What is an alien?
On decoding, re-coding, and alien abduction in Mysterious Skin and Aliens & Anorexia
[This essay discusses anorexia, CSA, rape, necrophilia, and animal abuse.]
In 1873, two physicians almost simultaneously published the first formal definitions of what is today described in the DSM as anorexia nervosa. Ernest-Charles Lasègue (1816–1883) and Sir William Gull (1816–1890)1 concurred on the major physical signs of the new disease, along with some of the key psychological disturbances. Neither one characterised anorexia (which Lasègue termed ‘anorexie hystérique’) as a fear of gaining weight, or a preoccupation with body image—though they did each note their patients generally seemed content with their emaciation.
A core problem in psychiatry is nosology—the classification and taxonomical arrangement of diseases. Though some doctors may, for example, start patients on antibiotics without conducting a lab test, the assumption motivating such an act is that the disease entity really exists and really is present in the body: some pernicious little rod of foreign genetic material, an invader upon foreign soil. A pathogen is an oppositional external agent, finally laid to waste by the clever technical intervention of the clinician. An infection is a war of one party, defined and distinct, against another.2
Psychiatric maladies do not work like this. From a catalogue of external manifestations (‘symptoms’) a clinician extrapolates backward to name an underlying cause (‘disease’), a hegemon’s reading practice, a desire to venture into the dense thicket of another’s internal world and to emerge victorious with a well-marked taxonomical tree in tow. A psychiatric ‘disease’ is a heuristic device. It is conjecture made out like a blank check to insurance companies and the families of ‘unruly’ patients; it is a story told to square the facts collected in the clinic. Faulkner called language “a shape to fill a lack;”3 so too have the nosological handbooks from DSM and ICD to Pinel’s Nosographie philosophique (1798) and further back.
Working in British and French contexts4 in which medicine was gaining epistemological authority and physicians were consolidating economic and political status, Gull wrote that the significance of photography to the medical field was to reveal objectively the ‘truth’ already uncovered by the trained scientific eye. In 1873 he began documenting his treatment of anorexics with engravings5 he commissioned based on photographs of these patients: a visual record of disease that simultaneously reduced it to its most visible characteristic. “Case reports of anorexia nervosa focussed on the management of emaciation without ever inquiring into the psychology of self-starvation, and photography corroborated this omission by constructing anorexia as a disease whose essence is confined to the surface of the body.”6 Whereas Lasègue considered anorexia a type of hysteria, in which self-starvation occurred as a result of some upset or emotional derangement, Gull defined the self-starvation as the disease itself. The etiology was irrelevant; the question was only to make the patient eat.
This circularity—one interprets deviant behaviour as a symptom, then extrapolates from the symptom to presume the existence of the disease, which is in turn only possible to define or identify by the behaviours now taxonomised as its symptoms—is, too, endemic to psychiatry. In a 2017 ‘ethnography of an entry into anorexia,’ Martin Chabert asked:
But why must it be the case that patients diagnosed ‘anorexic’ […] share by virtue of their diagnosis the common properties that would make them a coherent group? How can one not wonder if this coherence ‘on paper’ is produced by the medical entry into the inquiry, which homogenises the point of view of the ‘sick’ who are receiving the same treatment? […] This is a problem that in fact impresses itself on all researchers, including those in the social sciences, whose accounts take up the categories of medicine.7
Indeed one imagines the existing medical literature would benefit most auspiciously from the faintest awareness of such an insight. Noting that there is often a distinction between anorexia as considered by the theoretician and anorexia as an observed patient pathology, the psychoanalyst Tilmann Habermas8 once simply summarised the (then-current) DSM criteria for the diagnosis, then concluded the paragraph by asserting that “Anorexia is thus clearly different from the various other forms of psychological restriction of food intake that produce thinness.”9 The logical leap is as prevalent in the genre as it is infuriating; ditto a few lines up, where Habermas reports that case studies prior to 1918 clearly demonstrate that “patients at the time were not significantly different to today’s anorexics.”10 This is of course true, inasmuch as clinicians now look for and report on many of the same signs that their forebears did between 1870 and 1918.
Facts are theory-laden.11 This is to say that the prior theoretical commitments of an observer affect the selection and framing of the facts they record, which is in turn to say that the evaluation of a scientific theory is complicated: observational and empirical evidence is collected by human beings, who are inherently and always guided by our preexisting understanding of the inquiry.
This is true even for simple observations. If I want to know how cold it is, and I walk outside with a thermometer, my personal opinions won’t affect the reading on the thermometer. But they quite clearly have determined my method of scientific inquiry: I presume that coldness exists, that I can measure it, and specifically that I can do so by relying on an instrument maker’s calculations of how high a tube of mercury can rise in given atmospheric conditions. It is possible for me to carry out this entire operation without once defining coldness for myself, or attempting to—or even proving such a thing exists. We think of the scientific process as a cumulative effort based on solidly established facts, which saves everybody the necessity of re-learning what coldness is every time we want to check the weather. This is all well and good so long as those fundamental facts really are established. In psychiatry they are not.
Why presume that one self-starver may be interchangeable with another at all? For Gull, the answer was simple: the disease was the starvation, the symptom the emaciation, and the cure its reversal. The category of anorexia is thus deployed as a kind of dragnet, capable of capturing (and promising ‘health’ to) virtually any self-starver.
On the other hand, for Habermas, the preservation of the medical category demands its narrowing: here anorexia is a subset of psychologically mediated starvation, a specific disease with specific presentation and etiology (namely, the desire to be thin). If Gull’s model pitches itself on simplicity, Habermas’s has the advantage of rigging the rhetorical game around itself: a self-starver who does not meet the DSM criteria simply is not anorexic, at least not on paper.
For Gull, any two patients emaciated by their own hand were alike simply because he defined the individual distinguishing factors as non-essential to the nature of the disease. For Habermas, two anorexics were alike simply because he defined anorexics by their alikeness. Two tautologies facing down 120 years in the history of force-feeding.
