A Dualistic and Decontextualized Anthropology

The view that fasting requires pure intentions presumes a dualistic and decontextualized anthropology. Anthropological dualism contradicts the apparent intent of many authors. Knowing well that the Christian tradition has long defined itself against body dualisms like that of gnosticism, such writers explicitly position their theologies of fasting over and against the dualistic denigration of the body that they associate with Western culture. Many strive to promote the “sacredness of the body,” as I have noted. Despite this effort, anthropological dualism surfaces in their conceptions of the human will, on which their distinction between fasting and dieting hinges. The suggestion that the human will can exist apart from the influence of its social context implies an ahistorical will; the claim that a faster can—and must—freely exercise this ahistorical will in direct defiance of the pervasive influence of socialized body hatred assumes not only the will's ultimate freedom from culture but also the will's power over it. This is a hierarchal dualism in that it positions the power of an ahistorical will over historically situated, embodied practices.

This anthropological dualism is not unique to Catholic fasting literature, of course. Philosopher Susan Bordo observes that “the constant element throughout historical variation [in the West] is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom…) and as undermining the best efforts of that self.” As in Catholic fasting literature, “that which is not-body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization.”Footnote ²⁷ Bordo's work, which I will explore further as the essay proceeds, recognizes that this historical precedent has always also been gendered: male is the “active, striving, conscious subject”—the ahistorical will—and female is the “passive, vegetative, primitive matter”—the historicized body.Footnote ²⁸ To the point, Bordo explains that the desires that allegedly weigh the body down from actualizing possibilities of transcendence “have frequently been culturally represented through the metaphor of female appetite.”Footnote ²⁹

So entrenched are Westerners in this gendered mind/body dualism that even scholars who are aware and critical of this history nevertheless replicate dualistic accounts of the person in their work. Psychologist Sylvia Blood sees this among many social psychological researchers who study negative body image today, for example, and her analysis puts into focus the troubling anthropological assumptions underlying this Catholic fasting literature as well.Footnote ³⁰ In psychological literature, Blood explains, the concept of “negative body image” assumes a disjunction between a person's perception of her body and her “actual” (physical) body. A “normal” woman rationally aligns her body image with her “real” body, whereas a “sick” or “pathological” woman perceives her body as much larger or misshapen than it “actually” is. This common reasoning assumes a separation of the body from the perceiving and willing mind; it also assumes that the mind can control how the person experiences her body, regardless of the person's historical situation and socialization. This is precisely the logic we see at work in the Catholic fasting literature previously examined.

Blood notes that as researchers have reported increasing rates of so-called “negative body image” (data she deems suspect for a variety of reasons), their dualistic framework has left them to conclude that today's women are exceptionally and more widely irrational than before: they increasingly fail to align their mental perceptions and physical body shape. This conclusion assumes, again, the possibility of an ahistorical and entirely self-determining mind, and it also showcases another problem with dualistic accounts of women's embodiment: this reasoning blames individual women for their negative experiences of embodiment. It presumes that the woman with a historically untethered mind should be capable of willing herself out of a distorted body image. Therefore, the woman whose body image is shaped by social body norms is ultimately at fault for her own negative experience of embodiment.

The individualism of social psychological literature runs throughout Catholic fasting literature as well. Just as “sick” women with distorted body images are told to use their will to effect change in their self-perceptions, so too Catholic authors instruct fasters to invoke the power of their will to reject any desires that result from socialized body hatred in favor of a pure, God-centered will. The presumption and high estimation of the individual will in this dualistic anthropology reduces the social condition of body hatred to a matter of individual culpability and responsibility. This point is especially clear in the writings of Catholic authors such as Murphy, who suggests that an individual's fasting practices can remedy body hatred, implying that body hatred is caused by individual psychological neuroses and therefore resolved through individual corrective practices.

In addition to clarifying the anthropological dualism of Catholic fasting literature and its ahistorical and individualistic qualities, Blood's work also offers perspective on the appeal of such an anthropology. Blood frames the dehistoricization of the mind and concomitant overestimation of its power over women's embodiment as a corrective to an opposing trend in earlier psychology and feminism more broadly. Previously, researchers regularly presented women as helpless victims of oppression, which feminists decried as simplistic and even similarly oppressive.Footnote ³¹ In response, feminist psychologists reasserted women's agency in the face of sexist oppression, which informed optimistic accounts of women's control over their negative body perception and other oppressive realities. In light of this, we can recognize one boon of the dualistic anthropology in Catholic fasting literature: it emphasizes the agentive freedom of fasters in a context fraught with forces that engender body hatred.

