facilitative processes in general and family dispute resolution (FDR) in particular. I consider the tensions between legal processes and self‐determination and outline a series of benefits that derive from the default use of FDR processes.     

‘Shoot with your pen’: Isaac William(s) Wauchope’s Ingcamango Ebunzimeni and the power of speaking obscurely in public

This article explores Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, a collection of poems published in the latter months of 1912 by the African intellectual and missionary Isaac William(s) Wauchope (1852–1917). Wauchope is most prominently known for having written a poem that, among other things, incites his peers to ‘take paper and ink’ and ‘[s]hoot with your pen’. Ingcamango Ebunzimeni is a peculiar moment in the life and writing of Wauchope. In a remarkable series of events, Wauchope served a two‐year prison sentence in Tokai between 1910 and 1912. In the argument that follows, I raise a number of issues regarding the circumstances leading to the writing and publication of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Taking as a point of departure Wauchope’s seeming reluctance to explicitly engage his feelings about his imprisonment, I suggest that speaking ‘obscurely’ within a public context allows Wauchope to make utterances that begin to contest, in very complex ways, the fall from grace occasioned by his imprisonment. Wauchope’s poems address themselves to a context where the recent events of his life give rise to dire tensions between the dominant colonial version of his life story that holds him to be a ‘masquerading minister’ and its resistive corollary which seeks to redeem him as the unwilling victim of an unremorseful social order that, having generated a class of Christianised Africans as an example of civilisation, casts them down as a symptomatic failure of the very same process. Indeed, it is in addressing himself to both spheres of meaning simultaneously that Wauchope defines the complexity of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni.     

Suicidal Ideation in the Palliative Care Patient: Considerations for Health Care Practice

In the present study, I outline how four social workers, with experience in working with women who self-starve, commonly known as anorexia nervosa, conceptualise this phenomenon. I conducted single, in-depth interviews with each worker and feminist discourse analysis was chosen as the method of text interpretation. Alternative (non-psychiatric) ways of understanding women's self-starvation were explicitly privileged. Hence, the alternative discourses of feminist and poststructural theories were used to design the research and analyse the data. The literature review outlines the historical ‘discovery’ of ‘anorexia nervosa’ as a discrete illness category. Contemporary and dominant ‘pathological’ perspectives and marginalised ‘cultural’ perspectives are presented. Three dominant themes emerged from the interviews. They were ‘control and perfection’, ‘femininity’ and ‘self-destruction/self-preservation’. These themes are presented, as are their critical implications for social work.     

Diffusion of Variegated Neoliberalization processes in Euro-Mediterranean policies: a strategic relational approach

ABSTRACT

Recent contributions to the study of neoliberalism have made considerable advances in transcending the dichotomy between understandings of the concept either as an ‘ideology’ or as a monolithic ‘structure’. In particular, the Variegated Neoliberalization (VNLT) approach has proposed an understanding of neoliberalism that relies on a path-dependent moment (i.e. the ‘uneven development of neoliberalization’) which is then followed by a path-shaping moment (i.e. the ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’). Such a perspective allows us to understand both systemic and contingent tendencies in neoliberalization processes across different geographies, transcending the socially constructed North–South divide. However, the VNLT approach has encountered a number of critiques, particularly in relation to its treatment of agency. In order to transcend these critiques and propose a more nuanced understanding of ways agents reflexively and recursively interpret and deepen – or refrain from deepening – neoliberal norms, I turn to the Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA) proposed by [Jessop, B. (2001). Institutional re(turns) and the strategic – relational approach. Environment and Planning A, 33(7), 1213–1235]. Through the SRA, it becomes possible to pinpoint both instances of ‘structured coherence’ and ‘patterned incoherence’ resulting from agential reflexivity in different contexts of neoliberalization. I will therefore turn to cases where these two patterns can be observed in the context of Euro-Mediterranean policies – that is, Morocco’s ‘structured coherence’ due to its internalized and deepening neoliberalization, and Egypt’s ‘patterned incoherence’ as a result of its still uneven development of neoliberalization.     

Thinking About the Emotional Interaction of Therapist and Family

The emotional interaction of therapist and family has been difficult to explore within the field of systemic family therapy. This paper looks at ways of thinking about this process. As a starting point, I take some feelings I had with three families in the course of therapy. These are used to illustrate some concepts from analytic therapy which address the emotional interaction of therapist and family. The kind of theoretical space and guidance offered within systemic family therapy is then explored, and it seems that the Milan frame gives some space for thinking about the process but offers little guidance as to exactly how this might be done. This is a paper about practice, though it's primarily a theoretical discussion. There is no aim of establishing a ‘correct’ way of understanding the emotional interaction of therapist and family.     

