Re/Forming the Anorexic “Prisoner”: Inpatient Medical Treatment as the Return to Panoptic Femininity

Abstract

Through a theoretical and discursive text analysis, medical protocols for the inpatient treatment of anorexia nervosa are exposed as part of a disciplinary regime that enforces women's embodied conformity to normative femininity. Although anorectic practices are read as a threat to the patriarchal social apparatus because they represent women's autonomous manipulation of their bodies, medical protocols are read as a means of returning the female body to masculinist control. From a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, treatment mechanisms of surveillance and routinization function as a medical panopticon constructed to re/form the anorexic woman. Her return to the broader social panopticon is achieved only through her disciplined conformity, whereas her “recidivism” is deemed an individual failure. Medicine's collusion with the subjectifying force of normative femininity is thus laid bare: For her failure to conform to the punitive identity of “woman,” the anorexic individual becomes a patient/prisoner of the medical panopticon.