Yet Blood argues that the overestimation of women's agency in this patriarchal world is an exaggerated and mistaken corrective. The merits of her critique are apparent in the disjunction between this dualistic anthropology and women's own accounts of embodiment. If women possess ahistorical wills that enable them to free themselves of their socialized body hatred, then why do so many women struggle to escape its reach? Even feminist scholars with expertise in the social construction of women's body hatred find themselves self-consciously struggling to break free of its grip. Looking back on years of body hatred, Harriet Brown confesses, “I knew better…. I understand intellectually that the more freedoms and powers women achieve, the more insistent and damaging the social pressures that squeeze us (and, increasingly, men) into a certain shape, size, and attitude. But when it came to my own body, everything I knew evaporated and what I felt became overwhelming.”Footnote ³² Michelle Lelwica echoes Brown's commentary: “Even those of us who recognize both the fabricated quality of the unattainable ideal and its commercial function may nonetheless find ourselves involuntarily wishing we looked more like it.”Footnote ³³ These testimonies and countless others belie the dualistic anthropology that assigns women ultimate agency over their experiences of embodiment.

So too does the preoccupation in this Catholic fasting literature with distinguishing between fasting and dieting. That fasting books and articles regularly police the boundaries of fasting and dieting evinces their common entanglement in the experiences of women. Authors would not labor to distinguish these boundaries if they were not phenomenologically indistinguishable with some frequency, and these boundaries would not blur if self-conscious women possessed the unfettered capacity to will against the contextual realities of body hatred.

Bordo's 1993 monograph, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, offers an influential account of the social construction of women's body hatred that further clarifies the discontinuities between the anthropological dualism of Catholic fasting literature and the complex realities of women's embodiment.Footnote ³⁴ Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, she constructs a nondualistic account of women's embodiment in the capital-driven, mass-media-infused, contemporary Western world that mediates between anthropological extremes that paint women as helplessly oppressed, on the one hand, or as wholly self-determining, regardless of social context, on the other. Women's experiences of body hatred result not from a weakness of the will, she posits, but rather from the limited possibilities of social subjectification that are available to women-gendered persons in the modern West. With Foucault, Bordo holds that a complex matrix of social factors produces and constrains these possibilities for subjectivity. Although this social matrix limits the kinds of subjectivity that are available, it also affords the processes and practices by which one becomes a recognizable, agentive subject within this context. Bordo explains that these processes of social subjectification are not imposed forcefully and explicitly from above—as in “You must become this kind of woman, or else!”—but rather “through multiple ‘processes, of different origin and scattered location,’ regulating the most intimate and minute elements of the construction of space, time, desire, embodiment.”Footnote ³⁵

What is it about the processes of women's social subjectification in this context that so widely facilitates experiences of body hatred? Bordo argues that throughout Western history, women's bodies—especially their appetitive yearnings, from hunger to sexual desire—have been cast as dangerous, irrational, and unwieldy. To be a female subject, then, is to be a threat to others, a problem for society. Mediating this message are various racialized “controlling images” of womanhood, such as images of black women as the sexually aggressive “jezebel” or “hoochie,” and popular representations of Latinas as sexually alluring and threatening.Footnote ³⁶ With the rise of mass media, these negative associations are conveyed more widely and relentlessly than ever. Ubiquitous advertisements depict women who appear to have mastered their unwieldly and irrational appetites for food, which often appears to win them the affection of men, the more rational and prized subjects of this context. These ads communicate that actively regulating one's appetite, staving off food—even to the extremes of eating disorders—and appearing as one who controls her hunger—even if that appearance results from painful cosmetic surgeries or dangerous levels of exercise—are not only regular realities of womanhood but what the “ideal women” of this context do. “The slender, fit body [is] a symbol of ‘virile’ mastery over bodily desires that are continually exercised as threatening to overtake the self,” observes Bordo.Footnote ³⁷ Therefore, the woman who disparages and actively regulates her appetite is a good woman—a normal woman, not a rare or pathological female subject in this context.

Note here that a socially constructed distinction between the mind and body—that is, between the controlled, immaterial will and the unwieldy, ravenous body—underpins the social subjectification of women that Bordo critiques as the source of body hatred. Women become subjects according to this dualistic framework through recognizing their ravenous desires and striving to control them. And when women cannot control their appetites according to these dualistic cultural ideals, they are set up to experience themselves as social failures. The anthropological dualism that structures the Catholic fasting literature under review is the same anthropological dualism that structures women's body hatred.

