Tracing a Matrix of Gender: An Analysis of the Feminine in Hospital-Based Treatment for Eating Disorders

Abstract

Numerous studies have elucidated how a multiplicity of contemporary western cultural ideas and values that constitute `normal' femininity are enmeshed in and central to the discursive production and regulation of girls' and women's `eating disordered' subjectivities, bodies and body management practices. In this article, we seek to build on that work by exploring how discursive constructions of `the feminine' are articulated in nurses' accounts of nursing in-patients diagnosed with `eating disorders'. We have used a feminist post-structuralist, discourse analytic, interview-based methodology to explore how gender and gender power-relations are articulated not only in constructions of `eating disorders' and of those diagnosed as `eating disordered', but also in constructions of nurses and their relationships with (and to) patients. Our analysis illustrates how `the feminine' persistently appears and reappears as a multiplicity of binarized gendered subject positions that constitute, delimit and regulate `pathology', patients and nurses, suturing nurses and patients into a matrix of dichotomously structured femininities and a complex circulation of gender power-relations.