Marketing, fashion and the media large part of eating disorders, speaker says
By Sarah Blythe-Wood | April 16, 2009The final event during the WILL/WGSS/Quest Speaker Series took place on Tuesday April 14 in the Alice Haynes Room. Susan Bordo, renowned author and scholar of feminist, cultural and gender studies, spoke to a predominantly female audience on the subject, "Beyond 'Eating Disorders:' Why We Need to Rethink Everything We Thought We Knew." Historical conceptions of eating disorders, she said, are a result of a combination of fashions in the medical world. In the old days, anorexia was conceptualized as a form of hysteria, she said.