It follows from this account of social subjectification that women (and others) commonly experience their embodiment negatively and engage in practices to alter their experiences of embodiment—from food regulation and exercise to an array of self-harming practices—not because an external agent requires it but because the current social matrix produces gendered subjectivity such that self-surveillance and these bodily regulations are the way these women exercise “good” female subjectivity. Good women use their “minds” to control and restrain the unwieldy appetites of their “bodies.” Such discipline is the means by which they exercise gendered agency; neglecting such practices renders them aberrant females.Footnote ³⁸

From Bordo's account of social subjectification, we garner a number of additional insights about the inadequacies of anthropological dualism in the examined Catholic fasting literature. First, Bordo's account of social subjectification illustrates the wrongfulness and the negative implications of a decontextualized and dualistic anthropology. She positions no person—or part of the person, such as the will—outside the social matrix that engenders body hatred, which means that in this setting, there is no faster outside of body hatred. There is no will exercised outside of this context of body hatred because, at present, body hatred constitutively shapes all gendered subjects. All human agency, including resistance, is constituted by and exercised within it. This explains why women, including determined feminists, struggle momentously to eschew body hatred's disciplining practices.

That no one possesses a pure will unaffected by body hatred does not mean that everyone experiences embodiment negatively, or even in the same way, however. It simply means that embodiment presently occurs in relation to a social matrix that is determined by and determining of negative associations with bodily desire, especially certain manifestations of bodily desire such as female appetite. In view of this, we should see all fasters as Christians of unified “body” and “mind” whose subjectivities are negotiated and performed within a context that renders suppression of the female appetite and the accompanying regulation of bodily appearance as the primary means of becoming a good female subject.

Second, by locating body hatred not primarily within the agency of the individual female subject but rather more broadly in the complex social matrix that comprises the preconditions of one's subjectivity and agency in the first place, Bordo's work undermines the suggestion of Catholic fasting literature that the individual faster is singularly responsible for her own body hatred—or for her other embodied experiences, including fasting. Although women are agentive participants in the self-surveillance and body-regulating practices that comprise body hatred, it is the broader social matrix that first conditions such practices and constrains alternative possibilities of gendered embodiment. In sum, body hatred is first and foremost a social problem, not an individual one, and although embodiment is exercised personally, it is never a matter of the individual alone.

Moreover, Bordo's analysis reveals that the social construction of the good female body is not only gendered but also refracted through the additional and intersecting social structures of race, ability, age, size, and class, among others. Michelle Lelwica speaks to this as well in her 2017 monograph, Shameful Bodies, where she elaborates on the socialized qualities of the female ideal. The ideal female subject “is tall and lithe, soft and hairless,” which is furthermore associated with economic, age, and ethnic privilege.Footnote ³⁹ In advertisements, she is:

Maxine Leeds Craig documents the disproportionate repercussions of this beauty ideal on African American women in her book Ain't I a Beauty Queen?, where she states, “In a male supremacist society in which women were valued as much for beauty as men for their accomplishments, an ugly woman was a failure.… [A]s long as dominant standards of beauty excluded brown skin and short, tightly curled hair, beauty status was unavailable to most black women.”Footnote ⁴¹ Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, too, observes that “failure to meet society's beauty norms is … ‘visual deviance.’ Visual conformity in the United States, of course, is tied to the idolatry of whiteness.”Footnote ⁴² This informs her conclusion that “African-American women, by choice and by circumstance, violate nearly every dimension of American gender norms.”Footnote ⁴³

Gilkes exposes the disadvantages of black women in the Western social matrix further when she explains the complications of contending with white beauty norms within African American communities where standards of beauty and respectability often differ:

In view of this, writes Gilkes, black women live in “multiple jeopardy,” in that bodies and disciplining practices that conform to Western society's white-racialized, slender beauty ideal often embody different, sometimes negative, meanings within the African American community.Footnote ⁴⁶ As such, black women find themselves at an unresolvable disadvantage in society. The Western beauty ideal leaves those who do not embody its racial, economic, age, and shape prescriptions with deficient and ever-imperfect bodies. To the point, sociologist Sabrina Strings argues that “the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness … have been one way that the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.”Footnote ⁴⁷ And, although some gendered subjects have always been assigned more advantage than others in the Western social matrix, Bordo argues that these differentials have increased exponentially as the media bombards us with an increasingly “homogenized” ideal of the slender body.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although nonconforming individuals may garner social capital by participating in the disciplines of body modification that constitute ideal female subjectivity, they are nevertheless positioned to suffer more than others who have the economic resources or natal qualities that better equip them to perform gender in accord with this multifaceted slender ideal.

