The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein
Emmeline Clein | Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm | Knopf | February 2024 | 288 Pages
“Writing about my body is like breaking that mirror, cathartic and chaotic and unclean,” writes Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In her debut essay collection, Clein braids together scientific and academic writing, original reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir in an attempt to reorient our understanding of eating disorders. Ultimately, she argues that the disease should not be seen as the willful failure of individuals to care for themselves, but as a symptom of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that regulates the body in pursuit of narrowly-defined conceptions of health and beauty.
To make her case, Clein compulsively chronicles the history of what she believes led to the mass phenomenon of disordered eating. We follow her down rabbit holes into the diagnostic hierarchy of eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, eating disorder not otherwise specified, orthorexia), the limits of modern treatment, and the many religious and pseudo-scientific precedents that have come to define our modern misunderstanding—and gross mishandling—of the disease by the medical establishment and popular culture.
Dead Weight is somewhat personal, though Clein seems more interested in defining a collective narrative to explain this particular expression of feminine pain. “I am trying to harmonize with a ghost choir,” she writes, invoking voices from hundreds of historical figures, anonymous posters on Tumblr, and women in popular culture to build what she calls a “choral narrative.” In doing so, she creates some emotional distance between herself and the reader; then again, this may be a testament to the difficulty of talking frankly about our relationships to our bodies, never mind our internal and cultural fixation on the topic.
Dead Weight removes the onus from those suffering with eating disorders by offering a path to recovery via a meticulously-documented case against the powers that be. I spoke to Clein about the failures of traditional rehab, how to cultivate a non-obsessive relationship with food, and the possibilities of healing through embodiment.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Emma Glenn Baker: My first thought when reading this book was: Wow, this is intense, she’s really speaking to people in pain. Who did you write this for?
Emmeline Clein: Well, first of all, thank you. I have been called intense as a person too, so I’m not surprised the book turned out that way. It is speaking directly to people in pain. Part of that emotional intensity is anger, but I’m also really upset and sad. With this issue—eating disorders—people often feel that they have to talk about it from a remove to prove that they’re speaking from a position of recovery or—because it’s so associated with girls and this sort of feminized over-emotion—that they’re rational.
I wanted to write it from kind of within the distended belly of the beast, if you will. A big part of my intellectual ethic in the book is arguing that because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment that was very grounded in history and science without removing any of that emotion. I wanted to show that you could make all of the intellectual claims you want and historicize and get down and dirty with the scientific stuff, and that being overly emotional doesn’t actually mean that your argument is any less cogent.
EGB: It’s interesting that there aren’t many other sociopolitical histories of eating disorders because, growing up, women often feel like, “I have all of these terrible ideas about my body and I’m treating it in all of these terrible ways, and I am being told by my mom, by my teachers, by my friends that that’s understandable,” like, “look at these unrealistic beauty standards!” We have an intuitive understanding that there are all of these forces creating this terrible “nest.” So why hasn’t this been written about in this way before?
EC: There have definitely been sociopolitical histories of eating disorders, but they’ve pretty much been exclusively academic scholarship. Obviously there’s The Beauty Myth and stuff, but I think that we’ve never wanted to study teenage girls’ deep pain as an intellectual and political force, or as a symptom of these structural issues, because then what, are we gonna just totally restructure society? To your point, about this “nest” we’re living in, I wanted to see if we could see what each of the different sticks was and what that could show us. But I think that the nest metaphor is really interesting because it is this sort of weird maternal sorority passed down through families, and so unwittingly. I was really interested in the ways that women’s relationships with each other in girlhood and in womanhood throughout life can be this supportive and life-giving force while also the most harmful—it can be sort of a supportive self-harm environment. I wanted to unpack that and put a spotlight on it without demonizing anybody who engages in it because it’s how we’ve been taught to relate to each other.
EGB: I love how you talk about the latent competitiveness between girls and food, and even among the different diagnoses themselves. We all have these subliminal feelings about the different diagnoses—what it means to be anorexic versus bulimic, etc.—but you make it clear that that hierarchy exists within the medical establishment, too.
EC: Part of this book was trying to outline and then destabilize the diagnostic hierarchy that has been created by the medical profession, but that also predated it in terms of our psychological and philosophical biases about how we engage with our appetites here in the western world.
EGB: Right, so you illustrate the roots of our modern idea of the anorexic as this very pure, innocent, overly perfectionistic person. And then we have the bulimic, who is spoiled, gluttonous, messy. Can you unpack those stereotypes?
