CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Kiss, Kata Dóra |
|---|---|
| Title | Anorectic narratives the possible agency of anorectic women in the hungarian psychiatric treatment |
| Summary | This thesis examines women with anorexia involved in Hungarian psychiatric treatment. The research is based on interviews, both with women who were hospitalized and doctors who treat anorexia in practice. The study makes an attempt to challenge the current medical approach on anorexia from an anthropological and gender-based perspective. Therefore, my analysis contests the actual country-specific medical discourse with the lived experiences of these women. The purpose of the analysis is the representation of those subordinations, specific sets of suppressive practices, and institutional regulations that concern to an anorectic under the Hungarian medical care. The expectation of normal life, regular citizenship, proper womanhood, reproductivity, and well-functioning family, just a few of those decisive elements that the state or nation requires from a person who suffers from eating disorder. I assume that these factors are the parts of a bigger establishment of the Biopower. In order to the contextualization of these elements, the research touches upon the Foucauldian theory on Biopolitics and disciplinary power. Foucault emphasizes that power is not mere repression since it has creative potential too. I would like to argue that, however, the subordinations above influence the subject’s position and restrict her rights, the anorexia has already performed a sort of agency. Anorectic practices serve as a mean for the subject to flee from her crucial position to another. If the subject could not express herself verbally, she has to turn to other practices to perform herself in everyday life. I suppose that the anorexia is a bodily performed suffering by the cultural and symbolic constructions of the normative ideals, such as gender, race, class. Judith Butler thoughts on performativity and agency serve as a basis for the description of this agency. The problem of the anorectic is that through her life-threatening acts she becomes the object of medicalization that deprives her right of reason. Therefore, the agency of the anorectic necessary has failed in the present psychiatric complex. The thesis argues for a therapeutic process that could open a space for the anorectic to accomplish her agency and modifies her previous position. The research briefly touches upon the agency of the professionals too. According to my interviewee, their attitude is also determined by the circumstances of the psychiatry which hang on country-specific political and economic factors. This assumption drives out from the specific topic of the anorexia to the embeddedness of the psychiatry in wider Hungarian power relations. I hope that the discourse of the research can maintain a space for anorectic women to express their feelings and thoughts on their psychiatric therapy, that the Hungarian medical treatment could not provide them. I expect that this discursive space can extend the country-specific medical discourse on anorexia with some more sensitive and in-depth gender-specific perspectives for the more successful treatment. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/kiss_kata02.pdf |
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