Analysis
LESSON: All writing is purposeful and audience-driven. Whether you are writing an email to your manager at work, a letter to your childs teacher, or an essay for class, a specific goal and a direct audience should impact the writing choices you make. As a writer, it is important to understand these choices and make decisions that will best impact your goal. As a reader, it is important to analyze how other writers make choices and how those decisions impact the effectiveness of their messages. Because the reader-writer connection is so intertwined, we will focus our efforts in this unit on critically reading a variety of essays in order to develop insight into and analyze the effectiveness of written texts. Our work in this unit will culminate in the second major essay, an analysis essay.
YOUR GOAL: Your analysis essay should be an examination of how a writer successfully communicates a message to readers. It should investigate, explain, and support how the writer of a chosen essay accomplishes an intended purpose.To do this, you should explain the meaning of a text, analyze its structure and features, and help readers understand how/why it is thought-provoking, engaging, or impactful. In other words, your goal is to study the impact a text has by analyzing the authors writing strategies.You will have to use specific examples from the chosen essay to prove your points, making critical reading an integral part of this process.One important note to keep in mind is that analysis is notsimply a summary. Summarizing parts of your text may be necessary to support your analysis, but summary alone is not analysis. Analysis breaks the text apart to better understand what it is doing and how/why it is doing it. Assume your readers have also read the text you are analyzing; thus, to bring new insights/information to your readers, youll have to go beyond just telling them what happens in the text.
THE PROCESS:
FIRST, you will choose one of the two assigned readings as the subject of your essay:
Recovery Season: A Story of Anorexia, Adaptation, and Renewal
Globalization of Eating Disorders
NEXT, engage with the readings, activities, and discussion forums assigned each week. All assignments are purposefully structured to build critical steps into the reading/writing process. Skills you will learn include:
Step 1: Strategies for understanding a text
Step 2: Strategies for reflecting on a text (planning your essay)
Step 3: Strategies for responding to a text (revising your essay based on feedback(
Step 4: Writing and finalizing the essay
ESSAY COMPONENTS(you can find a rubric here):
An introduction that identifiesthewritten text you are analyzing with briefbackground information (the author, year published, and important backgroundof the text).
A thesis statement that clearly and directly provides an analyticalpositionabout the effectiveness of the written text. Note: You willworkshop your thesis in the discussion forums.
Targeted summary or description of the text. Youwill notfocus exclusively on summarizing the plot of your chosen text. Instead, approach this essay as if your audience has also read your chosen essay, soinsteadfocus only onthe features within the text that play a key role in supporting your analysis. Targeted summaries, as well as direct quotes, serve to support and illustrate the points of your analysis.
An explanation that demonstrates how your analysis supports or proves your thesis statement.
A conclusion that leaves the reader with a lasting impression as to why the essay is impactful.
ESSAY REQUIREMENTS:
APA formatting, including a title page, page numbers, running heads, 12-point Times New Roman font, and double-spacing.
A reference page including the essay chosen as the subject of your analysis. You will need to haveAT LEAST one source for the final submission. It can be the text you read or another, academic source.
2-3 or 600-900 words pages of content (excluding title and references page).
Freewriting:
Despite the fact that globalization has come along with a lot of advantages, there are negative sides. Globalization has affected the culture of eating healthy. Peer influence also becomes another factor of consideration when it comes to the issue of eating healthy.
Thesis Statement:
Globalization has had a major impact on eating disorders due to the mixing of cultures, influence of media, technology and peer influence.
Research to include in introduction (if any):
Globalization is only known for its positives and rarely for the negative impact has it on mental health. Globalization has been known to bring different cultures together leading to major cultural changes. These cultural changes lead to globalization playing an indirect role in the promotion of eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. Eating disorders are considered health compromising behaviors which increase the risk of major complications.
Topic / Discussion Point 1:
Media influence
Textual evidence to support Point 1:
The media is a marketing and influencing tool. When fast foods use the media to pass the trend and culture of fast foods.
Research to support Point 1 (if any):
Most of the movies and other media advocate for fast foods (Gerbasi et al. 2014).
