Chilling Out with My Abnormal Psych Professor

So I'm currently taking an abnormal psychology class with Amy Nereen at Haverford College, and upon finding out that her clinical specialty lies in working with eating-disordered individuals, I immediately set up an appointment with her to chat about this thesis. I asked her one main question - how do eating disordered individuals narrate themselves (if there is any consistency in these narrations, that is)? She replied that using the third person collective "we" or "us" (as Hornbacher does periodically throughout her memoir) implies that an eating disorder is ingrained. "You" do not understand "us." "I" am part of a "we" that validates these behaviors, and because "you" are outside, you cannot see the value of this "we."

And the "you?" According to Professor Nereen, using "you" to narrate the story of an eating disorder implies an initial reaching out as well as the fact that the eating-disordered person believes that this illness can befall anyone. "You" means that no one is immune to contracting an eating disorder (perhaps because of social predispositions), and "you" also means that "I'm" trying to get "you" to understand my point of view. I'm allowing "you" to empathize. I'm inviting "you" into my experience.

Finally, the "I." Dr. Nereen states that the "I" is symbolic of the sufferer taking accountability for her actions and recovery. She is no longer blaming other people, society, etc. for keeping her ill. She realizes that recovery is a decision, and that her illness may be stopped by her decision to get well - no matter what other people, society, etc. say.

So what does all this mean for Hornbacher? I'm wondering if I can look at Hornbacher's memoir through the lenses of recovery - nonlinear, messy recovery. What does she own? What does she put off onto society? And where does she allow her audience to empathize?

Garland-Thompson, Cont'd

Time to get back on track with part 2 of the post that I wrote last week...

At one point in the article, Garland-Thompson explores what it means when a woman is "too much." Historically, she has been labeled "hysterical." Always, she is labeled un-masculine and, by extension, inappropriate and unmanageable. In Hornbacher's memoir, she touches on the idea that her eating disorder was a way of avoiding this sense of being "too much." Hornbacher writes that as a child she was sturdy, loud, explorative, and, for my purposes, masculine. And since we can't have imperfect men (Garland-Thompson writes that historically the female body has been regarded as a flawed version of the male body), a female body performing a male gender role must obviously be quieted - its "too much-ness" brought back to a degree that a patriarchal society can swallow (pun intended).

What better way to erase female excess than an eating disorder? As Hornbacher shed pounds, she shed sturdiness, emotion, voice, sanity. Through the lens provided by Garland-Thompson, Hornbacher embodied the idea of femininity as disability - it was only when she was fifty-two pounds that she subjectively felt accepted, and it was only when she lost any grasp of an "I" (even in the context of a "you" or "we," as the pages in which she is most critically ill are written in fragmented sentences, many of which lack any definitive subject) that she understood herself to be a socially appropriate woman.

On the flip side of GT's meditation on female excess is her commentary on female "not enough-ness." When a woman erases her "excess" (which is perceived to be disabling and which is then treated as such), she gets "not enough-ness," another disabling condition in which a woman is weak, incapable, and dependent. This state of being "not enough" mirrors Hornbacher's illness at its height - when she is hospitalized time upon time, when she leaves college due to her disorder, when she moves back in with her parents after several lengths of time away. As excess is erased, "not enough" sets in, creating a creature incapable of finding social acceptance because she cannot advocate for herself. So it seems that the remedy to excess - erasure - becomes a disability in itself, and that GT's idea that the socially constructed female condition ultimately results in feminine disability finds ground.

Without saying as much, GT implies that a woman's best communication is not through her words, but through her body. GT writes that both women and the disabled are objects of gaze. Thus as objects of gaze, performance becomes their medium. Hornbacher's weight loss screams, "Do you accept me?!" and  her subsequent emaciation asks, "Am I crippled enough?" I see Hornbacher's eating disorder as a series of ongoing queries extended to society - queries, not statements. Always asking, never telling.

Returning from Break with Garland-Thompson

Winter break is coming to an end, which means that I've procrastinated on writing this blog entry for quite a while. That said, I'm going to write about Rosemarie Garland-Thompson's "Reshaping, Rethinking, Redefining: Feminist Disabilities Studies," which is a part of the Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities. I'm going to experiment with yet another format for this post. This time, I plan to create a statement-and-response style by quoting the article and then, well, responding to it, probably with more questions than answers. We'll see how that works out. 