EC: This was very, very explicit. Truly, there’s an article from [the academic journal] Social Work from the 1980s where [the writers] literally say that the main difference is that bulimics are usually more sexually active and also a little bit fatter. Bulimia was first diagnosed by a doctor named Gerald Russell who was running an anorexia clinic in England and he literally was writing down, essentially, “she says she’s anorexic but she’s not that skinny.”
In order to be diagnosed with either of them, you need to have certain biometric markers, which no other mental illness diagnosis requires. So if you are going to get diagnosed with anorexia, you could have all the cognitive and behavioral and emotional symptoms of anorexia, but not be “thin enough,” and then you wouldn’t be diagnosed with anything. With bulimia, often they’ll do a blood test and see if your electrolytes show that you’ve been throwing up enough times a day for it to be considered pathological.
In terms of outcomes, these diseases have very similar fatality rates, and also incredibly high numbers of crossover—a huge number of anorexics will develop bulimic tendencies once they’re in recovery, a lot of bulimic people will become anorexic after; both groups often suffer binge eating disorder, it’s all incredibly symptomatically mixed up. And the diagnostic regime separates us from each other and keeps us from communing in ways that could be really helpful, and instead silos us for the purpose of making us easier for insurance companies to label and categorize in order to just charge us hospital bills.
EGB: This all makes me think, if you have to either be so dangerously underweight or have enough gastrointestinal stuff screwed up to receive care, what are we really solving for? Obviously we don’t want these women to die, but we also don’t want them living like this.
EC: The main purpose of eating disorder treatments we have today is usually just to get you physically stabilized. Like you said, we want people to be physically healthy, but we also should want people to be able to eat without obsessing over it. To eat enough to nourish yourself and sometimes a bit too much for pleasure and a little bit not enough one day because you’re really busy, and to not have it be this totally fraught, all-consuming thing. The goal of treatment should be allowing people to live in a moment.
It was really historicizing [eating disorders], not standard treatment, that helped me recover—realizing how many other women had gone through this and also realizing that it wasn’t any of our fault because so much of treatment is teaching you to overcome it yourself versus understanding that you’ve been a pawn of so many systems: the diet industry, which is a function of capitalism, which is a function of patriarchy, etc. And also that by continuing to harm myself, I was also harming other women by making it look accessible and not dangerous.
EGB: That’s interesting that historicizing the lineage of eating disorders helped you. It’s not that learning about societal structures is not good or useful, but I don’t feel like that has ever actually helped me emotionally move through this issue. How did learning about being a pawn at the mercy of this complicated system help you get into the present?
EC: I definitely agree that eating and moving and existing mindfully is really helpful. When I say historicizing and realizing I’m a pawn, I mean to all these systems, but I also mean alongside my friends and so many other people I love, and to a lot of TV shows and books and films that have made a huge impact on me. While I was trying to learn more about the origins of these diseases and their roots in female hysteria and the racist history of the diet industry, I was also noticing the way that those insidious forces teach women to be insanely vigilant about how they consume. And I was seeing it replicated in all of my favorite movies and films and TV shows and books and thinking back to the ones that I had seen my whole life and sort of built this canon of disordered eating.
EGB: My favorite chapter in the book is the one on orthorexia. The baseline of your argument is that we conflate health and beauty, so that our way around our obsession with beauty and thinness is to cloak it in an understanding of health. Can you say more about that?
EC: Orthorexia still isn’t an official diagnosis. It’s just a term that a subset of medical professionals will use in their own practices. And it’s basically an eating disorder where you’re obsessed with health and purity, and you basically end up doing a version of anorexia where you’re cutting out so many food groups in pursuit of only having “pure things” enter your body. And then the wellness girls are like, “I’m not trying to be beautiful, I’m just trying to be healthy,” and are trying to masquerade a desire for a very traditional beauty standard in this desire for health. There are all these euphemistic words we’re using like “glowy” and “dewy,” and all these things that clearly connote one thing if you’re scrolling TikToks with the hashtag “glow”—and it’s a parade of white girls in athleisure.
I was curious, where did this come from? And it turned out that we have been sort of conflating health with a very particular white beauty ideal. For example, there’s this wellness obsession with digestion, “hot girls have IBS”-type stuff, this feeling that we need to figure out our digestive tracts and cut out food groups or whatever. In the 1800s and 1900s, there was a similar obsession with people feeling like they had this nervous gastric disruption and rich people would get colonics that are very similar to the type of stuff that Gwyneth Paltrow suggests people do today, at these really fancy health spas. And it was a way for wealthy white people to differentiate themselves from people of color and people that were not as wealthy and couldn’t access it. I think that’s often replicated today with this highly classed and racialized ability to have the time to be doing all of these different kinds of endless wellness regimes. But there was also a very Christian layer to it. And while it’s obviously much more secular today, there’s literally a religious fervor with which people pursue these wellness regimens.
