For those of us ready and able to speak, claiming space as women of color in conversations about eating disorders is not just about reducing stigma, but about challenging the dominant narratives that have obscured our pain or failed to comprehend it in its full complexity.
Tag: Eating Disorders
Larger than Life: Musical Theater, Body Positivity and Advocacy
A personal piece about the overlap of the body positivity movement, anti-racist activism, and musical theater:
“For theater kids, performing a title character twice before college is a dream come true. To me, as the person standing center stage, it was also a nightmare.”
Sexual Harassment Led to My Eating Disorder
While there are a number of risk factors for eating disorders, including our culture’s obsession with thinness, one factor is talked about less often and that is sexual violence.
The Ms. Q&A: How Reema Zaman Found Healing in Her Own Story
“The biggest goal and purpose of this book is to provide medicine: a call to action, an invitation of empathy, a healing balm.”
Liberating Words: “Worth It”
The poems contained in this series, “Liberating Words,” came out of an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors at The Winsor School, an all-girls school in Boston. The course, “The Personal Is Political: An Interdisciplinary Look at Feminism,” is co-taught by Libby Parsley, a history teacher, and Susanna Ryan, an English teacher. The second unit of the […]
Eating Disorder Awareness: It Starts With Us
Before arriving at college, you hear warnings—from parents, classmates and maybe even teachers—about the terrifying “Freshman 15”: go to college, gain weight. The warnings might seem harmless, but it matters that we present weight gain as a problem to avoid. More than incoming college students are warned to watch out for their GPA, their alcohol […]
Recognizing the Eating Disorders Plaguing Campuses
College campuses can play a huge role in preventing and treating eating disorders. A big round of applause to all the schools that participated in National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, but resources and activities for students should be implemented nationwide on a daily basis to help the thousands suffering from these disorders.
The False Promises of Eating Disorders
This is National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDA) Week. The theme this year is “I Had No Idea.” The goal is to point out the misunderstandings that people have, and rumors that people spread, about eating disorders.
Sexual Objectification, Part 2: The Harm
This is the second part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (Part 1 can be found here.) Sexual objectification is nothing new, but this latest era is characterized by greater exposure to advertising and increased sexual explicitness in advertising [PDF], magazines, television shows, movies [PDF], video games, music videos, […]
From an Eating Disorder’s Half-Life to Your Full Life
What happens to people with anorexia or bulimia who don’t get treatment–or who don’t get enough of the right treatment? Aimee Liu’s new book investigates.