Koski
Page 7
A tone of surprise indicates that Melanie anticipated greater resistance. Now, she is armed and
ready to seek greater change. In a subsequent meeting, Melanie explained to the group that she
has started taking steps towards meeting her own needs, including increased exercise, dance
lessons, and pilates classes. In her words, “I’m starting to recognizes that I have needs, and to
fill them with things other than food.” Again, she employs the eating disorder and recovery as
strategic tools in legitimating her actions. Her husband’s response, as she relays to the group:
“He doesn’t like it. He wants the old Melanie back.” She continues to express some hesitation
as to how meeting her needs is affecting her marriage. In her words, “I mean, I know he’s not
going anywhere…I’m not going anywhere…so it will just have to get better, right?” Melanie’s
uncertainty does not last long. She quickly receives the necessary affirmation from Eliza, who
reassures her confidently that “He’ll get used to it.” Melanie quickly responds, “Yes, he will.”
Through the use of the eating disorder as a strategic tool, coupled with group support, Melanie
developed the necessary confidence to stand up to her husband and create more room for herself
in her marriage.
Affirming Emotion and Sanctioning Anger
Social convention governs both emotion and its expression. As Hochschild describes,
“We feel. We try to feel. We want to try to feel. The social guidelines that direct how we want
to try to feel may be describable as a set of socially shared, albeit often latent…rules” (1979,
563). Such rules are not to be taken lightly. Current “feeling rules” cast women as the emotional
sex, with the exception of anger, which is deviant (Thoits 1985). Through group participation,
sufferers both affirm the importance of emotion and sanction the expression of anger, thus
challenging both feeling rules. Affirming the importance of emotion further challenges critiques
of women as overly emotional, and thus irrational. Given evidence that anger is a key emotion
in enabling feminist identity development (Hercus 1999), the sanctioning of anger further
demonstrates the groups’ feminist potential.
Modern convention equates women with emotion while simultaneously degrading
emotion as irrational. Support group participants affirm the value of emotion, thus affirming the
traditional female. One example is particularly telling:
Convention