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Films focusing on girls and women with anorexia have not found major producers and distributors in Hollywood, yet movies on subjects such as suicidality and bipolar disorder have been showcased. Eating disorders affect approximately 30 million people in the United States alone, and it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, so this invisibility seems incongruous. The authors theorize that Hollywood avoids this subject because of ontological anxiety. Movie plots are schemas and young females are inextricably associated with fertility and futurity. An anorexic’s appearance contradicts and nullifies this symbolic role because anorexia often leads to infertility and death. Psychological studies and philosophical arguments claim that a belief in an afterlife and the regeneration of humankind create coherence and meaning for individuals. An anorexic’s appearance and behavior represent images of self-destruction – images that inflame the viewer’s unconscious and primordial fears about the annihilation of the species. By avoiding the topic of anorexia, Hollywood defends against its symbolic fears of mortality but diminishes the importance of the subject through its absence; it ignores its place in women’s social history and erases its place in American history. Because of Hollywood’s social reach and because greater visibility is correlated with a reduction in stigma, the authors conjecture that a film on this subject would inspire necessary attention to women’s roles, public mores, public policies, and the social good.

Medical and mental health professionals are in general agreement that the occurrence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia has increased dramatically during the past ten years. The revelation that public figures such as Karen Carpenter and Cherry Boone were victims has demonstrated that these debilitating illnesses occur more frequently than previously supposed. Not only has the number of relevant professional communications in psychology, psychiatry, and medicine multiplied, but popular periodicals, newspapers, and television have brought these psychiatric disorders to the attention of the general public. As a result, wards and clinics specializing in the treatment of eating disorders have opened in cities of even modest size. Support groups for sufferers and their families are becoming more common as the magnitude of these mental health problems is recognized.

Eating disorders have long been perceived to occur primarily in women; few disorders in general medicine or psychiatry exhibit such a skew in gender distribution. Men and women with eating disorders share common risk factors and exhibit some overlap in clinical presentation, but important differences do exist. Determining which factors best explain these differences remain uncertain. Furthermore, despite a marked increase in the incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa in women over the last 50 years, the awareness of eating disorders in men remains low. This is in spite of the fact that men represent 10‐20% of cases of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa and up to 40% of cases of binge eating disorder. Similarly, recent research has focused on the assumption and stereotype that eating disorders in men are associated with homosexuality, when male body image objectification and body dissatisfaction are also widespread in younger heterosexual men who are being increasingly confronted with the same impossible body image ideals that already challenge women and gay men. The stigma of being a man with an eating disorder continues, and we persist in attempting to fit men with eating disorders into a theoretical and clinical framework largely focused on the physical, psychological, and emotional development of women. This article reviews the literature on eating disorders in men and explores the factors that may explain this gender discrepancy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse pro-anorexia from a discursive, metaphorical standpoint in order to enable an understanding of how pro-anorexia functions as political resistance through technological bodies.

Techno-metaphor is used to reveal how pro-anorexic communities online function through technology.

Six techno-metaphors work to construct pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment through technology. This pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment offers relief from the tensions of patriarchal femininity and provides control over troublesome embodiment. Technology enables women experiencing anorexia to resist the dominant interpretations of their lived experience that subjugate them.

This research offers an understanding of pro-anorexia as resistance to intolerable femininity and reconstructed female bodies through technology. By exploiting technological political space, pro-anorexics are claiming positions and forms of embodiment previously off-limits to women and their biological bodies.

“Lean working”, “leanness” or “lean” are terms that can be used to describe “doing more with less” i.e. improved utilisation of an organisation's resources. This paper outlines the concept of leanness before developing thinking to describe a state of “corporate anorexia” – the inability to utilise or balance effectively the facets/resources of the organisation. There may be a variety of causes of this state of anorexia; this paper will not however consider all of them in detail, since its main focus is around identifying the characteristics of an anorexic organisation. The case study analysis presented focuses on the process of change undergone by an organisation when becoming lean and the extent to which this may result in corporate anorexia. A review of literature is used to develop a set of questions that can be used to consider the impact of the process of change to a state of leanness on various facets of the organisation, and in particular the way in which they balance with each other. These questions are then applied to some case studies in order to assess how lean an organisation is, and conclusions drawn about what the cases show in relation to both leanness and anorexia.