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Understanding Eating DisordersConceptual and Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa$
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Understanding Eating Disorders: Conceptual and Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa

Simona Giordano

Print publication date: 2005

Print ISBN-13: 9780199269747

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2006

DOI: 10.1093/0199269742.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 16 January 2021

Lightness and Eating Disorders

Lightness and Eating Disorders

Chapter:
(p.93) 5 Lightness and Eating Disorders
Source:
Understanding Eating Disorders
Author(s):

Simona Giordano (Contributor Webpage)

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/0199269742.003.0006

This chapter draws on literary and artistic sources (Kundera, Dickinson, Giacometti, Modigliani, Sartre) to explain the value of lightness. It shows that the pursuit of lightness is not a contemporary phenomenon, contrary to what many people believe. Victorian literature is replete with slim and aerial heroines. Slimness and lightness symbolize values that are part of Western morality. It argues that the value of lightness is moral in nature, and that the pursuit of thinness is not the result of an aesthetic choice, but reveals adhesion to a cluster of moral values.

Keywords:   lightness, fear, intrusions, slimness, literature, arts

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