Topic / Discussion Point 2:
Technology
Textual evidence to support Point 2:
Technology has promoted the introduction of social media. Social media continues to influence the eating habits of the global population.
Research to support Point 2 (if any):
Social media is becoming a huge influencer (Bordo, 2013). Therefore, the content shared on social media affects the lives of humans.
Topic / Discussion Point 3:
Globalization
Textual Evidence to support Point 3:
Globalization has led to the adoption of fast foods thus affecting the eating habits of the global population.
Research to support Point 3 (if any):
People across the world are adopting the eating behaviors and patterns of their counterparts (Bordo, 2013). As a result, eating disorder is becoming a norm at a global capacity.
Conclusion
Globalization of eating disorders has been fueled by technology which has enhanced interaction between different cultures. Eating disorders are health compromising behaviors and education is needed to help the patients.
Research to include in the conclusion (if any):
Eating disorders are harder to treat as treatment involves the patient admitting they have a problem. Education offers the best solution in limiting the development.
References
Bordo Susan. (2013). The Globalization of eating Disorders. Thinking, Reading and writing about the new global Era pgs 19-22.
Gerbasi, M. E., Richards, L. K., Thomas, J. J., Agnew-Blais, J. C., Thompson-Brenner, H., Gilman, S. E., & Becker, A. E. (2014). Globalization and eating disorder risk: peer influence, perceived social norms, and adolescent disordered eating in Fiji.The International journal of eating disorders,47(7), 727737.
https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22349 b y M I C H E L L E R O B E R T S O N
S E P T E M B E R 2 8 , 2 0 1 5
Art by Stasia Burrington
AS A CHILD, I climbed my dad like a tree, hanging from his arms and never wanting to detach
myself from his legs. At six-foot-two, with leathery brown skin, long-reaching arms, and wild
white hair, my dad has always reminded me of a tree. He has always seemed knowledgeable like
one, too, like he contained as much wisdom and maturity as an ancient sequoia. When I entered
adolescence, however, my social life and sports teams stole my focus, and my dads job as a field
biologistthe binoculars hanging around his neck, the field guides filling the pockets of his
cargo pantsnever failed to embarrass.
We used to hike the hills of the Briones Regional Park the first Sunday of every month, my dad
and me, but we hadnt been there in three years. When I became anorexic, my doctors forbade
me from exercise in any form in order to preserve the tiny caloric intake I subsisted on.
At fifteen-and-a-half, I stopped eating carbs. At sixteen, I stopped eating pretty much everything
and dropped twenty pounds from my already-slim frame. And soon after, I was diagnosed with
anorexia nervosa and placed in a rigorous outpatient treatment program. The week of my
diagnosis, our monthly treks to the reservoir stopped.
When I was first diagnosed, my dad refused to believe it. She has a fast metabolism. I was a
skinny teenager too, I overheard him say to my mom over the dishes one night. I stopped really
talking to him after that, and eventually he stopped trying to talk to me. He didnt get it, didnt
accept that my sickness was real. Without our monthly hike, we lost all connection.
THE DESTINATION OF THOSE HIKES was always the reservoir, which, up close, looks more
like a dingy pond, only fifty meters across with grubby algae covering its surface and mud flats
ringing its perimeter. In late summer, though, it springs to life. Bubbles and splashes appear as
the heads of orange-bellied California newts break through the surface. Flashes of red puncture
the dark water like fireworks exploding against a black sky.
This sight only occurs for a short period of time, just as the newts emerge from a summer spent
hidden from view. In the spring, as the days become hotter and drier, they walk a few miles from
their breeding pond to shelter in burrows previously occupied by gophers or moles, or they crawl
under rotted logs, all of which promise shade from the unforgiving sun.
The newts would die from overheating and drying out, so they go underground, where the
temperatures are cooler, I remember my dad telling me years ago. They arent hibernating
theyre estivating. Instead of burrowing to avoid the cold in the winter, the newts burrow in the
summer to avoid the heat. Their metabolism slows down, and they stay in their burrows, only
leaving occasionally to catch bugs.