Into this thicket enters, in 2000, the filmmaker Chris Kraus with Aliens & Anorexia. Told in distinct but interrelated vignettes, A&A asks: what is the content of the act of not-eating? Anorexia is the shape, but what is the lack we ask it to fill? Lasègue considered the psychopathology exclusively the domain of women and girls; Gull didn’t consider it at all. What Kraus seeks, then, is a third option: per the dust description, a “recla[mation of] anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor ‘self-esteem.’”
The book is non-linear and non-chronological, but never coy: by page 17, Kraus tells us exactly what the jacket does, only in slightly different words. Among people who believe in aliens, there are those who fear abduction and those who seek out extraterrestrial beings as friends. The former “see the Aliens as hostile and sadistically dispassionate invaders, probing human genitals and anuses with high-tech speculums.” The latter, on the other hand, tend to seek out contact in groups. According to Kraus, these people want “to escape from ‘the imprisonment of total alienation and self-alienation; from political and existential martial law.’” She then introduces the philosopher Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace—wartime notebooks and “chronicles of her will to wait for God”—and then the plot of her own experimental film Gravity & Grace, in which “a group of lunatics” in New Zealand waits for an alien to come down to them.12
Two points to gather up here. Moving backward, there is first the metaphor of the alien as an escape from alienation itself, and Kraus’s attempt to reconfigure self-starvation as the attempt to reach the non-alienated state. This is not to say that Kraus considers self-starvation categorically exceptional—the characters in her film seek much the same sort of enlightenment as Weil does (at least in Kraus’s reading), and without primary recourse to food restriction. Starvation is a means of self-actualisation via self-abnegation, but it is not the only such.
Second, returning to that contingent of people who fear alien encounters, there is the question of absolute alterity. The alien in the abduction narrative is curious about his (“invariably, this Alien is male”)13 human subject’s body. He alone is the custodian of precious knowledge he may choose to bestow upon his captive; “she is grateful for the generosity he extends by speaking to her.” He is tall, clever, articulate; “his attention is a precious gift.” He shares his knowledge only verbally; the sexual encounter is an auxiliary humiliation. “It’s a little bit like playing s/m, without any of the pleasure.” The alien abduction is narrativised in a five-act structure as “a shameful and terrible ordeal.” In case we missed it, Kraus throws us a bone: “The Great Man, ooops, I mean the Alien-in-Charge…”14
Here then is the text’s thesis. The lack into which one might try to fit the shape of anorexia is the disjunction of alienation. The Alien himself possesses the Foucauldian power/knowledge that creates the disjunction. To refuse to eat is, for Kraus, a rejection of the social situation of alienation: the psychiatric institution, the workplace, suburban New Zealand. Quite apart from the clinical shape of anorexia, Kraus articulates an alternative interpretation of self-starvation as both an escape from one’s intolerable circumstances—a de-coding—and an attempt to reach some alternate Aufklärung—a re-coding.
At this point we must also attend to the alien qua abductor, however. An alien encounter need not be genuinely enlightening: his captive subject the alien “gratifies and torments … with a partial explanation.”15 This is knowledge foisted upon an unwilling subject, a new hegemon contiguous in terms with the terrestrial: “He tells her things that she’ll never fully understand about Alien technology and culture.” This is, firstly, Kraus’s way of preserving the internal sense-making of the self-starver without threatening the telos of the psychiatric industry. That is, the patient may be acting rationally, responding to a truly irremediable social situation—but this does not necessitate the corollary that her actions will free her; the great alterity she reaches for may indeed be only the keeper of the kingdom in which she already languishes.
Secondly, and more interestingly, however, the alien-as-abductor also tells us that for Kraus, alien-ness may serve a narrative purpose even upon return to earth. The alien abduction is not itself a recovered memory, but is like one.16 The abduction is the empty scaffolding of a story that may be filled with the content one will not, or cannot, gaze upon bare. A story about aliens is a story about something that cannot be spoken.
I have attended three croquet matches in my life; I mean real matches, with rolling lawns and champagne flutes and with two full teams, in uniform, mostly possessing physiques and phenotypes that one imagines would be flatteringly torchlit at a certain kind of Nazi rally. Croquet matches of this ilk are almost comically boring, to the point that the average spectator knows approximately 30% of the rules of the game and will spill deviled-egg filling down your sweatshirt if you ask for anything further.
One year, during the game’s last set,17 a group of local teenagers beat the shit out of a baby squirrel underneath a dorm window out of which I happened to be smoking. I heard later that an acquaintance had taken the squirrel to an animal hospital, but that it was unlikely to have survived. I saw only the end of the violence—and only through a haze of the bottom-shelf whiskey I already regretted stealing off a friend—but through some combination of eyewitness and gossip I eventually ascertained that the teenagers, who were also drunk, had picked up the animal by its tail and thwacked it against a nearby tree repeatedly.
My friend Neal, who went outside and stopped them, was in the middle of a book about bonobos and didn’t eat meat. I didn’t have a fake ID and was reticent to involve myself in any confrontation that might attract police attention. The kids scattered off in the direction of the docks, although Neal says we ran into a few of them later that night at a pub on Maryland Ave.
In Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004), two teenage boys reconnect after having been raped by their childhood baseball coach a decade prior. Neil, who remembers the abuse, tends to narrativise it as proof that he was Coach’s special favourite; Brian, who blacked out during the sexual encounters, remembers only a blue light and the touch of a strange hand, and believes he may have survived capture by aliens.
The alien abduction is a narrative frame capable of absorbing the unknowable. The alien in Brian’s memory-inventions is a source of knowledge—a scientific investigator probing at child-Brian’s body—as well as a figure of power. The alien operates by rules Brian cannot understand, but feels sure must exist: “Something happened to me when I was little. Do you know what I’m talking about?” he asks his father, having correctly but as yet unwittingly identified one way in which the legal–economic ownership of children engenders their sexual abuse at the hands of guardians. The alien is a potent figure for Brian because its utter alterity in the literal sense is precisely the load-bearing element in the fantasy: that is, a being not-from-earth cannot be expected to operate by the terrestrial social compact Brian believes protected him as a child. The alien is a recuperative figure in this sense. Brian’s recollection of his childhood is, at the beginning of the movie, predominantly coloured by a perception of (physical) safety and security. The sexual abuse is an aberration he can therefore only interpret as a foreign invasion. The origin of evil is not an adult he trusted but an unknown and unknowable interloper.