"Disability Studies views the condition of having a disability as a social relationship characterized by discrimination and oppression rather than as a personal misfortune or individual inadequacy. "

I have a problem with this view of disability. While I do think that we go overboard on calling people "disabled," I think this particular definition of "disability" ignores the fact that some individual differences are so contrasted with the majority that it is not logical to label these differences anything but disabilities. However, I think the definition does have a good point in that disability is recognized by how a person interacts with his social environment. We can see differences between individuals (i.e. that man has four limbs, that one has three), but it is not until individuals are placed within a social environment designed for a prototypical yet wholly undefined type of normativity that difference becomes either disability or advantage. If a difference is advantageous in the social environment, it cannot be a disability. 

"The fundamental premise of Disability Studies is that disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, a system that produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies." 

I don't think the system produces differentiated bodies, but I think it is by the system that we recognize differentiated bodies. Bodies are different and anyone can determine differences between bodies. It is not until bodies are evaluated within the social context, though, that those differences have meaning. 

"In short, the concept of disability unites a heterogeneous group of people whose only commonality is being considered abnormal."  

But what about the groups within the disabled - the eating disordered, the manic-depressives, the amputees? Society doesn't treat all of them in a homogenous way. I think it's inaccurate to lump everyone into a heterogeneous group of the abnormal. Rarely are schizophrenics regarded the same as those suffering from alcoholism. 

"Disability, then, is the unorthodox made flesh, refusing to be normalized, neutralized, or homogenized."

I have to jump in with Hornbacher here. What about disabilities like eating disorders, which are so orthodox in that they are wrapped up in adhering to social constructs? What about something that is so "normalized" and socially reinforced? How can this be seen as a disability? Or can it? 

"...each an acknowledgement that every woman is never simply a “woman,” but is multiply identified across a spectrum of cultural categories, many of which are extrapolated from human physical differences."

First, I just recognized something - I know a helluva lot more about feminism (and that's not saying much) than I do about Disability Studies. I better get reading. 

Here's the first sentence in this paper that links FS (Feminist Studies) to DS (Disability Studies), and I think this method of looking at a larger category and then breaking up the homogenous into heterogeneity by looking at individual difference may be a way of finding clumps of like differences and, thus, a way of identifying places of "disability." 

"Feminism becomes a theoretical perspective and methodology for examining gender as an ideological and material category that interacts with but does not subordinate other social identities or the particularities of embodiment,

history, and location that informs personhood."

So we're looking at feminism as a way of seeing the differences between women, and, by extension, between bodies, and how those differences still contribute to that person's "personhood," or place in the social context. 

"Feminist Disability Studies brings the two together to argue that cultural expectations, received attitudes, social institutions, and their attendant material conditions create a situation in which bodies that are categorized as both female and disabled are disadvantaged doubly and in parallel ways."

Just as the concept of gender is dependent on social definition, so is the concept of disability. I won't get into the parallels between FS and DS (I think this article is doing enough of that), but I will say that the parallels drawn between the two by the article most definitely pertain to my thesis. Hornbacher's works deal with, first, disability, but because one memoir focuses on her eating disorder, her work inevitably tackles gender as well - what is a gendered disorder, or (in the case of Madness), what does it mean to be female with a disorder that does not discriminate between gender?

"Within the critical framework of Feminist Disability Studies, disability becomes a representational system rather than a medical problem, a social construction instead of a personal misfortune or bodily flaw, and a subject appropriate for wide-ranging intellectual inquiry rather than a specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or social work."

So, does this mean we don't treat disability? It is unreasonable to suggest that reconfigure society to serve every disabled person (to some extent, we must rely on society to serve a majority), but perhaps it is reasonable to ask for a wider acceptance as differences - to not see differences as disability. 

"Making disabled women the objects of care risks casting them as helpless in order to celebrate nurturing as virtuous feminine agency." 

But what about needing help when society makes this borderline impossible? I mean, we can celebrate the "feminine agency" of disabled women by celebrating their giving and caring personalities (if present), but what about real restraints that might make these women the "objects of care" by necessity?