These last insights—that body hatred is first and foremost a social problem that results in a variant distribution of meanings and possibilities across diverse subjectivities—expose yet another problem with the presentation of body hatred that results from the dualistic anthropology of Catholic fasting literature. Because in these writings body hatred is decontextualized as a problem of the individual mind rather than as an outgrowth of subjects’ participation in their broader social matrix, the disproportionate social stigma that burdens some subjects more than others goes unnoticed. That women negotiate different agentive possibilities and constraints than men; and white women, different agentive possibilities and constraints than black and brown women; and able-bodied women, different agentive possibilities and constraints than those who are differently abled; and young women, different agentive possibilities and constraints than those who are older, and so on, goes unnoticed by these Catholic authors, despite the fact that these differentials are constitutive of body hatred in the contemporary United States. Consequently, these Catholic authors never consider how this social problem disproportionately burdens some vulnerable populations—female-gendered persons, people of color, larger people, older people, differently abled people, queer folk, impoverished and under-resourced persons, and the many who embody more than one of these realities at once.

Bordo spotlights the reality of body hatred as a complex social injustice that is gendered, racialized, classed, sizeist, and ableist. It is a social injustice that disproportionately burdens social groups already rendered exceptionally vulnerable by many other forms of social oppression. For these reasons, feminist liberation theologians such as Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid have identified body hatred as an instantiation of the patriarchal structures that feminist theologians have long identified with social sin.Footnote ⁴⁹ Entangled with the sinful structures of oppression, body hatred is a social reality that compromises the flourishing of women. “In a society where many perfectly healthy women are modelling themselves on an anorexic ideal we have to ask if there is something in our society that worships death,” asserts Isherwood.Footnote ⁵⁰ Her words recognize women's socialization to body hatred as antithetical to the flourishing that God intends for all people. Therefore, she suggests that Christians have a duty to reject and resist the social messages and practices that perpetuate body hatred.

In view of Isherwood's moral exhortation, it is vital to name a last, summative problem with the anthropological dualism of this Catholic fasting literature. Its presentation of the human person reinscribes the discursive matrix that engenders body hatred. As I noted earlier, the socially constructed distinction between the mind and body—that is, between the controlled, immaterial will and the unwieldy, ravenous body—underpins the subjectification of women that Bordo critiques as the source of body hatred. Dualistic attempts to control one's appetitive desires are at the crux of body hatred, wherein women become gendered subjects by recognizing their ravenous desires and by striving to control them. This is precisely the vision of the human person represented in Catholic fasting literature. It, too, posits that the rational mind or will is separate from and ultimately controlling of the faster's appetitive desires, though in this case Catholic authors are primarily concerned with controlling a faster's desires for social validation and legitimacy. It is not a person's uncontrollable hunger for food but one's unwieldy desire to conform to the slender ideal that must be tamed in order to fast. The account of fasting forwarded in this literature is therefore not a radical departure from or alternative to body hatred, at least with regard to its vision of the human person. Indeed, like the mass media that mediates body hatred in the broader US context through dualistic portrayals of the humans who have mastered their desires, fasting literature presents an ideal faster who has rational mastery over her socialized experience of embodiment. In this way, this Catholic fasting literature is itself complicit in the discursive structures of body hatred.

A Dualistic, Decontextualized, and Sexist Construction of Sacramental Practice

Having critiqued the anthropology of Catholic fasting literature, I turn now to the suppositions about fasting that also emerge from these writings. Here, the analysis of the Catholic sacramental tradition advanced by feminist theologian Susan Ross illuminates some of the literature's troubling assumptions about the practice of fasting. Ross's book, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology, helps us see that this literature reflects a sacramental dualism that, like anthropological dualism, is theologically inadequate and reflective of body hatred's troubling discursive structures.

Examining the broader Catholic sacramental tradition, which includes but exceeds the seven sacraments, Ross identifies a “sacramental dualism” that results from a preoccupation with sacramental “validity.” According to this mindset, “There is a ‘right’ way and a ‘wrong’ way; a ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ way” to enact and participate in sacramental practice.Footnote ⁵¹ The rigidity of sacramental dualism is inherently decontextual, for it establishes the theological parameters of a practice in the abstract, never accounting for how the particularities of social context might affect the workings of a given ritual. As a result of such either/or caricatures of sacramental practice throughout Christian history, the complex, contextual symbolic meanings, metaphysical effects, and moral implications of sacramental practice are often lost.