When Brian and Neil finally reach the baseball coach’s old house, and Neil recounts the assault to Brian, the screen of alien opacity shatters to reveal only a more rotten earth behind it. The knowledge withheld during Brian’s alien encounters does not make him free, happy, or ‘healed.’ “I wanted to tell Brian it was over now and everything would be okay. But that was a lie, plus I couldn’t speak anyway,” Neil’s closing monologue intones. “No one ever says, I was kidnapped by the Aliens and it’s the best sex I ever had.”18
Araki’s approach is unusual in the canon of fictional abuse narratives in that it locates the moment of Brian’s enlightenment not as a liberation but as a disillusionment. All he has gained by the end of the film is clarity, and if Neil is any illustrative case, this is not an intrinsically better or healthier position to be in, merely a different one. The alien was a device that allowed Brian to describe an event he didn’t yet know how to name; however, Araki’s suggestion at the end is that merely learning how to name it in no way ensures it is a less present or painful memory. If the alien abduction is a coping mechanism, then equally too is any other narrative: the story Neil tells himself about being the object of Coach’s special attention; his friend Wendy’s refutation of the same (“Neil… you were eight years old.”)
The film ends not with the two boys processing their trauma—indeed, arguably this is precisely what Brian has already been doing all along, via the alien abduction as a narrative conduit—but sitting together on Coach’s old couch as Neil thinks about all the grief and suffering in the world. “I wished with all my heart that we could just leave this world behind,” he tells us, having at last revealed to Brian that such a thing was never possible.
The information Brian has been seeking for the entire film is the destruction of the very belief system that has led him there. The alien abduction is a thesis narrative containing, in its orientation to uncover an esoteric truth, its own dialectical negation. If it succeeds as a narrative, it will destroy the conditions for belief in itself; up to that point, its proponents exist in a kind of ‘unhappy consciousness,’19 seeking knowledge by means of epistemological parameters that preclude access to the very same.
However, Araki’s claim is not a moralised one: Brian’s drive to discover what happened to him as a child is ultimately a matter of his own curiosity. He is not a better person, morally or by clinical-therapeutic standards, at the end of the film. The alien abduction narrative is a helpful one, insofar as it allows characters like Brian and his friend Avalyn to survive in a world that is demonstrably capable of harming them. The figure of the alien is thus a coping mechanism, but only insofar as any other narrativisation of sexual abuse is, too—however much or little resemblance it bears to real events.
What the alien abduction can do, and narratives like Neil’s or Wendy’s can’t, is express the emotional reality of child sexual abuse prior to its transliteration into medico-legal descriptive terms. The alien abduction appeals to Brian because it explains his sense of displacement, violation, and fear as logically preceding the narrative backfill. Whereas Brian understands that something hurt him but doesn’t know what it was, Neil struggles to reconcile his sense of having been an object of desire with an ethical belief that Coach has transgressed—not to mention the fear and unease that percolate his memories of the abuse.
The film doesn’t suggest that one boy has unlocked a ‘better’ means of surviving, and although their shared revelation at the end is certainly a change for both of them, it’s not clear it will be an immediately or uncomplicatedly positive one. The escape route Brian sought via the story of the alien is now gone—but equally painful for Neil are his attempts to talk through Coach’s assaults head-on. All roads lead from Rome.
The central problem with A&A, then, is that it lacks this sense of symmetry. For Araki the alien abduction is one story among many—one that may genuinely alleviate suffering or make daily existence tolerable, but one that may equally become a source of distress and terror in itself. Both Neil and Brian have, in some sense, outgrown the narratives they have been using to understand Coach’s abuse, but where so much clinical healing proceeds upon teleology, Araki does not conceptualise Neil and Brian as moving on a linear path to a particular destination. Instead, Mysterious Skin suggests that healing may be better understood as a process of managing—a process that may mutate, wax, or wane at different times, and in which one may seek numerous and varying ways to reconcile with the fact of living in a social order dependent on exploitation and therefore welcoming of abuse.
Kraus’s claim, though doused in critical theory and far more explicitly engaged with the mirroring of political violence on the interpersonal level, is at times facile by comparison. One of the main characters (as such) in A&A is Simone Weil (1909–1943), the Christian-mystical philosopher whose wartime notebooks, edited and published as La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Gravity & Grace), are the namesake for Kraus’s own film. Weil starved to death at the age of 34 after a lifetime of empathetic identification with the downtrodden and deprived, located as the source of her urge to reject sustenance: “She felt the suffering of others in her body, and found a language and a system for it. […] Craving unity, she launched herself into an altruistic panic, a state in which there aren’t any boundaries between who you are and what you see.”20
This act of identification—outside the self, outside the polity—is the origin of self-starvation in A&A. To hunger is to access a Great Outdoors21 via experiential collapse into the body of another.
Most sex-ed aimed at children these days includes a unit on sexual abuse. Tell an adult you trust if someone tries to touch you in a way you’re not comfortable with, these pamphlets declaim, or perhaps Draw a square around your ‘personal zone.’ Now practice with your seatmate some things you can say if you don’t want someone to touch you inside that zone.
Read this material more closely and you will notice that these warnings are invariably caveated, perhaps most explicitly to account for the medical encounter and the parent. No one should touch you here or here without your permission, except.
Medical sexual abuse is defined out of the child’s vocabulary. Medical touch is necessary and salubrious, and therefore cannot categorically be classified with rape or assault or tell a trusted adult. A doctor is a trusted adult. If a doctor touched you and it made you uncomfortable, you were mistaken. What happened is not what you experienced but something else. You are making up the wrong kind of story. The events in your story are incompatible with the physical parameters of the known universe. They ontologically cannot have taken place.
