Altering the Social: An Ethnography of Disordered Eating Among Southern Italian Women

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the way that young women use food to reconfigure their social relationships within a context of cultural change. Based on 16 months of fieldwork in southern Italy, I describe the symbolic power of food within this social context to underscore how women continually negotiate their social relations and identities through their daily food practices. I argue that the refusal of food enables individuals to disconnect from others and alter social relations, while sustained practices of refusing to eat (i.e., anorexia) become vehicles of self-transformation and meaning-making. Through an in-depth analysis of women's disordered eating experiences, I show how disordered eating practices are rooted in tensions and conflicts embedded in social relations rather than in ideals of beauty or phobias about fat. The findings advocate considering disordered eating behaviors from a perspective that emphasizes an individual's social position and relatedness to others.