Due in part to Ross's groundbreaking feminist critique as well as other advances in ritual studies, recent sacramental theology is increasingly attentive to and suspicious of this dualistic thinking.Footnote ⁵² But there is little evidence of this shift in the examined Catholic fasting literature. Predicating fasting on the pure intentions of the faster reflects the dualistic thinking that Ross criticizes here. Because fasting's efficacy is presumed to hinge entirely upon the practitioner's intentions, which are presented as transparent, self-determined, and unambiguous, the validity or invalidity of fasting is always clear; its results—various forms of holiness—are also guaranteed. What results from this sacramental dualism is a decontextualized theology of fasting that erases the expressive, metaphysical, and moral ambiguity of this practice, which ultimately renders fasting complicit in the realities of social injustice that many of these Catholic authors seek to address.

A closer look at the decontextualized sacramental dualism of this Catholic fasting literature reveals the theological and ethical inadequacies that Ross associates with the sacramental dualism of the Catholic theological tradition more broadly. First, according to Ross, within a framework of sacramental dualism, “the ‘tensive’ quality of symbols, and thus sacraments, has been too often overlooked in favor of a more ‘certain’ and decidedly unambiguous quality.”Footnote ⁵³ She points to debates surrounding the “real” or “symbolic” in Eucharistic theology to illustrate her point:

In Eucharistic theology, sacramental dualism reduces the constitutive mystery of sacramental practice and overdetermines the possible effects of divine grace in this Christian ritual. Although all theologies seek to understand the work of God in Christian life, to be sure, sacramental dualism so stringently polices the possibilities (and impossibilities) of ritual efficacy that it oversimplifies sacramental practice and collapses the “multivalent possibilities” that Christians otherwise affirm.

Ross suggests that theologians can clarify the workings of sacramental practice without eliding what she calls “sacramental ambiguity,” which includes a “metaphysical ambiguity” that recognizes these multivalent possibilities of grace between the “order” and “chaos” of the world in general and within the local context of ritual practice, in particular. The “continually changing character of the world de-absolutizes any kind of human expression as inadequate to the reality it attempts to describe,” and because of this, theologians must retain an openness to the unstable, evolving, and potentially opaque dimensions of sacramental practice, Ross explains.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although Catholic sacramental theology has tended to rely on theories of order that take on an “‘objectivity,’ which is then used to establish normative judgements,” she suggests that “such an assumption of fixity, of hierarchy, of clear and distinct order, may, in fact, be quite different than the kind of ‘order’ that does exist, and is more changeable and in flux than most human conceptions of order may realize.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The denial of metaphysical ambiguity and the “objectification” of false and rigid notions of order facilitate the either/or framework I have identified in Catholic fasting literature. These Catholic authors assume the existence of an absolute formula for fasting that, if observed, guarantees that grace will bring to fruition a set of particular spiritual outcomes: If one brings pure intentions to fasting, then one channels God's grace for spiritual improvement. Yet Ross's analysis of metaphysical ambiguity reveals how this rigid presentation of order preemptively denies the possibility of the work of God's grace in the lives of women who fast while also negotiating socialized body hatred. This unambiguity limits the possibilities of grace at work in these women's lives. Likewise, it also precludes the possibility that a faster with self-consciously pure intentions could experience fasting adversely, perhaps because her intentions are unstable, her unconscious motives unknown, or other circumstances in her life inhibit it.

What enables this troubling erasure of metaphysical ambiguity is in part sacramental dualism's disregard for the wider social context in which liturgical practices take place. This Catholic fasting literature has decontextualized the ritual, perpetuating the sacramental dualism that has long shaped sacramental theology. “Symbols emerge from particular social and historical circumstances that inform their meaning, and apart from which they become museum artifacts,” explains Ross.Footnote ⁵⁷ The unambiguous assertion that a practice can assuredly engender a singular outcome, that we can determine its validity or invalidity with absolute certainty, does not account for the variegated social and historical circumstances that shape symbolic practices such as fasting.

