Why are so many women and girls distressed about their bodies, about food and about being a woman? The Thin Woman offers new feminist and post-structuralist insights into the problems of anorexia nervosa.

Helen Malson draws on historical and contemporary literature to complement the findings of her own original research, based on the findings from a series of interviews with women diagnosed as anorexic. What does the medical profession "know" about anorexia? This volume questions the diagnosis of this eating disorder as a medical pathology, and asks the best way to understand this problem. In reviewing the history of diagnosis concerning anorexia along with her interviews, we can begin to see the problem as one socially situated in the conceptions of gender, subjectivity and control.