Is it any great surprise that the archetypal alien abduction is a rape? My suggestion is not that every alien abduction survivor is sublimating a past sexual trauma (nor is this what Araki proposes), but that the alien abduction is the rare site at which the connection between rape and medical touch may be made explicit. The alien has the doctor’s dispassionate gaze and scientific curiosity about the subject’s body; it gains access to that body in a kind of heterotopic haunted house, a spaceship–lab–clinic equipped with the gleaming metal instruments capable of making transparent the great intricate workings of living tissue. In Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), teenage Bill, having just discovered that his wealthy family are really an alien species of incestuous cannibals, winds up in a hospital where he overhears what is clearly and simultaneously both a medical procedure and a rape, shrouded only behind a gauzy curtain. In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Tom Cruise’s sexually repressed petit-bourgeois doctor character argues with his wife (Nicole Kidman) over the significance of topless medical exams. You really expect me to believe that when you’re touching a great pair of tits you’re not aroused by them at all?22 Kidman asks, only to be met with Cruise’s blank insistence that it’s different when he’s at work.
The medical encounter is considered to be of a different character to other acts of physical touch. It is not meant to be decoded with the same Rosetta stone as rape. The trick is that, in reality, most rape is not actually meant to be decoded with the same Rosetta stone as Rape, capital-R: Rape Proper. Someone who does not consider a medical encounter definitionally capable of involving rape does not really think a parent or a priest or a baseball coach can do it, either. The trick is that Rape is often a threat, but rape is rarely a reality. It is horrible in the abstract and unthinkable in the concrete. Its mundanity is matched by its conceptual elision.
The first trouble with A&A is that, for all Kraus wants to read self-starvation as a creative act, she cannot escape the notion that its valence derives from its use as a means of self-abnegation. It is a curious last-ditch recourse to a particular religious-cum-clinical logic, one that exists uncomfortably beside what is otherwise an attempt to read social and political content back into the rejection of food.
Kraus is—deservedly—scathing when she glosses the often quasi-feminist, psychoanalytic schools of thought on anorexia: Johanna Tauber, Maude Ellman, Rudolph Bell, Mara Palazzoli, Susie Orbach, Hilde Bruch, A.H. Crisp. Marlene Boskind-White, Cherry O’Neill, Kim Chernin. “It is female psychotherapists and recovering anorexics who really lead the pack in nailing down the anorexic girl as a simpering solipsistic dog.”23 The psychoanalyst’s anorexic is perfectionist, obedient, high-strung, and in one way or another invariably at odds with the mother and father. She is also wealthy, white, and female. She is a product of self-obsession both societal and personal, and via the weight-loss advert has secularised Saint Catherine’s holy fast.
Besides the psychoanalytic approach we may add to the catalogue the hysteric explanations, discourses on glandular causes, the search for ‘biological causes’ in the twin studies of the 1980s, and the neurobiological and then ‘biopsychosocial’ approaches of the new millennium.24 To leap from medieval saints to Gull and Lasègue necessitates ignoring decades to arguably centuries of medical discourses on the mind–stomach connection,25 but no matter—according to most popular western histories little of interest happened between the Italian renaissance and the Age of Revolutions anyway. The point is that these explanations have in common a general disinterest in any expressed desires of the self-starver, rendered a kind of unreachable shadow figure trapped behind the clinical construction of the anorexic. Not-eating must be understood in clinical terms if it is to be cured by clinical means; patient or other epistemologies constitute at best a distraction from the therapeutic work undertaken.
“So long as anorexia is read exclusively in relation to the subject’s feelings towards her own body, it can never be conceived of as an active, ontological state,” Kraus writes.26 She is repelled by the “multiplicity of readings” food may be subjected to: its origins, its passage through the channels of imperial resource extraction, its relation to the people around it (“In its journey to the table, was this food handled by anyone who cared or understood it?”)27 Overpriced food “smells like bills and coins and plastic,” a forcible intrusion of economic alienation by means of what is proffered as sustenance.28 “Dear Walter Benjamin,” she writes, riffing on the Arcades Project and Theses on the Philosophy of History, “Cynicism travels through the food chain. To stop eating is to temporarily withdraw from it. Without love it is impossible to eat.”29
The heart of the text lies then in the suggestion that anorexia promises escape—not the escape of death but of political liberation. Anorexia is a “state of heightened consciousness” and “an active stance: the rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food, the creation of an involuted body.”30 This is the content Kraus offers to fill the gap of the clinical entity anorexia: it is, or at least it can be, a political act. It is an effort to reject the morally intolerable—a kind of political over-coding that cannot be contained by the prescribed drumbeat of meal-snack-meal.
Yet even in the leadup to this formulation Kraus cannot escape the allure of anorexia-as-abnegation. Instead, she breaks the chain further down: Simone Weil’s “advocacy of decreation” arose not from masochism or from a hatred of her body, but because she “want[ed] to really see.”31 Her first experiences in decreation came through factory work,32 and it was this political-economic alienation—instantiated in the starved bodies of Europe’s Jews, the battle scars of resistance fighters, the dispossessed the world over—that she recreated when she ceased to eat.
This thesis ultimately peters out somewhere between a real rejection of the psychoanalytic readings of anorexia, and a mere footnote to the same. In 1962, Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that, for something to be good to eat, it must also be “good to think” (bon à penser): food is never only food, but represents class, cultural identity, social connection, and so on. Inasmuch as food is political, so then is rejecting it. But it is still a politics articulated on the terrain of the body, a politics of whittling down the “wretched flesh” overrun by signifiers and suffering.33
The second problem of A&A follows directly from this construction. Still writing loosely to Benjamin, Kraus despairs to her partner: “The global food supply—Hearst Castle—postmodern architecture with all that glass mixed in cupolas and porches—Korean salad bars, forty different flavors of identically tasteless food—it’s everything you want, except now you don’t want any of it!”34 This contemporary nightmare of transnational commerce is contrasted, a page later, to an anecdote from a trip in Bourgogne: a farm, Kraus’s partner "speaking fast Parisian French,” an old woman offering the couple a taste of the creamy cheese she makes all by herself, and Kraus: “And this was food.”35
What exactly is the difference between Kraus’s move here and the cottagecore fascism of any French-countryside-worshipping celebrity chef? If handmade cheese in Bourgogne is the Great Outside haunting industrial food consumption, one may as well skip Kraus and go straight to Alice Waters or Michael Pollan for a cultural critique of anorexia. A&A wants to rewrite starvation not as self-hatred but as an act of alienation turned on itself—a reaching-out, an attempt to substitute the metaphysically unknowable for the politically unthinkable. But, even if one is inclined to accept this elision of the embodied into the incorporeal,36 the text has at best a misguided understanding of alienation if artisanal cheesemaking in bucolic Europe is supposed to be its remedy.