EGB: I do think to a certain degree, seeking a ritualistic or spiritual connection between food and yourself is a timeless pose. In some ways it can be harmful, by making food so “sacred” that you restrict it or having a ritual around your binge—we obviously don’t want that for ourselves. But I personally feel drawn to the idea of pursuing a so-called “mind-body-spirit connection,” an integration with and presence through food and movement. What would you say to someone like me?
EC: I’m not saying that food shouldn’t feel sacred at times, because it is sacred to nourish yourself. And I am not saying the mind-body-spirit connection is full of shit in its better incarnations. I think it’s more like the way that the wellness industry and the health establishment in this country are in its current form—having grown out of a very long history of explicit racialized medical things—currently constructs that mind-body-spirit connection to try to make us believe that we can only access it through purifying the way that we consume food and basically trying to convince us that we’re only going to be able to bring our mind, body, and spirit into alignment if we follow a very specific set of dietary rules that are usually designed around shrinking the body, or inspired by classed and racialized ways that we separate out different types of food in order to demonize certain bodies.
EGB: Certainly there’s the issue of that intention being bastardized and turning into random influencers on TikTok and Instagram selling you god knows what. But I wonder if an impulse to consider your diet in pursuit of a mind-body-spirit connection is necessarily bad?
EC: I don’t think any impulse to consider your diet is necessarily bad. I just think it’s a very slippery slope in the society we currently live in to try to orient your diet according to a set of specific and rigid bylaws of any sort.
EGB: Yes, the rigidity of it, the always on-again-off-again food wars and cult diets are antithetical to improving your relationship with food. It also risks replacing actual presence with the fake presence of surveilling yourself.
EC: Right. I talk about this recent dissociative turn in feminism and looking for a way out of that. I call it a “feminism of attention.” I think we need to truly talk to each other about and listen to each other on the subject of “What has consuming food meant to you over the course of your life?” Not to be so cringe, but I believe that talking about it more openly with each other has changed a lot for me.
EGB: We already mentioned the competitiveness, both within diagnosable diseases and also in regard to the way women eat and behave around food and deal with each other. I think that part of the tendency to not be as vulnerable or warm about these issues is because, and this is really ugly, but, you risk losing power.
EC: Totally. And when there’s a culture of silence around it, then nobody’s doing [anything about] it. And so you only meet people who are going to openly talk about it when you’re deep on the pro-ana forum or when you’re in treatment. I want there to be a space in our culture to talk about it before it gets to that point and just talk about a feeling you had or a weird thing you did with your food or whatever it is. And I think, to bring it back to the orthorexia conversation, I think that wellness serves as a kind of a release valve [for this conversation], because you can be in a wellness space talking about cutting out an entire food group, or talking about making your weird food with only a weird seasoning, and it probably is helpful to talk about some weird obsessive thing you’re doing without fearing condemnation for it.
EGB: I completely agree. I think there’s a real impulse to talk about your body and your relationship to it. But when we’ve said, “Oh, this is pro-ana discussion. Oh, this is disordered thinking,” then it’s like, “Ok, well, maybe I’ll just talk about my detox.”
EC: Yeah, right, totally. And then that masquerades it, and then also feeds back into all those other really insidious forces I was talking about. So that’s why we have to find a way we can talk about this stuff that’s outside of any of these silos—outside of the medical silo, outside of the wellness silo—and that’s just, “What is your relationship with the shape of your body as it relates to the food you’re putting in it?” and I think if people felt safe talking about that with people they are close to, it would be different than how it currently is.
EGB: Obviously, there’s a long history and probably personal experience of abusing ourselves through food and exercise. But they are also really beautiful things, and they can be used to good ends, too. A “desire for health” can be a cover for a desire for beauty, as you say. But since we can’t really mentally decouple the two, it seems like the best route to healing is just getting into your body.
EC: I feel like I spent more than half of my life not listening to my body at all, whether that was about listening to a hunger cue or trying to learn what my desire was sexually or anything. And so, I try to listen to it these days, but it is a journey. And that’s why I think I write at the end of the book, “I’m hysterical, but I’m here.” That word “hysterical” was important to me because it’s the word we use for the history of pathologizing women’s unexplainable pain. I’m not saying that I don’t still have unexplainable feminized pain, but I’m trying to explain it. And I’m trying to listen to it and see what it’s telling me to do.
Emmeline Clein is a writer. Her first book, Dead Weight, is out now from Knopf and forthcoming from Picador in the United Kingdom. Her chapbook, Toxic, was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022.