The smile of accomplishment: (dis)ordered eating in women’s gymnastics

This article challenges social narratives that assume that the abusive structures underlying women’s gymnastics, which historically manifested in waves of disordered eating, have been overcome. Mobilizing a psychoanalytic framework that brings Lacan into dialogue with Kristeva, the article argues that disordered eating remains systemically embedded in the sport. A Lacanian approach theorizes disordered eating not as primarily motivated by the ego-narcissistic drive to match an ideal image or meet imposed aesthetic standards, but as a response to anxiety arising from the body’s inherently fragmentary experience of itself. Attempting to overcome this helplessness, the anorexic chases a completed, perfected body image. For Lacan, this is doomed to fail because the subject can only emerge through the image’s incompletion, its stain. The addictive pursuit of eradicating this stain pushes the anorexic into the position of abjection. From a Kristevan perspective, by abjecting herself from what is considered normal, the anorexic’s disorder contributes to defining what is normal, to establishing social order. This situates her in a paradoxical position of simultaneous fascination and disgust. Structurally, the gymnast occupies the same position. As an aesthetic sport, women’s gymnastics requires athletes to perform visual perfection according to the FIG Code of Points. Scores are determined by deductions from a perfect starting score, which provides a means of defining an ideal image in its totality. This article draws a parallel between this scoring system and the mechanisms underlying disordered eating, showing how the psychosocial structures of a sport interact with the psychophysical structures of a symptom.