Fat, syn and disordered eating: The dangers and powers of excess

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Fat Studies on 8 April 2015 available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21604851.2015.1016777This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating.This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating

Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities

“At ‘Amen Meals’ It’s Me and God” Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual

New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States. This study employs a qualitative-ethnographic methodology grounded in participant-observation and in-depth interviews to describe these nonobligatory, extra-halakhic rituals. What makes these rituals stand out is the women’s sense that through these rituals they experience a direct con- nection to God and, thus, can change reality, i.e., bring about jobs, marriages, children, health, and salvation for friends and loved ones. The ‘‘amen’’ rituals also create an open, inclusive woman’s space imbued with strong spiritual–emotional energies that counter the women’s religious marginality. Finally, the purposes and functions of these rituals, including identity building and displays of cultural capital, are considered within a theoretical framework that views ‘‘doing gender’’ and ‘‘doing religion’’ as an integrated experience

A História da Alimentação: balizas historiográficas

Os M. pretenderam traçar um quadro da História da Alimentação, não como um novo ramo epistemológico da disciplina, mas como um campo em desenvolvimento de práticas e atividades especializadas, incluindo pesquisa, formação, publicações, associações, encontros acadêmicos, etc. Um breve relato das condições em que tal campo se assentou faz-se preceder de um panorama dos estudos de alimentação e temas correia tos, em geral, segundo cinco abardagens Ia biológica, a econômica, a social, a cultural e a filosófica!, assim como da identificação das contribuições mais relevantes da Antropologia, Arqueologia, Sociologia e Geografia. A fim de comentar a multiforme e volumosa bibliografia histórica, foi ela organizada segundo critérios morfológicos. A seguir, alguns tópicos importantes mereceram tratamento à parte: a fome, o alimento e o domínio religioso, as descobertas européias e a difusão mundial de alimentos, gosto e gastronomia. O artigo se encerra com um rápido balanço crítico da historiografia brasileira sobre o tema

Contradiction, Paradox, Synecdoche:Parts and Whole in Medieval Devotion

All religions make some use of the material to represent or lead to something beyond. But not all religions emphasize materiality to the extent that Christianity does, impelled by the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and of the Incarnation. Hence a paradox: if the Christian God is understood to redeem, not merely to transcend, the material, then corruptible, partible matter must be capable of incorruption and eternal wholeness.  In her lecture,  Caroline Bynum will explore one consequence of this paradox: Christianity’s insistence on material fragmentation as a way of distributing the holy, while embedding this in the idea of synecdoche. Describing first the cult of holy matter and the way in which the anxieties about decay attendant upon it are reflected in theology and reliquaries, she will then look at five wound piety (which has often been understood as erotic or proto-feminist) as an example of the devotional sense of pars pro toto. Caroline Walker Bynum is professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and University professor emerita at Columbia University in New York City. She works on theology, religion and culture in the later Middle Ages. Her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval Studies. Her books Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1991) and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (1995) provided a paradigm for the history of the body. Her recent book Wonderful Blood (2007), which won the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America in 2011, focuses on devotion to the blood of Christ in northern Germany in the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. This lecture is based on a chapter in her new study Christian Materiality, which is due out from Zone Books  late this spring.Caroline Bynum, Contradiction, Paradox, Synecdoche: Parts and Whole in Medieval Devotion, lecture, ICI Berlin, 16 May 2011, video recording, mp4, 55:54 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e110516

Who Does She Think She Is?

Abstract: A retired medievalist uses an incident from her early career to urge younger scholars to both self-confidence and realism about their own scholarship. Pointing out that suspicion of bright, high-achieving women has not disappeared, she argues that the greatest weapon for triumphing over it is women’s self-confidence that they set their own standards for excellence