Disordered Eating, Agency, and Social Class: Elaine Mar's Paper Daughter

In her ethnography Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, sociologist Beverly Skeggs discusses the identity politics surrounding social class in the UK and details how working-class mothers negotiate their roles as caretakers within the confines of their class. In Class, Self, Culture, Skeggs explores the different ways class circulates as a form of value, and, as noted in the epigraph, how value is prescribed to different bodies. Here, Rashedi draws upon Skeggs's research on class, value, and bodies to examine the relationship between disordered eating and class identity in Paper Daughter, the memoir of Elaine Mar, a Chinese-American woman who emigrated with her family from the Toishan region of mainland China in 1972 to a working-class neighborhood in Denver CO.