"...feminist practice often leaves no space for the needs and accommodations that disabled women’s bodies

require."

Yup. 

"The fundamental premises of feminist disability critical theory are:  that representation structures reality; that the margins define the center; that gender and disability are ways of signifying relationships of power; that human identity is multiple and unstable; and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications."

I don't have much comment here, except that this seems like a useful way of putting these two areas of studies together, especially in the context of Hornbacher's works. In Horbacher's works, I have to look at the representation of the body and the mind, the power dynamics between the two, and what it means to be female -with an inherently politicized body - in addition to being disabled. 

--------------------

Okay, processing this article has given me a major headache and I need to sit and think for a while. With that in mind, look for part II of this post later. 

Original Thesis Proposal - 11/07/11

“Look Who’s Talking: The Development of Narrative Voice Over Marya Hornbacher’s Memoirs of Mental Illness”

Elisa Marder states that the feminist ‘we’ represents a “disarticulated voice,” or an individual female voice lost within the din of the collective interest (151). The ‘we’ creates ground for women to be heard, yet suppresses the individual voice in the interest of the group. Similarly, Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford argue that female writers create textual “space” by sharing authority (415). In that space lies not only the individual experience, but the sociopolitical implications of the individual experience for the group. Feminist narrative, then, is developed from the individual experience speaking through the voice of the collective.

            In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1999) and Madness: A Bipolar Life  (2008), Marya Hornbacher constructs narrative voices that seldom settle on a concrete ‘I’. Her first memoir, Wasted (about her childhood and adolescence with an eating disorder), favors ‘you’ and ‘we’ to describe the first-person narrator’s experience. By contrast, her second memoir (in which she describes her experience with bipolar disorder) flits between the voices of three women – a manic woman, a depressed woman, and the woman caught between these two. In the first memoir, Hornbacher draws her reader to empathy with the second-person singular pronoun and creates a community of eating-disordered individuals with the third-person plural. In the second work, she works to cohere three selves with the first-person singular, but still finds points where she loses her narrative identity and says, “Now I’m someone else” (49). In my thesis, I want to explore Hornbacher’s development of narrative voice using theories of feminist discourse and narrative theory, examining how Hornbacher employs characteristics of feminist prose in order to represent and politicize the mental illnesses about which she writes.

            In both memoirs, Hornbacher uses herself as a case study to support a larger political gesture toward advocacy for individuals with mental illnesses. Her juxtaposition of herself and the clinical literature surrounding her disorders turn her personal narratives into political ones. This politicizing of the self is both a quality of illness narrative (as highlighted by Garrett) and of feminist prose (as shown by Smith). I argue that Hornbacher combines feminist prose with attributes of illness narratives in order to extend the feminist style of writing beyond the political realm of feminism and into the realm of mental illness advocacy. Instead of creating multiplicity in her narrative voice to speak for a larger group of women, Hornbacher creates multiplicity to speak to and for those with eating disorders and bipolar disorder.

            I plan to use a comparative approach between the two memoirs to highlight how Hornbacher’s narrative voice develops over the chronological frames of the narratives. I will examine how Hornbacher’s earlier memoir attempts to insert the coherent ‘I’ – her personal experience – into many pronominal selves. I will then contrast that ‘I’ in many selves with the ‘I’ in Hornbacher’s second memoir, in which she presents many selves within a coherent pronominal ‘I’. In addition to looking at pronouns, I will consider the linearity and fragmentation of Hornbacher’s memoirs and her incorporation of outside voices into texts, that by definition of their genre, are supposed to be owned by their author. By delving further into the structure of the works, I hope to uncover how each work is communicates its larger message within memoir – a personal genre that implies a singular ‘I’.

            Of course, I wish this project were as coherent as I’ve presented it; yet I must concede that it is endlessly complicated. I must ask: can feminist prose lose its ‘feminist-ness’ and become true advocacy narrative? I also have questions about genre. If I claim that Hornbacher’s texts employ multiple voices that speak for a larger cause, can I call the texts memoir? Must memoir focus on personal experience and interpretation, and if not, who ‘owns’ the prose? Even more questions: what is the relationship between aesthetic representation of mental illness and advocacy for that same illness? And does representation of an illness by Hornbacher represent the illness or the individual experience? Where is the border between the singular voice and the collective, and is there a difference between the politicized self and the politicized collective? These two texts that consider questions of genre, ownership, voice, and structure, all of which interact not only within the texts, but beyond their pages as they advocate for those with mental illness. My question is whose voice – and how – is behind that advocacy. 

