BOOK REVIEW Paula Saukko (ed.): The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse State University of New York Press, Albany, 2008, 134 pp Rebecca Lester Published online: 11 September 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 In The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse, Paula Saukko (a Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University) undertakes an interrogation of diagnostic discourses of anorexia from the 1970s to the present day. The aim of the work, in the author’s words, ‘‘is not to simply ‘denounce’ the diagnostic and popular notions of anorexia … [but to] explore the personal implications of discourses on eating disorders in terms of contradictory social voices or accents,’’ as well as the politics embedded in such discourses (pp. 2–3). She does this through the theoretical and methodological concepts of dialogic theory, which, she says, enables her to ‘‘work against the grain’’ of traditional understandings of anorexia as false consciousness, recasting it again as polyvocal and multilayered. She concludes that diagnostic and popular discourses on anorexia reify a time- oriented (developmental) moral vision of healthy female selfhood against which ‘‘the anorexic self’’ is read. She proposes instead what she calls a ‘‘space-based’’ model of the heterogeneity of discourses as well as individual experiences of anorexia. Saukko’s passionate and engaging writing style makes this a compelling text, and some of the arguments found within it are fresh and inspiring. Yet there are some important fault lines that trouble the work and threaten to undermine the author’s larger agenda. This short book is comprised of six chapters. In the Introduction, subtitled ‘‘Interrogating the Anorexic Self,’’ Saukko lays out her theoretical and methodo- logical orientations and the aims of the work. She also introduces the reader to the fact that the impetus for this book has its roots in her own personal experience with anorexia at age eleven, 30 years before writing the text. She has felt ‘‘alienated and insulted’’ by theories that portray anorexics as having ‘‘an insufficient self, lacking in autonomy and self-determination, and being vulnerable to outside influences, such as media and peer pressures to be thin’’ (p. 1), and presents this text as a R. Lester (&) Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis, USA e-mail: rjlester@artsci.wustl.edu 123 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:639–642 DOI 10.1007/s11013-009-9151-5