More concretely, the sacramental dualism of this fasting literature assumes a decontextualized practitioner whose intentions are free from socialized body hatred, which overlooks the multifaceted symbolic meanings of the female body that Christians inevitably bring to fasting in this social context. Many Catholic authors describe the fasting body as “sacred,” a meaning they attribute to Christian anthropology. They assume that when a faster recognizes the body's inherent goodness, she can reject society's wrongful denigration of the body. Yet Christianity itself assigns multiple meanings to the body, and more to the point here, it is never the exclusive context of fasting and thus never the singular source of the body's meaning in this ritual. These Catholic authors dismiss the female body's other contextual meanings—namely, that the Western female body symbolizes uncontrollable, excessive, and dangerous drives, not the least of which is a drive to eat. Were these Catholic authors more attentive to the social contextualization and multiple symbolic meanings of the female body, especially the hungering female body, they would likely have to reckon with fasting's metaphysical ambiguity. Likewise, the black body or disabled body—or the black, disabled, female body—each bear contextual symbolic meanings that potentially complicate fasting practices. Yet as it stands, sacramental dualism disregards these contextual variants as irrelevant to the meaning and efficacy of fasting. Ross would identify this as an erasure of “expressive ambiguity,” a second, unacceptable consequence of sacramental dualism throughout the Catholic tradition.Footnote ⁵⁸

This brings us to yet another troubling consequence of sacramental dualism. Ross demonstrates that sacramental dualism disregards social context, not only to the detriment of symbolic multivalence and metaphysical ambiguity, but also to the neglect of the moral implications of a sacramental practice. What results is an inherent disregard for the potentially mixed-moral, or even amoral, effects of a practice when it is exercised within a particular sociohistorical context. Ross illustrates this problem through her analysis of the doctrine of ex opere operato, which “is meant to convey the intrinsic sacrality and effectiveness of the sacraments themselves: that they are not dependent upon the piety of the minister, nor necessarily on the conscious awareness of the recipient.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Ross recognizes this doctrine as a crucial historical and theological development, but her attention to social context informs her concern for how the rite's intrinsic efficacy might facilitate “a casual approach to sin,” among other things.Footnote ⁶⁰

Unbinding the efficacy of sacramental practice from human agency rightly affirms the primacy of God's will. That sacramental practice is not contingent upon the sinlessness of Christians is also sensible because no one is without sin. Yet a sacramental dualism that shields practice from social context so much so that sin and injustice, including sexism, are deemed entirely irrelevant to conceptions of sacramental practice goes against the long-standing principle that Christian liturgy and beliefs, including Christian moral beliefs, are intricately bound (lex orandi, lex credendi), and it certainly contradicts the postconciliar theological movement that posits the interconnectedness of Christian liturgical practice and Christian ethical action in the world. In this way, sacramental dualism facilitates an “ethical gap between worship and daily life” that is predicated on the traditional view that “sacraments belong properly to church life, to the realm of ritual and the sacred, whereas ethics is concerned with the concrete appreciation of religious faith to everyday life.”Footnote ⁶¹ In doing so, sacramental dualism erases the moral ambiguity that emerges from contextually attentive reflection on sacramental practice, as we see in this Catholic fasting literature.

Catholic authors have defined fasting in such a way that it is, by definition, shielded from the oppressive reality of body hatred that constitutes women's embodiment in the present US context. The separation of liturgical practices from everyday life—especially the realities of injustice that constitute life—is a moral concern because it preemptively dismisses the relevance of sexist oppression in favor of decontextualized beliefs about and practices of fasting. Instead of taking up the problem of body hatred as an issue of social injustice with which Catholics ought to concern themselves, Catholic authors generally acknowledge this reality only for the sake of asserting its irrelevance to this liturgical practice. In doing so, these authors preemptively bracket the question of whether Catholic theologies and practices of fasting might actually be complicit in the perpetuation of body hatred. And, as demonstrated previously, insofar as Catholic theologies of fasting predicate a dualistic anthropology, one composed of an ahistorical and self-determining mind that is expected to control the unwieldy desires of the body, these theologies of fasting do perpetuate the discursive structures that engender the very body hatred that many Catholic authors purport to reject. Yet the sacramental dualism that shapes this Catholic fasting literature does not necessitate that Catholics attend to the social complexities of body hatred in order to fast effectively in this context. As a result of the erasure of the multifaceted symbolic and moral ambiguities of fasting practice in a context of body hatred, Catholic fasting literature enables body hatred to continue uninterrogated. The inattention of this literature to the realities of women in a social context of body hatred render it, once again, complicit in body hatred.