An Initial Close Reading of "Wasted" (09/12/11)

Throughout Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, there are several “present-day” “Interludes” dated sporadically during the time in which she was constructing her memoir. In her September 22, 1996 Interlude, Hornbacher is reviewing her charts at TAMS, the hospital at which she received both inpatient and outpatient treatment for her eating disorder during her teenage years. Though she states that she is at TAMS “reading my charts” (143, italics mine), she immediately turns from this apparent ownership of the charts to disconnecting the charts with herself by “othering” the teenage girl described in the files before her. She states that the charts “[regard] a person (sixteen, female, white) named Marya (chronic, total denial) who is clearly very sick” (143). By separating her current identity from her past self, Hornbacher effectively creates two identities – that of the eating-disordered teenager and that of the successful journalist – to which she has both an historical, factual allegiance and an emotional allegiance, but which (as becomes apparent over the next few paragraphs) have never become integrated into one cohesive identity by which Hornbacher (the one cohesive woman) can live.

            Janice Gasker’s work, Incorporating Sexual Trauma into the Functional Life Narrative, defines the term “cognitive dissonance” as “a series of thoughts about the self which are inharmonious or incongruent” (27). Cognitive dissonance, she writes, can be manifested when “one’s perception of one’s role in an event does not seem to match one’s identity” (27). In Hornbacher’s Interlude, cognitive dissonance is apparent in the author’s simultaneous identification with and rejection of her own medical files.  Hornbacher writes that she “is a regular person . . . [and that] this never happened to [her]” (143), exemplifying an attempt to deny the factual existence of her eating disorder, thus allowing her to avoid having to incorporate her past as an eating-disordered young woman into the “post-disordered” desired identity she has carved for herself.

 Hornbacher’s desired identity, at the time this Interlude was written, is summed through projection onto one of her former doctors at TAMS. She describes the doctor smiling at her, and then moves into a series of short sentences in which she imagines how the doctor views her. From her tone, the reader may gather that these sentences represent how Hornbacher herself wants to be viewed, and that by implicitly telling her audience that this is how the doctor sees her, she is actually projecting her own wishes for her identity onto the doctor. Through the imagined eyes of the doctor, Hornbacher writes, “I am a grown woman. I am married. I am employed. I am Recovered. . . . They are proud of me. It was a Long Haul, but I Made It” (143).  There is no room in Hornbacher’s desired identity for her eating disorder. There is no room for the difficulties of the past to creep into her present. She writes that she is “Recovered” with the “R” capitalized as if to say, “Everything is well now, and everything is supposed to be well; I am secure in my identity.”

Although Hornbacher’s desired identity suggests security, the structure and vocabulary of the Interlude suggest that her true present identity is anything but secure. The first sentence begins, “I suppose you’d call it amnesia” (143), first indicating uncertainty in the brief narrative that she is about to present by “supposing” and then furthering that uncertainty by stating that the short Interlude that follows – in which she actively tries to deny her past narrative by refusing to incorporate it into her desired narrative – is possibly the result of “amnesia”. The narrative that follows oscillates between disbelieving identification with and “dis-integraton” (Gasker 50) of Hornbacher’s teenage self. Hornbacher writes that the charts “make [her] sad” and “make [her] shake [her] head in disbelief . . . that [the girl] could be so blind to the ramifications of her behavior” (143), again highlighting the girl in the charts as an “other.” But a moment later, the next paragraph of the Interlude opens, “I am that girl, still” (143) and then goes on to talk about all of the physical ramifications of Hornbacher’s eating disorder that make her denial of ever having had the disorder implausible. She writes, “The ramifications occupy space in every cell of my body, every damaged organ and nerve, every memory tainted and skewed by the obsession that was and is my life” (143). What is interesting about Hornbacher’s reluctant identification with the teenager in the charts, though, is first that her identification with the subject of the charts comes at the close of the interlude and is then rescinded by the final paragraph of the short section, in which she returns to referring to the subject of the charts as “the girl” (not even as “Marya”, as she did when she first distanced herself from the subject). Then, in addition to returning to calling the subject “the girl,” Hornbacher further evidences her position as an outsider in the narrative by invalidating the girl’s voice, describing turning the pages of the charts as “listen[ing] to the pleading, wheedling, delusional, lying voice of this girl” (144), refusing to come down from her “Recovered” position on high to take a moment to consider why “this girl” was “pleading, wheedling, delusional [and] lying.” The brief identification with the subject of the charts is, then, a purely physical one. Hornbacher undeniably resides in the wounded body characterized by the results of an eating disorder. She cannot deny the presence of her arrhythmic heart or the physicalities of the mental ramifications of an eating disorder (named specifically in her obsessions), yet she never connects her notable physical ramifications with her emotions, and never connects her emotions with her present self.

