Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food

In the spirit of Orbach's seminal book Fat Is a Feminst Issue, the authors of this enlightened collectionoriginally published in the U.K.write from professional and personal involvement with the work on eating disorders being conducted at the Women's Therapy Center in London. Orbach maintains that obsessive eating or non-eating behavior is an individual, albeit political, response to a ""complex set of social circumstances'' in which women find themselves. Theoretical pieces here bolster her views: they explore the neopuritanical replacement of sex by food as ``the focus of guilt in women's lives''; compulsive eating as anger denied other, socially legitimate avenues of expression; and symmetries between the bulimic and anorexic internalization of ego boundaries and strategies for control. Essays highlighting alternative therapies are fertile with case references and the compelling voices of sufferers, like the anorexic who asserts that ``becoming what we are requires existential courage to confront the experience of nothingness.'' This book offers both solace and insight and is a vital contribution to a field where the need for a holistic approach grows with frightening urgency. (October)