Prior to estivation, the newts engage in a mating frenzy. The females enter the pond and release a
scent of seduction, the Chanel No. 5 of newts, which sends the males into sexual overdrive. In
response to this aroma, the males deposit a spermataphore, or sperm-sharing sack, in front of the
female, who then perches atop it to absorb the sperm. Once the eggs have been fertilized, she
deposits gelatinous egg masses, which hold up to thirty eggs apiece, onto plant roots or in rock
crevices and then waits for her offspring to emerge.
The reservoir during breeding time reminds me of a fraternity party: boys and girls doused in the
latest Marc Jacobs scent or Axe body spray, trying to attract the best mate before night ends. As
a sophomore in college, I often wore crop tops and bright miniskirts on the weekends. Id be
lying if I said I wasnt trying to attract a mate like the others, but there was more to it for me.
When I was anorexic, I lost not only weight, but also my sense of womanhood. My breasts
shriveled, my long hair fell out in clumps, and my period stopped altogether. Id made it through
four years of puberty, only to shrink back into my preteen body, like a butterfly returning to its
chrysalis. When I recovered from my eating disorder, I gained thirty pounds in nine months. I
struggled with the extra weight, noticing a thick layer of fat nuzzling against my midsection,
limbs, and face. I was twenty years old, a sophomore in college. Hormonally, it was puberty 2.0.
I felt like a woman again, and I wanted to show off my body as a way of telling the world I was
back.
LASTHENIA CALIFORNICA, common name: goldfield, says my father, crouching to examine
a golden-yellow flower under his hand lens. Around him, the natural world carries on without
him noticing; all of his attention is absorbed by his study of the bloom. Then he plucks ita
sacrilegious act for any self-respecting biologistand hands it to me, then continues walking.
Except for my dad occasionally calling to birds in the trees with his signature wsh sh sh sh, we
walk the next few miles in silence.
Its September, and Im home from college. The rains have just begun to fall, so my father and I
have set out in pursuit of those orange-bellied newts, hoping that the sudden arrival of moisture
will have roused the amphibians from their deep slumbers. Its our first hike to the pond since
my diagnosis.
With his dust-colored khaki pants and wide-brimmed hat, my father blends in with the towering
oak trees. I have to run to keep up with his long strides, my legs already tired from the walk from
the parking lot.
At the top of a tall, yellow hill, my dad pauses without saying a word and breathes in the air and
the sunlight. Then he keeps walking as if nothing has happened, occasionally breaking the
silence by pointing out a mariposa lily with its signature burgundy spotting or an Alameda
whipsnake. Endangered, he says, pointing to the yellow-and-black reptile as it slithers across
our path.
When my father doesnt know what to say, he talks about nature. Growing up, I perceived this as
negligence. He couldnt understand my teenage problems: heartbreak, friend drama, struggles
with calculus, pimples. On the rare nights when my mom was out of town, we would sit at the
dinner table with only the sound of our forks scratching the plates, no wsh sh sh sh to break the
silence.
In November of my freshman year, at one of these silent dinners, I tried to discuss with him the
idea of taking time off from college or dropping out altogether. My anorexia has become too
much for me, I said softly, defeated. I barely have energy to walk to classes.
He put his fork down. I took a year off from college when I was your age, he said. I went up
to Tuolumne Meadows to hike, and foraged food to supplement the canned goods Id brought. I
slept in the woods with a rifle next to me, in case of black bears.
My eyebrows knit together in an expression of exasperation. Here he goes again, I
thought, trying to relate his one love, nature, to my real problems. If I were to drop out, I
wouldnt be frolicking in the woods and shooting bears, Id be entering an in-patient eating
disorder treatment clinic.
He kept talking, I was out walking in those untouched woods when I suddenly felt the need to
run. I ran and ran through towering sequoias and heavy fir trees until I tripped on an oak sapling
and started tumbling. I tumbled for what felt like miles until I reached the bottom of the slope. A
week later, I hitchhiked back to Berkeley and re-enrolled in classes.
RECOVERY IS A SEASON that often goes unnoticed by others, but this period of timeafter
youve gained the weight, gained the energy, gained your life backbrings with it unexpected
challenges. Like many anorexics, I spent more time in recovery than actually being sick. In
fact, my anorexia went untreated for only six months before my mom brought me to the doctor.
