Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse

This book takes up the challenge of examining womens understandings of eating disorders and child sexual abuse away from a framework focused on pathology. The central argument is that womens distress is an enactment of their engagement with certain discourses and practices, rather than a reaction triggered by child sexual abuse. Guided by a contemporary feminist framework and Mikhail Bakhtins sociological linguistics, to substantiate the argument, womens own poetry and drawings are used as evidence to develop, support and supplement research findings. The book establishes that an eating disorder is an understandable response to sexual trauma and shifts the focus away from a damaged personality. Even more importantly, it demonstrates that women with eating disorders are using their bodies as a form of resistance to express silenced traumas that remain in the silenced female body. This is an active way of making sense of experiences of child sexual abuse.