‘Family ideology’: identification and exploration

The issue of ‘family ideology’ has been systematically ignored by a majority of ‘family¹ scholars whilst it has been taken for granted by a minority. The following study arises from the author's attempts to explore the issue of alternative theoretical approaches to the analysis of family life’.² Increasing numbers of contemporary researchers concur in recognising the diversity of ‘family forms’ and the inappropriateness of speaking of ‘The Family’.³ Despite these recognitions many researchers find themselves re-adopting the term ‘The Family’ in their discussions and especially in the titles of their work. For example. Segal clearly recognises that the ‘traditional family model’ no longer reflects the reality of our lives (1983, 11) and yet the title of her book is What is to he done about THE FAMILY? (emphasis added). One reason for the re-importation of the idea of ‘The Family’ may be found in the rather limited nature of previous conceptualisations of ‘family ideology’. With the exception of Barrett (1980), recognitions of ‘family ideology’ tend to be conceptualised in terms of sets of partisan beliefs supporting a particular ‘family form’. Thus the concept of ‘The Family’ is rarely regarded as being problematic in itself, rather attention is paid to the presumed virtues or deficiencies of the particular form of ‘The Family’ which is assumed to be prevalent. Notwithstanding the recognition of ‘family diversity’ or the inappropriateness of the term ‘The Family’, nearly all discussion becomes a straightforward attack upon, or defence of. ‘The Family’.⁴ Only very rarely does analysis avoid this trap and question whether ‘The Family’ really exists to be attacked or defended; thus Collier et al. have asked ‘Is there a Family?’ (1982) and the present author has asked ‘Do we really know what “The Family” is?’(Bernardes, 1948a). The objective here is to identify and explore a specific conceptualisation of ‘family ideology’. The aim is to avoid engaging in attacks upon, or defences of, ‘The Family’ but rather to address the ideological context of such debates themselves, especially in respect of the assumed existence of ‘The Family’. It is hoped that this approach will stimulate a much more critical examination of ‘family ideology’ and the concept of ‘The Family’. More generally, the attempt to conceptualise ‘family ideology’ in this much broader sense is seen as a pre-requisite for the development of an alternative theoretical approach to the analysis of ‘family life’.     

Un-imagining the local/future: cinematic engagement with the absence of hope

ABSTRACT

With reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong’s uncertain fate come 2047, I ask how one un-imagines the cultural future of inhabiting the locality. As people take prompts from the present predicament to cope with real possibilities about the future, they realize that a strong embodiment of local consciousness permeates the sociocultural space. I discuss how such engagement takes place through cinematic experience, and examine tactics of the spectator’s critique centring around the erosion of hope at the core of everyday, intellectual and affective imagination. I trace the ways in which postcolonial subjects engage with hope and with the shock of hopelessness in a lived social imaginary. Examining in detail three differently representative recent films, namely, The Midnight After (2014. Dir. Fruit Chan, The Midnight After Film and One Ninety Films), Overheard 3 (2014. Dir. Alex Mak and Felix Chong, Sil-Metropole, Bona Film and Pop Movies) and Ten Years (2015. Dir. K. L. Ng (‘Local Egg’, Boon-deh dan), J. Au (‘Dialect’, Fong-yin), K. Chow (‘Self-Immolator’, Jee-fun jeh), F. P. Wong (‘Season of the End’, Dong sim), and Z. Kwok (‘Extras’, Fau gua), Ten Years Studio), I depict the modes in popular imagination that invoke people’s engagement with the ‘local’, albeit in its affective state. Accordingly, in the context of ‘externalized’ social realities, I identify three interlocking modes of cultural engagement, which I characterize as figurative, performative and prefigurative, respectively. In their ‘future’ imaginary, I look for ordinary people’s ways to face the absurdity of the status quo and the performativity of local struggles with the self.     

Conjuring up traditions: atmospheres,eras and family Christmases

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and ‘detraditionalization’, sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in people's lives. Based on a qualitative study of ‘Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives’, this article explores people's experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multi‐dimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as ‘traditions’, people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters – sometimes quite profoundly – in people's lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time – past, present and anticipated for descendant generations – into packages of generalized ‘time out of time’, characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras – more than broad or macro understandings of ‘tradition’ – are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are ‘indexed’ in and through time.     

‘Going to Brazil’: transnational and corporeal movements of a Canadian‐Brazilian martial arts community

In this article I use a case study of capoeira (an Afro‐Brazilian martial art/dance/game) in Canada to bring together sport and transnationality literatures. I show that understandings of transnationality can be extended through both investigating people born and raised in the North, since they play an important role in creating transnational spaces, and attending to the corporeal means that people deploy to connect to a homeland or ‘travel’ to a foreign country. Through adopting a particular racialized/ national style of movement, those who ‘stay put’ in the North can ‘move’ across ethnic boundaries, if not geopolitical borders. Real (international), imagined (virtual and emotional), and corporeal (embodied) ‘travel’ to Brazil are key experiences of the senior capoeirista (capoeira devotee). Sporting activities provide an exceptional window onto transnationality studies, given that ways of moving are fundamental to social, cultural and national identities.     