When I finally gained those thirty pounds and the will to eat, I was like a newt awakening from
estivation. After being absent from the pond, after not seeing sunlight for so long, I wanted to do
and feel everything. I went from being a ninety-pound zombie to a newt in the sun.
I stopped binging on vegetables and started binging on experiences. I wanted to try every food,
take every class, meet every stranger, experience everything I had missed out on during those
years of sickness. My lack of a menses, and consequent lack of sex drive, triggered an explosion
upon its return. I went to every party, tried every drug that crossed my path, hooked up with one
frat guy Friday night only to hook up with his frat brother the next. I missed that anorexic high,
that feeling of being on the edge at every moment, and so I replaced it with whatever thrills I
could find.
One September night, I got drunk off of a plastic-handle bottle of vodka at a frat party and slunk
off with a cute stranger to his apartment. Along the way, he spoke of his passion for
environmental sciencea self-proclaimed nature nerd. We went to his room and talked for
hours, mainly about our backpacking experiences and favorite native perennials. He reminded
me of my dad in his unabashed passion for native grasses and preference of poppy breed.
As the night progressed, we started making out. It was harmless, until it wasnt. I felt the air in
the room dry out, then heat up, as he pushed me further and further, hurting me yet ignoring my
pleas to stop. I couldnt break away. I felt stuck under a rotting log, immobile, lifeless.
After that night, I no longer wore skirts and crop tops. I turned to my eating habits to express my
helplessness and confusion, just as I had done in high school.
The trouble with recovering from anorexia is that you never really recover from anorexia. Just as
the newts know another dry season is coming in which they will have to return to a state of half-
life, recovered anorexics always fear that their old habits will return.
Two weeks later, I came home from school to talk to my doctors and try to get my eating back
on track. I had been driving from doctors office to doctors office, trying to keep up with a
steady stream of appointments, when on my last day home, a Sunday, my dad suggested we hike
out to the reservoir.
IT LOOKED JUST AS SHABBY and insignificant as I remembered itthe reservoir that saw
me as a plump preteen, an anorexic teenager, and now a recovered woman on the verge of a
relapse.
My father and I scanned the water, and everywhere we looked we saw newts that seemed to
stretch and leap and gulp in the air as they peeked their heads out of the water, relishing the
sunshine that they had hid from for so many months. My dad and I exchanged grins,
acknowledging the magnificence of the moment.
We spent some time rolling over logs to look for those that had yet to emerge from estivation.
Under one such log, I found a newt crushed beneath the home that was meant to preserve him. I
reached for my dads arm like I did as a toddler. He held onto me tightly and said, Dont forget
that the rains came, and he failed to realize it. He missed his chance at freedom.
While my father stood on the bank basking in the glory of the California newt, I tramped around
the edges of the reservoir, coming upon a wart-covered newt that looked different from the rest. I
called my dad over for a diagnosis. He looked at my worried expression and then at the newt.
Sometimes males grow thick, wart-covered skin to prevent themselves from absorbing too
much water after they return to the pond following estivation season, he said.
The skin, which I took to be a sign of illness, really acted as a shield.
The skin is telling him, Absorb it slowly, youve got time, the water isnt going anywhere,
said my father, taking off his field hat so that his blue eyes were no longer hidden. In that
moment, he seemed to acknowledge everything that happened over the past few years.
As I cradled the warty newt in the valleys of my hands, I marveled at the creatures ability to
adapt and overcome. His body was telling him it was okay to get back in the pond. But also, to
enter with caution. I gently set the warty newt down in the murky water and looked back to see
my fathers protective gaze watching over me. As soon as our eyes met, he looked away, but in
that brief glance, I knew what he was telling me. I needed to trust my instincts. I needed to get
back into the pond.