It’s not impossible to imagine a psycho-politics of identification outside the self. Lisa Downing has proposed to read necrophilia as a fixation in which “identification and desire intermingle. It is a radically narcissistic type of desire as its original object is neither mother nor father, but a concretization of the self’s auto-destructive death wish.”37 Indeed corpses, and death itself, were popular as both mass entertainment and erotic fixations during the nineteenth century. Especially prior to Haussmannisation, visits to the Paris Morgue were one of the more popular tourist activities the city offered, and the public displays made no secret of the particular appetite for the bodies of young girls.38 Desire converged on them from numerous directions: the wish to be them, the wish to fuck them, the wish to become them by fucking them. “Among people who reject the mystical state, the only yardstick left for measuring the will-to-decreate is sadomasochism.”39
From the eternal providence divine
a power descends into the tree and rain
back there—a power that makes me lean and fine.
And all these people singing in their pain
weep for immoderate service of the throat,
and thirst and hunger make them pure again.
I am climbing a mountain to reach God. I am starving the earthly flesh off my spirit. God is merciful and he will forgive me this flesh as long as I can make it go away. As it sloughs off me, my burden eases and my steps are lighter. My body is less my body and it carries easy. My body is less my body because it carries easy. The more I climb, the less I suffer.
If I keep climbing now, how can anyone be sure I am really climbing for the sake of God? If I keep climbing and it’s only to ease my suffering then I cannot ever reach God. If I keep climbing and I’m still suffering it’s because I haven’t yet learned how to love God. To love God is to feed off God. If you enjoy starving you’re a pervert. If you don’t you’re in sin. A Communion wafer is a simple pressed paste of water and flour, nutritionally comparable to matzoh or a saltine. Calorie-labelling laws in many countries do not require companies to report a macronutrient content if the accepted serving size has been shown in regulatory testing to contain trivially few calories. Therefore you may find that the Body of Christ contains no fats, proteins, or carbohydrates, and accordingly no calories, when it comes off the factory line. Depending on your activity level and the size of your wafers, on a hypothetical mono diet you would likely need to eat upwards of 2000 Bodies of Christ each day in order to maintain optimal biological functioning. You would likely feel constipated due to the paucity of fibre content in refined flours, and would frequently experience bloating due to the amount of water that the human digestive system must hold when metabolising carbohydrate.
And many a time along this turning way
we find the freshening of our punishment,
our punishment—our solace, I should say,
For that same will now leads us to the tree
as once led the glad Christ to say, ‘My God,’when by His opened veins He set us free.
“Because it’s mostly girls who do it, anorexia is linked irrevocably with narcissism,” Kraus says. “It’s inconceivable that the female subject might ever simply try to step outside her body, because the only thing that’s irreducible, still, in female life is gender.”41
The gendering of anorexia is slippery. Health follows wealth, and marginalisation induces distress; it is not surprising that anorexia should show a gender disparity. Exactly how large this disparity really is depends, of course, on how we define anorexia, eating disorder, pathological starvation, and so forth.42 Kraus is certainly correct when she notes that men who starve or deprive themselves are rarely psychoanalysed to the extent, or with the same degree of scorn, that women are. Augustine reports dry-fasting in the Confessions as a rejection of his base and spiritually distracting pleasure sensations, but I’ve yet to read anyone using those stolen pears as the key to decode his secret underlying body-hate.
However, it is not the case that all gendered descriptions of anorexia have abrogated a political or even explicitly feminist analysis. Susan Bordo proposed that the condition was an extreme symptom of a dominant cultural logic that treats women’s bodies as malleable objects to control and display—a social violence that flares especially when women are perceived to be gaining independence or asserting themselves.43 Anorexia has been conceptually figured around the loss and gain of women’s legal rights, or, for example, around the academic pressure and racist social exclusion endured by a French-Algerian girl in an élite preparatory class.44 Joan Jacobs Brumberg considered anorexia the domain of middle-class girls with certain kinds of family lives,45 a view that still dominates today—but the historiography does include the occasional assertion otherwise, especially as the clinical category eating disorder widens around the shape of anorexia.
In Mysterious Skin, the connection between gender and sexual violence is primarily drawn out against the terrain of male sexuality and sociality.46 The film opens with Brian recounting in voiceover the day that Coach raped him: a five-hour blackout that begins at his baseball game and ends when his sister finds him, nose bleeding, hiding in the family’s basement. His father naps on the couch while Brian and his sister entertain themselves; when their mother gets home, she tends to Brian’s nose in the bath. An expository exchange between the parents reveals that Brian didn’t get picked up from the game by his mother as she was stuck at work and had no idea it was even raining; his father, meanwhile, disparages Brian for being both a poor athlete and “a quitter,” then shambles off to bed. Brian’s mother takes him off the baseball team, which he’d only joined at the behest of his disappointed father in the first place. When we rejoin Brian as an adult, his father has now been entirely absent from his life for the past two years.
Thus, in both a very practical sense and a deeper philosophical one, it is Brian’s childhood failure to correctly practice masculinity that renders him particularly vulnerable to the coach’s abuse. That his father already disdains him makes it particularly easy for another trusted adult to step in;47 sexual violence is the disciplinary arm of the gender system already punishing him. After the assault, Brian begins wetting the bed and experiences more nosebleeds and fainting spells—all forms of bodily infirmity that his father interprets as further evidence of Brian’s weakness and inferiority.
