The Fifth Element : Social Class and the Sociology of Anorexia

TLDR: In this article, the authors argue that the set of practices and orientations acquired through an anorexic career builds upon practices and orientationations clearly identified with middle and upper class status.

Abstract: Epidemiological research has identified a significant association between upper or middle class membership and a woman's probability of becoming anorexic, but the extant literature has yet to address the social processes underlying this association. In order to fill this gap, this paper frames anorexia as a deviant career that entails the adoption of an anorexic set of practices and orientations that may be recognized as a distinctive type of Bourdieuian habitus. Drawing upon on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews conducted in France, this paper argues that the set of practices and orientations acquired through an anorexic career builds upon practices and orientations clearly identified with middle and upper class status.

Full text

HAL Id: halshs-00428573
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00428573
Submitted on 15 Apr 2020
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entic research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.
L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diusion de documents
scientiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.
The Fifth Element : Social Class and the Sociology of
Anorexia
Muriel Darmon
To cite this version:
Muriel Darmon. The Fifth Element : Social Class and the Sociology of Anorexia. Sociology, SAGE
Publications, 2009, 4 (43), pp.717-733. �10.1177/0038038509105417�. �halshs-00428573�

The Fifth Element: Social Class and the Sociology of
Anorexia
Epidemiological research has identified a significant association between upper or middle
class membership and a woman’s probability of becoming anorexic, but the extant
literature has yet to address the social processes underlying this association. In order to
fill this gap, this paper frames anorexia as a deviant career that entails the adoption of an
anorexic set of practices and orientations that may be recognized as a distinctive type of
Bourdieuian habitus. Drawing upon on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews
conducted in France, this paper argues that the set of practices and orientations acquired
through an anorexic career builds upon practices and orientations clearly identified with
middle and upper class status.
ANOREXIC CAREER - DEVIANT CAREER - BODY - EATING DISORDERS
(SOCIAL FACTORS) - FOOD - HABITUS - HOSPITAL - RESISTANCE
Muriel Darmon, CNRS

A great deal has been written about the socio-cultural bases of Anorexia Nervosa. Indeed,
perhaps too much for the preferences of scholars in the field: in an appraisal of a recent
book, one described herself as ‘someone in feminist theory, women’s studies, and
medical discourse analysis who had hoped she would go to her grave without ever having
to read another word about anorexia nervosa’ (Treichler, in Gremillion, 2003). Yet,
despite an abundance of sociological writing on the subject of Anorexia, gaps remain in
this literature. Surprisingly enough, sociologists researching Anorexia have shied away
from the one element that is traditionally theirs to study: social class. Instead, social
scientists have geared their focus towards four alternative elements: a gender bias
rendering women more at risk than men, the most affected age-group (adolescent girls),
historical time periods (especially from the 19th century onwards, and especially since
the 1960s), and cultural-geographical boundaries (Western countries and Japan).
Compared to the abundance of research on the above four themes, and considering the
relevance and specificity of class analysis in sociological thought, the class position of
anorexic individuals has been understudied, causing social class to have a limited role in
theorizing about eating disorders.
This paper provides an analysis of anorexia that puts this ‘Fifth Element’ in plain light
while elaborating a purely sociological analysis of anorexia. It also illustrates the
usefulness of approaching anorexia as a deviant career of conversion while reconstructing
the ‘social space’ of class culture, class dispositions and class practices in which this