Australian Family Therapy: Have We Lived Up To Our Mission Statement?

In 1983 the Fourth Australian Family Therapy Conference had the theme ‘Merging the Streams — Integrating Trends in Family Therapy’. In his keynote address Brian Stagoll outlined concerns regarding the nature of family therapy as it was then developing in Australia. This article revisits some of these themes to see where we have come from, where we are heading and which topics continue to be ignored. Evidence is drawn from articles that stood out for me in the Australian Journal of Family Therapy (later the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy) and selected relevant papers from the 1983 conference itself. Finally, I speculate upon possible reasons for the absence of discussion on certain issues, most strikingly: systemic influences upon indigenous Australians, farm families, working with children in families, certain aspects of gender, the systemic implications of addiction; and environmental impacts on families now and for the future. The danger for family therapy is becoming stuck in a closed system that ignores the wider system.     

Love,Will and Becoming in Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Bakhtin

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the ideas of the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov and the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Compared mostly with regard to the Dostoevskian novel, these two authors prove to be connected by a more complex intellectual relationship, as the commentators of Bakhtin’s Collected Works have demonstrated. The present paper continues this broad-context discussion by revealing the principal difference between Ivanov’s and Bakhtin’s worldviews as it stems from the different orders of dependence of love and volition. The framework for comparison is provided by Max Scheler’s essay ‘Love and Cognition’. The primacy of the will causes constant becoming of the human subject in Ivanov’s poetic universe, mostly presented as self-surpassing. The primacy of love in Bakhtin’s philosophy of the deed results in the ‘becoming’ of the other, primarily in the form of the growing value of the beloved, rather than in the form of his or her internal existential transformation.     

Family Matters: (e)migration, familial networks and Irish women in Britain

The recent increase in transnational migration among women has lead to a reappraisal of theoretical explanations of migratory movement ( Castles and Miller, 2003 ; Fortier, 2000 ; Zulauf, 2001 ). This paper reviews a number of theoretical explanations of transnational migration and then applies these theories to a qualitative study of women who migrated from Ireland to Britain in the 1930s. I explore the women's reasons for leaving Ireland and their experiences as young economic migrants in Britain in the inter‐war years. Women have made up the majority of Irish migrants to Britain for much of the twentieth century yet the dominant stereotype of the Irish migrant has been the Mick or Paddy image ( Walter, 2001 ). Through an analysis of these twelve women's narratives of migration, I explore themes such as household strategies and familial networks. I am interested in the interwoven explanations of migration as both a form of escape ( O’Carroll, 1990 ) and a rational family strategy and, hence, the ways in which women's decision to migrate can be seen as a combination of both active agency and family obligation. Drawing on the work of Phizacklea (1999 ) as well as Walter (2001 ) and Gray (1996 , 1997 ), I will analyse the ways in which family connections may transcend migration and engage with the concept of ‘transnational family’ ( Chamberlain, 1995 ). In so doing, I raise questions about the complex nature of migration and the extent to which it could be described in terms of empowerment.     

Love is Not All You Need: A Revolutionary Approach to Parental Abuse

This case story is a composite of similar family situations where the parents were at risk of harm from their teenage children and commonly the father/step‐father has moved out of home leaving the mother to parent the children on her own. Several of these cases involved physical threats to the lives of the parents. These referrals occurred in a Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health Service and a Family Therapy NGO between 1985 and 2005. This approach is offered as a complement to the widely published ‘non‐violent resistance’ approach of Haim Omer and his colleagues. We hope it goes some way to address what Lavi‐Lavavi et al ( 2013 , Journal of Systemic Therapies, 32(4), 79–93). describe as ‘the mother's plight’:

The plight of the mother continues to present a major challenge… We are also seeking ways to allow the mother more breathing space, help her to disengage from abrasive conflicts, acknowledge her contribution and sacrifice, and provide her with vantage points that may help her recognize and enhance small improvements. Hopefully, these measures will enable women to evolve from unacknowledged victims to pillars of the family’ (p. 92).

     

Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children,Childhood and Temporality

Notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are intrinsic to childhood research. Whilst the ‘being’ child is seen as a social actor actively constructing ‘childhood’, the ‘becoming’ child is seen as an ‘adult in the making’, lacking competencies of the ‘adult’ that he or she will ‘become’. However, I argue that both approaches are in themselves problematic. Instead, theorising children as ‘being and becomings’ not only addresses the temporality of childhood that children themselves voice, but presents a conceptually realistic construction suitable to both childhood researchers and practitioners.