How to Fast

Throughout the examined fasting literature, accounts of how to fast emphasize its distinction from other nonreligious disciplines of food abstinence. Whereas Catholic fasting literature offers a portrait of the self-determining faster who willfully rejects conscious and unconscious social mores and their accompanying practices to fast with a singular regard for God, which results exclusively in increased holiness, the analyses of Bordo and Ross engender quite another portrait. In this analysis, a faster abstains from food in a context where the exercise of appetite and its restraint are inescapably laden with meaning, often negative meanings; depending on the social markings of the faster's embodiment, one's yearnings may be more stigmatized than others. Consequently, abstinence from food is never exercised with total isolation from these other social meanings. Fasting is an ambiguous practice, and one that has variant ambiguities as it is practiced across the diverse experiences of embodiment that emerge in this context. To the extent that fasting is a holy practice—a practice that continues to be a spiritually edifying mediation of God's grace—it is in and through and amid experiences of embodiment shaped and constrained by body hatred, not apart from them.

It follows that what sets the food abstinence of fasting apart from dieting cannot be the purity of the conscious intentions one brings to food abstinence. Examining body hatred through a feminist lens has revealed that ahistorical, pure intentions are a dualistic myth, and one that perpetuates body hatred. What sets fasting apart cannot be its separation from a context of body hatred, but rather fasting's additional contextualization within a religious community. To put it in Ross's terms, it is the additional symbolic meanings and metaphysical dimensions of this Catholic practice that distinguish it from other food abstinence. Fasting has more complex expressive ambiguity than dieting because the practice participates in religious and social symbolic matrixes. Likewise, fasting has a distinct metaphysical ambiguity because it takes place within the Catholic community, which is a unique (though, of course, not exclusive) mediating site of God's grace. Put differently, a feminist theological analysis helps Catholics see that fasting is not defined by its distinctive decontextualization from body hatred but rather the multiple and intersecting contexts in which this practice of food abstinence occurs. Therefore, rather than saying fasting occurs when one abstains from food exclusively for the sake of God and the sacredness of the body, Catholics can say that the food abstinence of fasting differs from dieting because it is never only about individually regulating the body but always also about a collective striving toward holiness.

Who Can Fast

A new account of who can fast results from this delineation of fasting. No longer is fasting reserved for those who have allegedly buffered themselves from the influence of social context. All who abstain from food in communion with their fellow Catholics are fasting, including all who abstain from food while also negotiating the variegated complexities of body hatred.

Recognizing the diversity of who can fast clarifies further the symbolic ambiguity of fasting, for the common religious context of Catholic fasting does not negate or override the diverse social meanings that each faster navigates as a socially embodied being whose appetites and abstinence are always already gendered, racialized, and structured by ableism, classism, and sizeism, among other realities. The common Catholic context of the fasting subject does not negate the expressive ambiguity that shapes all fasters within their common Catholic context.

Furthermore, the common Catholic context of fasting itself assigns differing meanings to persons and their appetites. Christian historians and feminist theologians have thoroughly demonstrated that female desires have long been interpreted and policed differently from those of men within Catholicism.Footnote ⁶⁴ The same is true of many other (and overlapping) marginalized groups. As such, abstaining females navigate a distinct set of meanings from their male counterparts, even within the Catholic context alone. It follows that the expressive ambiguity of the fasting body is not only a consequence of the multivariance of the body in Western society, but also of the multivalence of anthropology within Catholicism itself. Therefore, to say that all Catholics can fast does not mean that we should speak of them as experiencing the food abstinence of fasting in the same way. What this requires Catholics to adopt is a discourse about fasting that embraces its diversity. Whereas the current fasting literature restricts fasting to the tidy portrait of a pure-intentioned few, theological and pastoral discourse about fasting should acknowledge the inevitable diversity of fasting experiences that accompany the diversity of Catholic people.

More transparent discourse about the socially constructed differences among the genders and their potential effects on experiences of fasting would witness to this multivariance and help to obviate the pitfalls of the dualistic anthropology that bolsters the current discourse. This necessitates that we also continue the resolute work of feminist and queer theologians who have critiqued the limitations of Catholicism's gender binary and reimagined theological anthropology accordingly.Footnote ⁶⁵ Our anthropological proposals must attend to the refraction of gender through other social realities such as race, class, and sexuality. Only when Catholics shift their theologies of embodiment and embodied practice beyond dualism and decontextualization will each of these discourses contribute to the fullest extent to the possibilities of embodied resistance within this context of body hatred.

