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Research Article
6 January 2020

‘Fainting is one way of disappearing. Anorexia is another’: Disordered eating in Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo: A Memoir

Publication: Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 20, Number 2

Abstract

The Italian American autobiographical protagonist of Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo: A Memoir (1996) uses food to discuss issues of identity, gender, and social class. This article focuses in particular on the chapter ‘Anorexia’ where her disordered eating habits, shaped by her problematic relationship with her mother and other family members, encounter the deadly eating troubles of one of her college friends, thus allowing the protagonist to engage in deep reflection on the meaning of her unconventional relationship with food. Framing my reading within Susie Orbach’s Hunger Strike (1983) and other influential feminist works on anorexia, bulimia, and food-related pathologies, I will reflect on the role that the corporeal language of self-harm plays as a way of rejecting the family and the dominant culture as well as a paradoxical instrument of empowerment, thus placing DeSalvo’s memoir in the emerging genre of Bulimanografie.

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Biographies

Francesca Calamita is Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia where she teaches Italian Studies and collaborates with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington (2013) and was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, IMLR, University of London (2014). Her interests include women’s writing, gender studies, and feminist theory, the representation of women’s relationship with body and food in fiction, pop culture, advertisements, and films from a transnational perspective. She is author of a monograph on anorexia and bulimia in modern and contemporary Italian women’s writing, Linguaggi dell’esperienza femminile (2015) and co-editor (with Petra Bagley and Kathryn Robson) of Starvation, Food Obsession, and Identity (2017). She is co-editing (with Claudia Bernardi and Daniele DeFeo) a volume on the depiction of women’s relationship with food in Italian culture and society, titled Eve’s Sinful Bite (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). She is a member of the research network ‘Hungry for Words’, University of Nottingham.

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Published In

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 20Number 2June 2020
Pages: 249 - 271

History

Published online: 6 January 2020
Published in print: June 2020

Keywords

  1. disordered eating
  2. food
  3. identity
  4. gender
  5. social class
  6. motherhood
  7. anorexia
  8. Italian American women’s writing

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