In other words, the way in which Brian’s father disdainfully feminised his son created conditions that allowed sexual abuse to flourish—and the bodily signs of having endured that abuse, in turn, form further evidence of Brian’s essential effeminacy in his father’s eyes. A tradition in tetravalent elemental theory holds that masculinity is associated with unyielding solid matter, femininity with flows and fluxes of water.48 Femininity is medicalised: it is construed as disabling, and bodily failure itself as feminine.
Neil’s introduction to the film—like Brian, he narrates his own section in voiceover—begins with a flashback to him, eight years old, masturbating. He relates that, by this time, he had already been doing it for years; he also foregrounds his attraction to men. Only at the end of the sequence does he mention Coach—a participant in Neil’s sexual development, to be sure, but not the sole or even primary figure the story revolves around. Neil describes infatuation at the first sight of his coach: “He looked like the lifeguards, cowboys, and firemen” that Neil has seen in his mother’s Playgirl magazines.
Neil becomes the team’s star player (“the other kids were a bunch of hopeless spazzes,” he adds, as the editors cut to Brian dropping the bat when a pitch flies his way) and looks for Coach’s approval whenever he makes a good play. In his teenage self’s voiceover narration, Neil couples his athletic performance and his attraction to Coach, who uses his position of authority to ensure closer physical access to Neil—at the movies, then back at Coach’s house. In a different way to Brian, Neil is rendered particularly vulnerable by his gender deviance—in this case, his homosexual interests. Unlike Brian’s father, Coach does not have the intention of punishing Neil into performing hetero masculinity, but the way in which child-Neil’s sexual desires already push him to the margins of society (the film opens with him in a classic voyeur pose, rendered absurd only by the reality of an eight-year-old) makes it easier for Coach to ab/use and discard his body on his own whims.
Thus, in Mysterious Skin, Brian and Neil both experience alienation, prior to the abuse, that articulates along the lines of gender. The threat that one could become female is only the flipside of the exhortation to be male; womanhood is not just a generic opposite condition against which manhood defines itself, but more specifically represents a failed state into which a male subject may at any time fall or be pushed. When teenage Neil—now a sex worker, and more legibly gender non-conforming—is raped by a client in New York City, the man orders him to “Open wide and suck it, slut,” repeating the slur throughout the rest of the assault.
In A&A, womanhood is a determining factor all but guaranteeing that, should you ever try to meet an alien, you will be called a self-hating narcissist. In Mysterious Skin, womanhood itself is a kind of alien—an alternate and unknown way of being, a state of abjection that looms as an indirectly spoken threat before, during, and after the abuse.
Legally and socially, we often speak of “women and children” together; the two groups are defined in certain respects by shared subservient positions in relation to the patriarch. The sexual knowledge child-Neil lacks is part of what drives him to Coach; the familial-economic power with which Brian’s father bullies his son is only replicated with a veneer of friendliness when Coach invites him over, offers him food and video games, and then undresses him.
Kraus’s aliens are male, too: they are boyfriends, teachers, Great Men. But, because A&A treats gender as a static pair of opposites rather than as a violent process of creating and decreating a body, the text can never quite reconcile its notion of not-eating as an attempt at escaping-femaleness with its efforts to read rationality and dignity back into the lives of the female anorexics who have tried it. The effort is understandable, Kraus argues. But it is still futile.
For a variety of reasons mainly having to do with poverty, tuberculosis was rampant in nineteenth-century Europe. It was not, however, generally associated with the figure of the sensitive, consumptive woman until around the 1840s.49 Even after, this was an unstable discourse, constantly butting up against fears of degeneracy, urban filth, and moral decline. While tuberculosis certainly carried different valences for the wealthy, it is curious that many popular histories have so calcified around the notion that illness has ever been an uncritically celebrated trait in women.
“I leave to Gavarni, poet of chloroses, / His babbling troupe of sickly beauties,” wrote Baudelaire, who was otherwise at least passingly enamoured of corpsefucking,50 “Because I cannot find among these pale roses / A flower like my red ideal.”51
That he bothered to object to the chlorotic ideal at all indicates that it retained popularity as an archetype of beauty—but also that it rankled more than just him. Wealthy sickly women in the nineteenth century could be aestheticised and sentimentalised, but they were also considered to be difficult, demanding, sexually disturbed, and potential vectors of disease—dangerous biological links between upper-crust society and the filthy urban poor. Many consumptives lived or died in institutions. Some of these institutions were their homes. If the female consumptive was a figure of fascination, her allure often derived in part from the sense that she was in fact transgressing the prescribed limits of femininity, and possibly in a way that threatened the very fabric of society.
Similarly, anorexia has never had an uncomplicated relationship to overcultural beauty norms. Photography of emaciated bodies has been a mainstay in the medical literature for over a century, but in other contexts the same images provoke pearl-clutching. ‘Pro-ana’ is a fetish object for its detractors, a kind of sewer crocodile prowling the underbelly of the information age: a social body instantiated into a starving teenage body and coming inside your house to steal away your chubby-cheeked babies and turn them into bratty scrawny strangers.52 From time to time some public health official or another will propose to run pictures of emaciated anorexics on billboards, or in educational TV shows, to warn the impressionable public against the danger of the disease. The public, for their part, generally find such images both titillating and scandalous—or perhaps titillating because scandalous.
The rhetorical claim that medical photography makes about anorexia is not just that it is unhealthy, but that it is ugly. Indeed, the promise of most ‘eating disorder treatment centres’ remains along the lines of We will make you more beautiful. Don’t you want to be more beautiful? One of the only books with anything useful to say about starvation-induced hypothalamic amenorrhea also includes readers’ recovery testimonies: “My boobs are fuller … my husband thinks I’m sexy.”53 This is for the same reason that before-and-afters can’t show fat recovered anorexics: their existence threatens the conceptual linkage between health and beauty upon which the anorexia doctor’s career rests. A girl must be thin. But she must have flesh, too—at the very least enough to reproduce.
