Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm

A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought.

“Electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness—a deep regard for what intimacy, hope, and resistance might look like in a world where women are taught to devote their lives to destroying themselves.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside and through other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge Eating Disorder, and Orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal. While examining GOOP, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current methods of treatment, Clein also grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with each other. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.