In The Thin Woman', Helen Malson presents a feminist and post-structuralist approach to understanding and re-conceptualizing the problem' of anorexia nervosa. She does not begin, however, with a critique of earlier feminist analyses, most notably Susie Orbach's work, but with an exposition of the particular combination of feminist and post-structuralist theory that informs her analysis. Helen Malson draws on Lacanian, feminist psychoanalytic theory and Foucault's post-structuralist perspective to critique the view of anorexia nervosa as an individual pathology. She argues that this latter approach, which is commonplace in mainstream psychology, in the medical and clinical domains, and in popular discourses around eating distress, places severe limitations on the ways in which it is possible to understand `anorexia' in its political, socio-cultural and gender contexts.
The book falls into three sections: in Part I, Helen Malson sets out the feminist poststructural perspective on which she draws in presenting her analysis. These two chapters move from a Lacanian approach to psychoanalytic theory, through the work of feminists such as Kristeva and Irigaray, into an examination of post-structuralist views of discourse, most notably the work of Foucault. For the uninitiated, this section oers an admirably clear and concise account of a literature that can appear almost incomprehensible. I was left wondering exactly why such an approach might oer more than the widely-known work of Susie Orbach Kim Chernin, Marilyn Lawrence, or indeed Susan Bordo, but this is covered in greater depth in Part 3.
The second section of the book presents a `geneology' of anorexia nervosa, considering the discursive construction of anorexia and other eating disorders. I would have liked to see more explicit mention of Julie Hepworth's work on the historical context of the discovery of anorexia (Hepworth and Grin, 1995). Both Helen Malson and Julie Hepworth were critical of the traditional approach to anorexia nervosa, both adopted feminist and post-structural perspectives but Helen Malson interviewed women diagnosed or self-identi®ed as anorexic, whilst Julie Hepworth focused on the accounts of health care professionals working with clients diagnosed as anorexic. However, the chapters in this second section do provide a valuable analysis of diverse representations concerning anorexia and other eating disorders' considered in social and historical context.
The two chapters in Part II examine the discursive production of anorexia nervosa' as a disease entity in texts of the late 19th and the late 20th century. The ®nal section of the book comprises four chapters which draw on Helen Malson's interviews with 23 women diagnosed as anorexic in relation to popular discourses around eating, gender and embodiment for women. This section begins with a chapter reviewing the main feminist approaches to anorexia, which have relied on socio-cultural and/or psychodynamic approaches. Helen Malson argues that such analyses have tended, however inadvertently, to reinforce the pathologizing impact of the notion of anorexia' as a gendered disease entity, since the latter has never been systematically deconstructed.
It is not possible to do justice to the arguments presented in the key section of the text, within the con®nes of a book review. The focus is not on the women as individual subjects, but on the various discursive resources they draw on in everyday talk about anorexia, femininity and the body. The analysis revolves around four related areas: the construction of the fat and