“Anorexia nervosa described a pathology in which physical appearance functioned as such an accurate index of health that feminizing the body of the emaciated girl through refeeding was synonymous with saving her life.”54 By attributing to the anorexic the phrenological decoding practices of the medical profession itself, the physician transforms anorexia into a disease both caused and cured by vanity.
The associations between anorexia and gender—anorexia as a pursuit of feminine beauty, anorexia as a rejection of the female body, anorexia as a marker of a feminine disposition—thus articulate on terrain analogous to Araki’s treatment of the relationship between sexual assault and gender. Although the aliens are male, the Great Outdoors is female. The cosmology is merely tautological: whatever is baffling, opaque, chaotic, or unknowable is female by definition.
However, what Araki succeeds at doing is decoding alterity—Brian’s discovery that he and Neil were assaulted together—without foreclosing on the possibility of recoding it later. Brian and Neil come to an understanding of their shared past, but the screenplay is never judgmental or prescriptive about how they respectively narrativise the events moving forward. Araki gives content to the blank alien figure who has been menacing Brian’s abduction memories—he is, of course, the baseball coach, but more to the point he is metonymously representative of the much broader set of economic relations and legal regulations that produces the child as a possession in the first place.
However, the film imposes no personal preference as to how Brian and Neil could, or should, respond to this content. Brian gains clarity about the past, but whereas acceptance of an officially-sanctioned clinical interpretation of one’s psyche is normally a mainstay of ‘recovery stories’ (fictional and otherwise), Mysterious Skin ends with the two boys embracing as the shot pulls back, the old couch surrounded only by an inky dark. Whether Brian is better off with the information he’s learned, and what he will do with it, are simply not within Araki’s purview; the film is uninterested in imposing a teleological recovery narrative on the characters. The triumph of this ending is to both reveal the alien to us, and to open other frontiers of alterity.
In A&A, on the other hand, Kraus struggles to reconcile the ultimate knowability of the alien with the utter alienness she attributes to food itself. Suffering debilitating flareups of Crohn’s disease, she develops a worsening fear of food; rummaging through a friend’s kitchen, she reads the labels not just for trigger ingredients but as the provenance documents for her next meal. She is bothered by the distances these foods have travelled, by the number of hands and machines that have touched them. The unknown here is the food; the efforts to make transparent aim at it. Food is the conduit to pain. Pain maps the contours of the body social and individual.
In Kraus’s film Gravity & Grace, the aliens don’t arrive to rapture up the doomsday cult. The group splinters; one member meets with a curator in NYC to pitch her art portfolio. “Yes, but don’t you think you need to distinguish between the mere debris of capitalism and a more heartfelt form of shit?” the curator asks. “More towards a manifestation of the transcendental sublime?” Read: the answer to capitalist overcode is not merely to decode, but to recode: to reach for something completely new. “I think if you were to take another look at the kitchen, you’d find a deep source of new material you have not tapped into,” the curator finishes.55 Read: food. Read: eat. Read: don’t.
Part of the difficulty here is that the association between women and mysticism is not usually a very interesting one. Women’s nature is chaotic, unknowable, illogical; women have access to some occult higher knowledge: these are not new ideas. In the sixteenth century, fasting teenage girls were paraded about the European medical literature as evidence that women were medical aberrations and wonders of nature (prodiges de la nature).56 Indeed the rhetorical construction of nature as the non-agentic terrain upon which man articulates his dominance has long been linked to analogous claims over women’s bodies.57
The notion of womanhood-as-alienation is a necessary component of any epistemology of anorexia, but where A&A simultaneously traffics in the notion of womanhood-as-alien, it does little besides unify two unproductive schools of ambivalently feminist thought. A&A comes to feel like intellectually edging. I’m uninterested in recovery narratives and I don’t think starvation is intrinsically any more meaningful than non-starvation. But it’s no less meaningful, either. There is content to the act. It can be known and named; it is quite often itself a means of knowing and naming—or not-knowing and re-naming, as the case may be—something else.
In one vignette, teenage Katia clambers into a car with three drunk men: “Be prepared to meet the stranger for the stranger might be Christ,” she thinks.58 The men take her to a house party; she begins imagining one of them as a rapist character from de Sade’s Justine and becomes “completely unaware of her own presence in the picture,” telling herself she’s not in any danger. “Later on the afternoon dissolved into a haze of furniture and floor and bruises. But Katia crawled out, survived—”59
Like Brian in Mysterious Skin, Kraus’s characters use alien unknowability as a way of expressing things they cannot say otherwise. Katia uses de Sade to decode the behaviour of the drunk men at the party, even when she has not yet consciously acknowledged that they pose any danger to her. Simone Weil names God’s unknowability to reconcile the horrors of the twentieth century with her desire for justice on terrestrial terms. (Facing down a similar theodical formulation, Meillassoux once concluded that God does not exist yet.60)
Like Brian, Kraus’s characters also chafe against this very unknowability. It is torturous for Weil to endure knowledge of another’s suffering; Kraus reports that “daily life turns into a terror as soon as you start doubting food.”61 But, unlike Brian, the alien-seekers in Kraus’s paradigm don’t reach much in the way of new knowledge. The alien in A&A only obscures; it never becomes a means to decode, or even a thing to be decoded itself. Peek under the hood and you find only the same Great Man you knew before. The rape begins, the body starves, the scene cuts to black.
Although there is plenty to dislike in what might euphemistically be called the ‘trauma narrative,’ one upshot of the psychotherapeutic turn is that trauma is generally considered to be a kind of chronic affliction. Anorexia, on the other hand, has been thoroughly relegated to the realm of the curable, which by corollary means that if you still have it you must not be trying very hard to get rid of it. Anorexia has two accepted trajectories: death or recovery. There is no future in anorexia. If you intend to live with it you are insane and probably socially dangerous. Why bother re-coding it, then?
In Park Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), factory worker Young-goon becomes convinced she is a cyborg, who must recharge herself electrically and will die if she eats food. Institutionalised after plugging a live wire into her wrist, she is first pressured to eat and then eventually force-fed. “She has the right to not eat!” her love interest Il-soon screams, but the doctors respond only by asserting the physical danger that Young-goon’s delusions put her in.