Michelle Robertson is in her final year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she
studies creative writing. The Globalization of Eating Disorders
By Susan Bordo
Susan Bordo was born in Newark, New Jersey, and is a professor of
philosophy and the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the
University of Kentucky. She has written a number of works, including The
Creation of Anne Boleyn (2014) and her best-known book, Unbearable
Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2004), which was named
a Notable Book by the New York Times, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,
and received a Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for
Women in Psychology. To learn more about Susan Bordo and see a complete
list of her works go to www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/bordo.html. In the
following essay, Bordo looks at how the Western media portray women and
how this is affecting various cultures across the globe. Before reading, think
about how you feel about your own body image. How does the media affect
your self-concept about your appearance?
The young girl stands in front of the mirror. Never fat to begin with, shes
been on a no-fat diet for a couple of weeks and has reached her goal weight: 115
lb., at 54 exactly what she should weigh, according to her doctors chart. But in
her eyes she still looks dumpy. She cant shake her mind free of the Lady
Marmelade video from Moulin Rouge. Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim, and Mya,
each one perfect in her own way: every curve smooth and sleek, lean-sexy, nothing
to spare. Self-hatred and shame start to burn in the girl, and envy tears at her
stomach, enough to make her sick. Shell never look like them, no matter how
much weight she loses. Look at that stomach of hers, see how it sticks out? Those
thighs they actually jiggle. Her butt is monstrous. Shes fat, gross, a dough girl.
As you read the imaginary scenario above, whom did you picture standing in
front of the mirror? If your images of girls with eating and body image problems
have been shaped by People magazine and Lifetime movies, shes probably white,
North American, and economically secure. A child whose parents have never had to
worry about putting food on the family table. A girl with money to spare for fashion
magazines and trendy clothing, probably college-bound. If youre familiar with the
classic psychological literature on eating disorders, you may also have read that
shes an extreme perfectionist with a hyper-demanding mother, and that she
suffers from body-image distortion syndrome and other severe perceptual and
cognitive problems that normal girls dont share. You probably dont picture her
as Black, Asian, or Latina.
Read the description again, but this time imagine twenty-something Tenisha
Williamson standing in front of the mirror. Tenisha is black, suffers from anorexia,
and feels like a traitor to her race. From an African-American standpoint, she
writes, we as a people are encouraged to embrace our big, voluptuous bodies. This
makes me feel terrible because I dont want a big, voluptuous body! I dont ever
want to be fatever, and I dont ever want to gain weight. I would rather die from
starvation than gain a single pound.1 Tenisha is no longer an anomaly. Eating and
body image problems are now not only crossing racial and class lines, but gender
lines. They have also become a global phenomenon.
Fiji is a striking example. Because of their remote location, the Fiji islands did
not have access to television until 1995, when a single station was introduced. It
broadcasts programs from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Until that
time, Fiji had no reported cases of eating disorders, and a study conducted by
anthropologist Anne Becker showed that most Fijian girls and women, no matter
how large, were comfortable with their bodies. In 1998, just three years after the
station began broadcasting, 11 percent of girls reported vomiting to control weight,
and 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting during the previous months.2
Becker was surprised by the change; she had thought that Fijian cultural
traditions, which celebrate eating and favor voluptuous bodies, would withstand
the influence of media images. Becker hadnt yet understood that we live in an
empire of images, and that there are no protective borders.
In Central Africa, for example, traditional cultures still celebrate voluptuous
women. In some regions, brides are sent to fattening farms, to be plumped and
massaged into shape for their wedding night. In a country plagued by AIDS, the
skinny body has meantas it used to among Italian, Jewish, and Black Americans
poverty, sickness, death. An African girl must have hips, says dress designer
Frank Osodi. We have hips. We have bums. We like flesh in Africa. For years,
Nigeria sent its local version of beautiful to the Miss World Competition. The
contestants did very poorly. Then a savvy entrepreneur went against local ideals
and entered Agbani Darego, a light-skinned, hyper-skinny beauty. (He got his
inspiration from M-Net, the South African network seen across Africa on satellite
television, which broadcasts mostly American movies and television shows.) Agbani
Darego won the Miss World Pageant, the first Black African to do so. Now, Nigerian
teenagers fast and exercise, trying to become lepaa popular slang phrase for the
thin it girls that are all the rage. Said one: People have realized that slim is
beautiful.3
1 From the Colours of Ana website (http://coloursofana.com/ss8.asp). [This and subsequent notes
in the selection are the authors.]