That all Catholics can fast does not mean that all Catholics should, however. Just as canonical dispensations currently dissolve some from prescribed fasting because of the danger it would pose to their health, so too some Catholics may need to refrain from fasting because food abstinence will endanger their physical livelihood.Footnote ⁶⁶ Included among them would be anorexic persons, whose low body weight compromises their physical well-being. Note, however, that refraining from fasting because it compromises one's physical health importantly differs from what emerges from the prevailing Catholic fasting literature. A passage from Kate Wicker's Weightless: Making Peace with Your Body helps to illustrate this nuance. Wicker advises readers to change their fasting practices in accordance with their experiences of body hatred, writing, “Fasting is a good regimen for some people, though it is dangerous territory for me. In my eating disorder days, I used lenten [sic] fasting as subterfuge for my unhealthy eating habits. There was nothing pious about it; rather, it was a part of my sickness.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Although Wicker's recommendation that sick individuals withhold from fasting is correct, she provides an inadequate justification. Wicker advises some readers to refrain from fasting because their eating disorders would render fasting an impious practice. In other words, their body hatred would necessarily render the practice religiously ineffective. Such reasoning reinscribes sacramental dualism. When the church's canons permit dispensation from fasting, they do so not because such fasting would necessarily be impious or ineffective but because the risk to the faster's health is unnecessary. That is precisely the reasoning I endorse here.

What Results from Fasting

In view of the feminist account of body hatred put forward in this essay, one might conclude that every effort to control the female appetite, including fasting, inescapably reinscribes the contextual workings of body hatred and therefore represents an instantiation of sexist oppression. This might lead one to conclude that what results from fasting is simply more oppression, more body hatred. But in fact, Bordo's feminist portrait of embodiment offers a much more complicated portrayal of what potentially results from Catholic fasting. Shifting Catholic discourse to represent this ambiguity is a practical step beyond sacramental dualism and toward more liberating speech about fasting.

Recall that Bordo, with Foucault, rejects an account of sovereign power wherein women, as agentless victims to the external forces of body hatred, are forced to despise their bodies and repeat the exercises of body regulation that we associate with this. Rather, women and other persons participate in body hatred not as helpless victims but as active agents, though agents whose embodied lives are shaped and constrained by the limited avenues of subjectification available to them in this context. This view of power and social subjectification led Foucault to emphasize later in his career “that power relations are never seamless but are always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new opportunity for transformation. Where there is power, he came to see, there is also resistance,” explains Bordo.Footnote ⁶⁸ Therefore, even as the present social matrix constrains the possibilities of social subjectification, it is also the means by which some women assert their agency and exercise it in socially legitimate and “empowering” ways.Footnote ⁶⁹ With regard to fasting in a context of body hatred, this view of power and subjectivity necessitates that we recognize not only how food abstinence can reinscribe sexist oppression—which it might—but also how some women might wield disciplinary practices for new and creative means, even within a social matrix of body hatred. By abstaining from food in a religious context that associates it at least in part with the pursuit of a more intimate relationship with an unconditionally loving and transcendent God, a faster may subvert the social norms that associate food abstinence with the pursuit of male approval or with the problem of the body, even as the faster also may also reinscribe these social norms.Footnote ⁷⁰ Why? Because fasting does resist the absolute reduction of the body to a means for external social affirmation. As such, not only sexist oppression but also subversion and empowerment are possible results of Catholic fasting. Indeed, they can simultaneously result from the very same exercise of fasting.

In fact, Ross's treatment of metaphysical ambiguity gives us reason to speak with hope about the subversive potentiality of fasting practices. A theology of fasting predicated on metaphysical ambiguity begins with a recognition of the possibility that fasting can be a graced and socially subversive practice in the lives of women whose socialized body hatred confuses the intentions they bring to fasting or the results they garner from it. Metaphysical ambiguity requires Catholics to consider God's work in a setting where fasting and body hatred inextricably intertwine. As such, increased holiness and just resistance are potential results of fasting in a context of body hatred; they are not its exclusive or guaranteed results, however.

Recognizing the subversive possibilities of fasting, though, does not shield Christians from the struggle against the unjust dynamics of body hatred that burden some people more than others. Ross's commentary on the moral ambiguity of sacramental practice shines a light on the social complexities that shape the contexts where fasting takes place and reminds Catholics that such injustices do affect and often impinge upon the work of grace in the world. Therefore, a clear-eyed account of how body hatred constrains the possible results of fasting should also compel Christians to social justice actions that resist the dynamics of body hatred beyond the sanctuary. Dismantling the multiple and intersecting structures that stigmatize nonconforming bodies—including sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, heteronormativity, and capitalism—is vital to curbing the unjust body hatred in our midst. Until Catholics shift their discourse about fasting to reflect these realities of moral ambiguity, the entanglement of fasting with this reality of injustice as well as its effects on fasting's outcomes will remain overlooked or oversimplified.