After Il-soon understands the nature of Young-goon’s fear of food, he devises a different solution. Simulating DIY surgery in the maintenance room, he pretends to insert a device into Young-goon’s back that will allow her cyborg body to digest human food. Later, in the canteen, she worries the device will break, and he hands her a homemade business card: lifetime warranty, call for repairs. Echoing the director’s commands in the factory-floor opening scene, Il-soon directs the entire canteen through the process of eating a bite of rice. Young-goon chews and swallows.
The implication is that Young-goon understands both the cyborg logic of her anorexia, and its physical impossibility in the world. Her belief in her own inhumanity develops in the context of a distant relationship with her mother, as well as the recent loss of her grandmother—who raised her, but has been institutionalised due to her own belief that she is a mouse and her accompanying refusal to eat anything besides radishes. Young-goon’s disavowal of her own physical nature is a means of decoding these events, and her place in her family and social order.
The cyborg story is a tool that Young-goon needs to survive, and yet one that also poses an existential threat to her in the form of starvation. Il-soon’s solution is to ensure Young-goon’s epistemological access to the parts of the narrative she finds useful, while giving her permission—not marching orders—to eat. A cyborg, it turns out, doesn’t need a human body for that.
A masonic conspiracy theory of the 1970s held that Gull either knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, or perhaps was even himself the killer. The theory is irrelevant to the subject of this essay on the grounds that no serious contingent of scholars in any field considers it credible. Its existence is, however, germane to any decent historiography of anorexia nervosa.
Cf. Latour, Les microbes: guerre et paix. Paris: A.-M. Métaillé (1984).
As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International (1990 [1930]), 172.
By which I primarily mean that Gull and Lasègue worked within the scientific nexus connecting Paris, London, and the Edinburgh medical schools.
At the time it was necessary as a practical matter to favour engravings over original photographs in mass-print media.
Erin O’Connor, “Pictures of Health: Medical Photography and the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.4 (April 1995), 549.
“Un embarras alimentaire: Ethnographier une ‘entrée en anorexie.’” Genèses 107 (juin 2017), 132.
Yes, son of Jürgen.
“Die Anorexia nervosa (Magersucht) in der deutschsprachigen medizinischen Literatur von 1900 bis 1945: Die Rolle der Magersucht in der Entstehung der Psychosomatik.” Sudhoffs Archiv 76.1 (1992), 38.
Ibid. 37
See e.g. Kuhn, Feyerabend, &c.
Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia. Cambridge, M.A.: Semiotext(e) (2000), 15–17.
Ibid. 15
Ibid. 16
Ibid.
Ibid.
I never learned any of the rules of croquet and can’t promise any of this terminology is correct.
Kraus 2000, 16
Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, B.IV.B “Freedom of self-consciousness : Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.”
Kraus 2000, 25
Phrase borrowed from Meillassoux; cf. remarks on the naïve realism of pre-critical metaphysics, After Finitude (2007), “Ancestrality.”
Paraphrasing.
Kraus 2000, 141
See e.g. Dominik Groß, “The Historical Discourse on the Etiology of Anorexia Nervosa Results of a Literature Analysis.” Sudhoffs Archiv 99.1 (April 2015), 31–43; A.R. Lucas, “Toward the understanding of anorexia nervosa as a disease entity.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 56.4 (April 1981), 254–264.
See e.g. Elizabeth Williams, “‘The voice of the stomach’: the mind, hypochondriasis and theories of dyspepsia in the nineteenth century” (2021); idem., “Stomach and Psyche: Eating, Digestion, and Mental Illness in the Medicine of Philippe Pinel” (2010).
142
Ibid. 144
Ibid. 147
Ibid. 154
Ibid. 135, 163
Ibid. 27
Ibid. 125
Ibid. 128
Ibid. 151
Ibid. 152
I’m not.
Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Oxford: Legenda/European Humanities Research Centre (2003), 53.
See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press (1999), Ch. 2.
Kraus 2000, 48
Dante, Purgatory, Canto Twenty-three. Translated by Anthony Esolen.
Kraus 2000, 142
For example, see Habermas 1992 on some of the reasons why anorexia has historically been under-described (‘mis-categorised’) in Germany, relative to the density of medical writing on the phenomenon from Britain and France. “The differences in [historical] case descriptions compared to the current picture of anorexia are mainly due to the describers, and not the patients” (60).
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press (1993).
Patricia A. McEachern, Deprivation and Power: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press (1998); Chabert 2017.
See e.g. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (2000).
Although it is certainly also implied that Avalyn was abused, likely sexually, and that the same goes for a great many other survivors of alien abduction.
It’s possible to force a reading of this film in which the nuclear family itself is already and intrinsically dangerous to children, but it’s clear Araki himself isn’t quite there. Sad!
See e.g. Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les Rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière. Paris: José Corti (1942).
David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press (1995), 13.
See Downing 2003.
“L’Idéal.” Les Fleurs du mal XVIII. Éditions Larousse (2006), 48.
See e.g. Starving in Suburbia (2014). Or don’t—it sucks.
Nicola J. Rinaldi, No Period. Now What? A Guide to Regaining your Cycles and Improving your fertility. Waltham, M.A.: Antica Press (2019 [2016]), 116.
O’Connor 1995, 544
Kraus 2000, 235
François Béroalde de Verville et al (eds.), Débats scientifiques: Autour de la jeûneuse prodige du XVIe siècle; La querelle de l'abstinente (1566–1602). Paris: Classiques Garnier (2019), 42.
Famously by Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row (1980). Londa Schiebinger discusses similar and overlapping concerns in Nature’s Body (2004) and elsewhere, generally with stronger historical methodology and less longing to retvrn.
Kraus 2000, 32
Ibid. 33
“Deuil à venir, Dieu à venir.” Ismael 3 (2006), 6.
Kraus 2000, 139
incredible essay that i read slowly in order to savor (and now i have to watch mysterious skin lol). so many wonderful lines here but i want to shout out the one about augustine’s pears and body hate because it’s frying me
just watched mysterious skin so i could read this essay. worth it!!!