career develops. This will be done by identifying anorexic food practices and body uses
as those of the upper and middle classes, revealing the anorexic conversion as a
particularly class-oriented one, and also by deciphering diagnostic stereotypes and acts of
non-compliance during the hospital phase. This article proposes an analysis of anorexia in
which social class is not limited to a set of values or representations, as is often done in
social scientific studies of anorexia. It instead regards class practices, class dispositions,
and class habitus not as causes, but, rather, as social conditions of possibility (or social
conditions of likelihood) of the anorexic career.
Methods
This paper draws from research conducted in France from 1997 to 2001, based on
repeated in-depth interviews with anorexic patients from two different hospitals (6
patients in Hospital H, 8 in Clinic C) and 5 months of observations of the everyday life
and talk therapy sessions in the units they were hospitalized in, together with interviews
with some of their teachers (11 interviews), snowball interviews of formerly diagnosed
anorexics (3) and comparative interviews on body and food practices with high-school
girls (11 interviews).
The persons interviewed as anorexic patients were all adolescent girls, and were all from
upper and middle classes. Class membership was defined based on both parents’ and
grandparents’ occupations and diplomas, which were obtained through a short
questionnaire filled in by patients after each first interview. Data on parents were also

accessible through medical records. The class membership in the sample ranged from
Anne, whose father has a diploma from the French elite school system of ‘grandes écoles’
and is the head of a company (himself son a CEO of a major car company), and whose
mother is an engineer, again with a diploma from a ‘grande école’. Anne was coded as
‘upper-class, with both cultural and economic capital’. At the other end of the spectrum,
Sidonie’s father has a high school diploma, owns a restaurant, and had parents who were
skilled workers in the railway industry. Sidonie’s mother did not finish high school, helps
her father at the restaurant, and comes from a family of sewers. Sidonie was thus coded
as ‘middle-class from working class background, with more economic than cultural
capital’
.
Interviews began with a general question on the subject’s ‘experience with anorexia’ and
were conducted to allow a detailed description of the practices that constitute the
anorexic career. In the course of observation, I paid close attention to the words that were
used to classify, label and discuss pathologies and patients. Therefore, and somewhat
untraditionally, practices have been gathered mainly through interviews, and categories
and representations through observation.
Looking for the Fifth Element
As has been stated previously, the elusiveness of the Fifth Element (class) is merely
relative to the intensive study on the other four elements. Social class is far from being
altogether neglected in social scientific studies of anorexia But it has been mainly

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "The fifth element : social class and the sociology of anorexia" ?

Darmon et al. this paper proposed to understand anorexia as a deviant career, a career that is a conversion into an anorexic set of practices and orientations that can be understood as a distinctive type of Bourdieuian habitus. 

Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "The fifth element : social class and the sociology of anorexia" ?

This is not understood as causes per se but, rather, social conditions of possibility or of likelihood. 

Q3. What is the definition of anorexic patients?

They are generally defined as ‘difficult’, ‘non-compliant’, and ‘resisting’patients, and are depicted as such at the fieldwork sites of this research. 

Q4. What was the idea of anorexia as a deviant career?

The idea of anorexia as a ‘deviant career’ (Becker, 1963) emerged from fieldwork analysis as a way of understanding the objective and subjective modifications that took place during subjects’ experiences of ‘anorexia’ as it was described in interviews. 

Q5. What is the role of the professionalisation in the anorexia game?

She employed this professionalisation as a patient (Barrett, 1996, p. 162) as a strategic weapon in the ‘serious game’ (Goffman, 1961) of resisting medical intervention and point of view. 

Q6. What was the message that Louise was trying to send?

That was the message The authorwas trying to send: The authorwas thin but The authorate normally, or even The authorate more than people usually do, The authorwasn’t thin because The authordid not eat…’ (Louise). 

Q7. What is the main focus of this article?

In these two studies, what is left behind is precisely what this article focuses on: the anorexic activity itself, which can be seen as a self-conversion work. 

Q8. What is the main argument for anorexia?

This has been approached in three ways: by equating thinness and frailty with high social status and differentiation from lower classes, as early as the 19th century (Brumberg, 1988) as well as more recently (Gremillion, 2003); or because upper and middle classes mean higher education and educational achievement, which contradicts traditional female gender socialization and can therefore foster anorexia (Lawrence, 1987) or finally because a ‘middle class context’ — i.e., an emphasis on success at school or in the public domain or specific definitions of individuality and independence — by itself, or through conflict with other social norms, creates a pathway to anorexia (Turner, 1996 ; Evans et al., 2004).