Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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      Since 1983 I have been exploring the theologies of female survivors of sexual and domestic violence. At the same time I have wondered about the social contexts that sustain and encourage eating disorders in women. In what follows, I explore how three issues—sexual abuse in the family, food and weight preoccupations, and patriarchal religious discourse—interrelate. The relations among Christian religious discourse, incest, and eating disorders have not been traced either in the literature on incest or in the literature on eating disorders. Yet these connections reveal an important, and so far unexamined, psychosocial phenomenon.

      Looking at how and where these issues intersect can illuminate some possible sources of female body, weight, and appetite preoccupations. My intention is to offer some social and psychological insights into the multilayered nature of painfully common forms of female suffering—incest and body hatred. I hope such information can awaken and empower helping professionals, advocates, friends of survivors, and, most importantly, the survivors of incest who also suffer from what psychiatrist Hilde Bruch calls “the relentless pursuit of thinness.”¹

      Sporadic accounts in the psychiatric literature of eating disorders show that as many as five out of six women in anorexia nervosa treatment programs² and seven out of ten bulimic³ college women report histories of sexual abuse before age twelve.⁴ Because my intention was to explore the theology of eating-disordered survivors of incest, I selected nine such women as the subjects for this study in order to explore possible religious links among the women interviewed. All were initially sexually abused before age eight. All reveal that such a history has set the stage for their problematic relationship to their appetite cues (for both sex and food), to their sense of autonomy and personal agency, and to their body-size and shape perception. In fact, there are important links of meaning in the incest survivor’s mind between her incest experience and her subsequent eating disorder.⁵ These links are also laced with religious content that indict a patriarchal culture. I will show the theological dimension of this cycle of abuse—roots centuries deep in the history of Christianity, especially in relation to Christian women.

      In collaboration with psychohistorian Charles Strozier, I created a qualitative, in-depth interview method based on Robert Lifton’s work with Vietnam veterans suffering post-traumatic stress.⁶ The women interviewed came from the spirituality groups with which I have worked as a facilitator or participant observer.

      Each of the nine women I interviewed was molested or raped as a child by at least one older male in her family or extended family; two of the survivors were abused by older females as well. This ultimate emotional betrayal reverberates throughout a survivor’s lifetime. It appears in her conflicted relationship to her God, to others whom she would like to trust but can’t, and, most insidiously, in her relationship to her body and bodily appetites. As long as the survivor believes she can do something to her body to have power, earn validation and worth, she remains entranced, ultimately a target of further victimization. She is seduced by a false solution.

      Important connections lie between a woman’s eating disorder, her religious discourse, and her traumatic past. Her abuse is, without question, a horrendous violation with traumatic bodily effects. Her eating disorder expresses both the avoidance of and the wish for redemption from that trauma. I hold that too often her theology, rather than mitigating her trauma, may function as a second source of injury insofar as it enables her spiritualization of her traumatic past and symptoms. I unite these central themes throughout this book, and offer a critique of the theological paternalism found in Christian discourse and in Twelve-Step groups. I believe that as long as the survivor of incest has a paternalistic God who promises to save her if she surrenders her will to Him, her struggle for power and meaning—masked by preoccupation with food, appetite, and weight—will forever be a source of conflict.

      A survivor’s psychosocial conflict is not about food but about a particularly gendered identity. As a woman, she has been taught, in myriad ways, to hang her security upon external validation. Female redemption is to come from outside herself—from the approval of others, from a male savior, or, in Twelve-Step parlance, from a Higher Power. I argue that a survivor’s empowerment process includes disentangling these internalized messages and meanings. As long as survivors of incest are reliant on a paternalistic and transcendent rescue, they are seduced into repeating the paradigm of helpless victim-powerful parent—the paradigm of their abuse. Such a model for “recovery” is a model for a permanent trance which ultimately disempowers the survivor. Her future needs to include affirming relationships that are not dependent on her surrender.

      If the significance of these connections becomes apparent it may facilitate empowering new psychological and social approaches to understanding the familial, cultural, and religious sources of female selfdestructive “inclinations,” specifically those found in women who experience a compulsion to flee from their female flesh through an eating disorder.

      Pastoral and secular counselors, advocates and friends, and survivors themselves must not only understand the gendered symptoms of a survivor’s suffering—her depriving stance toward her body—they must also work to see behind the disguise of the survivor’s eating behavior. For a survivor of incest, food is a “double-edged tool”⁷ to block or defend herself from being overwhelmed both by her painful past and by her nonaffirming present. Food intake or food refusal can also be a selfsoothing tool. Such an implement works to comfort the survivor. The anesthetizing behavior or ritual can stave off a sense of despair grafted onto her experience through sexual trauma and social gradations of sexual objectification. Food deprivation or purging behavior at times is an act of atonement in some of the survivor’s cases. The counselor must realize that until the survivor has more functional means to express her pain, shame, and outrage, as well as fill her emptiness, she will feel compelled to use the methods that have enabled her survival thus far—food refusal, overeating, or binge and purging behaviors. A counselor’s role can be to support a survivor through her memory excavation of past traumatic events, and to encourage her to reclaim her present and past power that enabled her to survive.

      As these women begin to make their own connections among their abuse, their religious discourse, and their nonconstructive coping behaviors, they can slowly shift from an unconsciously self-destructive relationship with their bodies to an increasingly conscious sense of embodiment. As survivors recognize that they have internalized the voices of the perpetrator and the scrutinizing gaze of a masculinist society—which have taken shape as problems with food and weight—they can begin working together to exorcise the socially and the religiously sanctioned offenses. Instead of seeing their bodily appetites as a source of shame and evil, they can begin to relate to their bodies as sources of power.

      I have set up the exploration of these connections in a way that parallels the construction of the questionnaire I used in interviewing the women.⁸ In chapter 1, I very briefly introduce the reader to the nine women interviewed and the key concepts employed—patriarchy, paternalism, incest, trauma, eating disorders, and recovery—and to the method to be implemented (see the appendixes for the questionnaire and for a fuller description of the methodology). In chapter 2, I articulate, in depth, the abuse backgrounds of the respondents.⁹ In chapter 3, using case studies, I briefly discuss the most provocative theories connecting eating disorders and incest. Chapter 4 is divided into two sections. In section 1, I trace misogynous themes in Christian theology that divinely license female submissiveness and male dominance in intimate relationships. I also discuss instances within Christian theology that reflect dread of the female body and show, some historical precedents for female self-starvation as, paradoxically, both parody of and resistance to a patriarchal culture. In section 2, I show how aspects of the female saints’ ideation in the late Middle Ages mirrors some of the feelings СКАЧАТЬ