2 Reported in Nancy Snyderman, The Girl in the Mirror (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 84.
3 Norimitsu Onishi, Globalization of Beauty Makes Slimness Trendy, The New York Times, Oct. 3,
2002.
How can mere images be so powerful? For one thing, they are never just
pictures, as the fashion magazines continually maintain (disingenuously) in their
own defense. They speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but
also about how to become what the dominant culture admires, values, rewards.
They tell them how to be cool, get it together, overcome their shame. To girls
who have been abused they may offer a fantasy of control and invulnerability,
immunity from pain and hurt. For racial and ethnic groups whose bodies have been
deemed foreign, earthy, and primitive, and considered unattractive by Anglo-
Saxon norms, they may cast the lure of being accepted as normal by the
dominant culture.
In todays world, it is through imagesmuch more than parents, teachers, or
clergythat we are taught how to be. And it is images, too, that teach us how to
see, that educate our vision in whats a defect and what is normal, that give us the
models against which our own bodies and the bodies of others are measured.
Perceptual pedagogy: How To Interpret Your Body 101. Its become a global
requirement.
I was intrigued, for example, when my articles on eating disorders began to
be translated, over the past few years, into Japanese and Chinese. Among the
members of audiences at my talks, Asian women had been among the most
insistent that eating and body image werent problems for their people, and indeed,
my initial research showed that eating disorders were virtually unknown in Asia. But
when, this year, a Korean translation of Unbearable Weight was published, I felt I
needed to revisit the situation. I discovered multiple reports on dramatic increases
in eating disorders in China, South Korea, and Japan. As many Asian countries
become Westernized and infused with the Western aesthetic of a tall, thin, lean
body, a virtual tsunami of eating disorders has swamped Asian countries, writes
Eunice Park in Asian Week magazine. Older people can still remember when it was
very different. In China, for example, where revolutionary ideals once condemned
any focus on appearance and there have been several disastrous famines, little
fatty was a term of endearment for children. Now, with fast food on every corner,
childhood obesity is on the rise, and the cultural meaning of fat and thin has
changed. When I was young, says Li Xiaojing, who manages a fitness center in
Beijing, people admired and were even jealous of fat people since they thought
they had a better life. . . . But now, most of us see a fat person and think He looks
awful.4
Clearly, body insecurity can be exported, imported, and marketedjust like
any other profitable commodity. In this respect, whats happened with men and
boys is illustrative. Ten years ago men tended, if anything, to see themselves as
better looking than they (perhaps) actually were. And then (as I chronicle in detail
4 Reported in Elizabeth Rosenthal, Beijing Journal: Chinas Chic Waistline: Convex to Concave, The
New York Times, Dec. 9, 1999.
in my book The Male Body) the menswear manufacturers, the diet industries, and
the plastic surgeons discovered the male body. And now, young guys are looking
in their mirrors, finding themselves soft and ill defined, no matter how muscular
they are. Now they are developing the eating and body image disorders that we
once thought only girls had. Now they are abusing steroids, measuring their own
muscularity against the oiled and perfected images of professional athletes, body-
builders, and Mens Health models. Now the industries in body-enhancement
cosmetic surgeons, manufacturers of anti-aging creams, spas and salonsare
making huge bucks off men, too.
What is to be done? I have no easy answers. But I do know that we need to
acknowledge, finally and decisively, that we are dealing here with a cultural
problem. If eating disorders were biochemical, as some claim, how can we account
for their gradual spread across race, gender, and nationality? And with mass
media culture increasingly providing the dominant public education in our
childrens livesand those of children around the globehow can we blame families?
Families matter, of course, and so do racial and ethnic traditions. But families exist
in cultural time and spaceand so do racial groups. In the empire of images, no one
lives in a bubble of self-generated dysfunction or permanent immunity. The
sooner we recognize thatand start paying attention to the culture around us and
what it is teaching our childrenthe sooner we can begin developing some
strategies for change.
Source: Susan Bordo, The Globalization of Eating Disorders. Copyright Susan Bordo, Otis A.
Singletary Professor of the Humanities, University of Kentucky. Reprinted by permission of the author.