At the end of Hornbacher’s September 22, 1996 Interlude, the writer remains emotionally disconnected with her teenage narrative experiences, even if the physical evidence of those experiences are undeniably written across her damaged body. She attempts to separate herself from the denial that once plagued her youth (seen in her charts as, “(chronic, total denial)” (143)), yet ironically is still encased in denial as she pines for an identity that emotionally refuses to integrate her past experiences, even if those experiences are somewhat factually integrated. The result of this emotional denial is the dis-integration of her eating disorder into her identity, causing Hornbacher herself to be hanging between two apparent identities – that of the successful and Recovered woman and that of the damaged teenager. Hornbacher’s struggles with denial and identification, projection and personal distancing continue throughout Wasted, and, as seen in this short excerpt, do not find resolution. It seems as though Hornbacher is attempting to tell two narratives simultaneously – a “present day” narrative and a narrative about an eating disorder –, and that she intellectually recognizes that these two narratives cannot be separated, as their main character is on and the same, but cannot figure out how to tie the narratives together without disrupting the precarious emotional balance on which her present desired identity hinges.

In contrast to the Interlude discussed above is a section entitled “Spring 2007” in Hornbacher’s subsequent memoir, Madness. In the section, Hornbacher describes an outing with a close friend to a local restaurant after a sleepless night of writing that she can barely recall. Using short sentences to create a humorous dialogue between herelf and her friend, Hornbacher completely upends the sense of dis-integration associated with her mental illnesses as described in Wasted and writes with acceptance of the quirky behaviors her bipolar disorder causes. Instead of fighting the ramifications that come with mental illness, Hornbacher integrates them into her personality and does not need to keep defending herself as a “normal person” (as she did in the Interlude) because she knows that, to some extent, she is both normal and abnormal. In one section of the “Spring 2007” text, Hornbacher switches her seat in the restaurant where she is eating with her friend, stating that the other seat “made [her] anxious” (253). Similarly, she describes how she separates her bread into three equal parts and then butters the three parts with equal amounts of butter because “[i]t makes [her] calm to do this” (253). Hornbacher does not probe deeper into her explanations for why she performs these peculiar behaviors. As evidenced by earlier parts of the book, she knows the clinical reasons behind these quirky actions, yet unlike in Wasted, she does not delve deep into clinical reasoning to invalidate the presence of evidence of mental illness in her life. She is not searching for external self-definition by projecting herself onto others and onto clinical literature (as seen in Wasted, specifically in the aforementioned scene with the doctor). Instead, in her “Spring 2007” section of Madness, Hornbacher finds balance between herself as a successful writer (at the same time she is performing these strange behaviors, she is also publishing articles and working on a book) and herself as a person afflicted with mental illness. She is no longer consumed by her obsessive thoughts; she instead lets her “ill” thoughts run parallel to her “normal” ones with the understanding that there will be times that either the “ill” or the “normal” side of her will temporarily take control. In this section of Madness, what Gasker refers to as “integration” is seen in that Hornbacher has successfully married her desired self with her factual and emotional past, resulting in an identity by which she may functionally live – an identity that simply was not present in her account of September 22, 1996. 

WORKS CITED

Incorporating Sexual Trauma into the Functional Life Narrative.

     Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002. Print.

Hornbacher, Marya. Madness: a Bipolar Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Print.

Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York, NY:

     HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998. Print.