The Gender Politics of Fasting

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/fasting-gender-politics.html

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Last summer I took part in a 24-hour fast, as part of a “Break Bread Not Families” prayer and fasting chain. I spent a day not eating, in spiritual solidarity with the 2,400 children who had been separated from a parent at the border. Many of these children were being detained a few miles from my house in McAllen, Tex., where their parents were signing deportation papers on the promise of reunification — and where President Trump visited last Thursday. The hosting organization was LUPE (La Unión del Pueblo Entero), a nonprofit organization that works on local issues in South Texas and was founded by the labor activists Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in 1989.

Chavez, — who died in 1993 and is considered a hero by many for founding, along with Huerta and other labor organizers, the United Farm Workers of America — was a deliberate undereater. He undertook three major fasts in his life — the first public fast lasted for 25 days in 1968, the second for 27 days in 1972 and the last for 36 days in 1988 — with frequent shorter ones in between. Chavez claimed that he didn’t fast primarily to nudge political action, much less to change his body shape. As a Roman Catholic, he described fasting as a means of purifying his body, mind and soul, and he saw it as an opportunity to do penance, join in solidarity with others, and draw attention to the maltreatment of farmworkers.

Chavez called fasting “probably the most powerful communicative tool that we have,” emphasizing the spiritual nature of the medium. In fasting, he believed that one soul could speak directly to another one, bypassing political and religious differences. Chavez described fasting as a “sacrifice for justice” and a “reminder of suffering.” Each fast was deeply personal, but Chavez knew that he was tapping into the history of not eating as a way of speaking truth to political power.

Chavez also knew that he was risking his life and worrying loved ones by under-eating, but he insisted that he didn’t fast “out of a desire to destroy myself.” Yet despite knowing that some fasters die around the 15-day mark, Chavez persisted 10 days longer than that in his first public fast. He died at 66, his body certainly weakened by his fasting.

Most people would not be surprised to know that Chavez was not — either during his life or posthumously — generally considered to have an eating disorder. His fasting was believed to have served a higher purpose. That was not the case with another well-known Catholic, who, decades before Chavez, was drawn to the idea of refusing food for a social good and to connect with God.

The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) — not a traditional Catholic but a Catholic nonetheless — was a faster, too. She systematically denied herself food three times in her life. At 5, Weil gave up sugar upon learning that French soldiers didn’t have access to it. The second time, she ate only what factory workers could afford to eat. The third time she died, at 34, after having for too long eaten only the quantity of food that her compatriots in occupied France would have access to.

Weil stated that her fasts were motivated by a sense of solidarity with France’s emaciated outcasts, and her empathy found a home in her empty stomach. But she confessed that her fasting had as much to do with what she called the “void” where God lived as it did with solidarity. She wrote a considerable amount about the spiritual relationship between God and emptiness.

“We have to fasten onto the hunger,” she wrote, since hunger reminds us that we are not self-sustaining, that God is spiritual bread. She believed that loving God was akin to renouncing food even when one is hungry. Food can’t fill the void inside of us, she thought, since that’s where God belongs. For Weil, hunger was a sign that there was room enough for God.

Weil claimed that her fasting was spiritual and social, as Chavez did. Both systematically underfed themselves and claimed religious grounds for doing so. In both cases, loved ones worried about them, and in both cases, these periods of undernourishment hastened their deaths. They each provided religious reasons for not eating, but only one of them was believed.

In many of the subsequent accounts of her life, Weil has been labeled an anorexic, like St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century nun who was also convinced that she could reach God through her empty stomach. This was not the fate of Chavez, who is today still admired for carrying out a centuries-old ascetic practice, nor of Mohandas Gandhi — nor for that matter, Jesus Christ, who in the Bible is said to have fasted for 40 days and nights in the desert.

Today, even though one-third of diagnosed eating disorders are found in men, we overwhelmingly associate the medical diagnosis of anorexia nervosa with women (a more obscure term, anorexia mirabilis, denotes undereating as a form of religious asceticism, and is not listed as a medical condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). All this suggests that in society when a woman intentionally fasts, we are more likely to see her as sick; and when a man does it, we consider him spiritual. It’s certainly possible that Weil hid a case of anorexia nervosa behind a mask of spirituality. By that logic, though, Chavez might have done the same thing.

The same double standard applies outside of a religious context. Just like yoga, meditation, and other spiritual practices that get popular when they jettison their religious trappings, fasting has become a health practice in recent years, often in male circles. Some research now supports the idea that the body does well when it gets deprived of food for certain lengths of time, from 12 hours to three days, a concept known as Intermittent Fasting. Like the Paleo movement (a diet often marketed to men), I.F. remembers us as Paleolithic humans in the wild, with days of plenty sandwiched by days of nothing. Today, magazines and podcasts aimed at men promote the idea that I.F. is good for a man’s physique. Notably absent is public worry that these men will develop eating disorders. In contrast, when a female student in my class announced that she was going to start practicing I.F., other students quickly warned her to “be careful.”

To point out this gender disparity around fasting is not to ignore the very real problem of eating disorders. In an age where anorexia nervosa and bulimia are prevalent among both men and women, there is sufficient reason to be cautious in branding any fast as “spiritual” — doing so might give cover by offering a religious justification in cases that may very well be psychological and physical in nature. The American cultural obsession with thinness and the demonization of body fat that magnify critical self-image and the psychological aspects of eating disorders should not be taken lightly. But that does not negate the misunderstanding and gender stereotyping that often surrounds intentional fasting for spiritual or political purposes.

My own one-day fast confirmed that I love food, but also that I am capable of systematically denying it to myself for a higher cause. Like Weil, I had hoped the pain in my stomach would serve as a reminder of the emotional pain of the children who lacked not food but mothers. It did: Every time my stomach groaned I imagined temporarily orphaned children. Privation joined me to them, even if mine was self-imposed and temporary. Like Chavez I felt repentant, as in, turned back toward the good, toward justice, toward God. Fasting made me feel utterly connected to these children, and thoroughly Catholic. By fasting I was tapping into my own religious, ascetic history, and I had triumphantly joined Weil and Chavez in their quest to share in the suffering of others.

Something telling also happened that day. I kept wondering if my desire to not eat was indicative of a latent eating disorder. In eating (and other areas), women are taught to doubt themselves. Perhaps the power radiating from the sickly bodies of Gandhi and Chavez contrasts too sharply with the medical diagnoses of bodies like Weil’s, leading women to believe that deep inside, our souls are sick. I doubt that the men I fasted with that day in Texas heard a critical voice in their head, incessantly pressing them to examine their motives.

As a philosopher, I am in no position to make diagnoses for either of these historical figures, but I can insist that their actions — and ours — be viewed in the same light, with the same kind of scrutiny.

Mariana Alessandri is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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