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Equally important, participants’ attempts at change actually reaffirm negative feminine
stereotypes. More specifically, participants’ use of the eating disorder as a strategic device and
subsequent failure to link eating disorders to social structures undermines participants’ attempts
to challenge feeling rules. Participants’ challenge is rooted exclusively in their eating disorders.
The eating disorder alone is adequate cause for participants’ emotions and their expression.
Participants need not further justify or explain their emotions. Consequently, participants merely
affirm the importance of emotion for emotion’s sake, which in turn reinforces conceptions of
women as irrational.
Implications
The results of this paper have both practical and theoretical implications. Most
pressingly, we may garner insight into means of improving support groups. Support groups’
failure to spur feminist identity development is tantamount to a failure in frame transformation,
to borrow again from social movements literature (Snow et al. 1986). Frame transformation
“redefines activities, events, and biographies that are already meaningful from the standpoint of
some primary framework, in terms of another framework,” (Snow et al. 1986, 474), radically
altering individuals’ interpretation and understanding of their experience. At present, support
group participants employ an eating disorder frame. Gender represents an alternative. The
failure to transform the eating disorder frame to a gender frame results in the observed frame and
disease extension, as well as participants related identity transformation. Identifying as women,
rather than eating disordered, might enable participants to achieve the same ends while enabling
participants to abandon their eating disorder identity and, more importantly, the eating disorder
itself.
A collective identity based on gender need not inherently reinforce essentialist
conceptions of gender. Participants could construct a collective identity as women in which
participants call into question the gender roles and expectations that potentially contributed to
their eating disorders. Questioning such norms would not only present a challenge to the gender
order but would also align participants with women more broadly. Linking their personal
distress to social structures would broaden both the base and basis for mobilization, women and
gender inequality, respectively.
Convention