 
REBECCA J. LESTER Assistant Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology Ph.D., Univ. California at San Diego, 1998 314-935-9426 rjlester@artsci.wustl.edu |
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REBECCA J. LESTER Assistant Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology Ph.D., Univ. California at San Diego, 1998 314-935-9426 rjlester@artsci.wustl.edu |
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My research focuses on medical anthropology, gender, embodiment, religion and ritual, psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry. Linking these issues at various points is my focus on gender, self and the body. I am currently writing my first book (based on my dissertation research): an ethnography of subjective transformation through the systematic alteration of the experience of embodiment in the context of a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico. I examine the ways in which the Sisters' existential transformation proceeds in direct, practical engagement with larger cultural concerns about Mexican nationalism and cultural identity in the face of an accelerated movement into the "first world." In examining this process, my book is an exploration in the ways in which gendered subjectivities may become politically and socially charged as means of articulating cultural conflicts about modernity and how these larger meanings take on significance for people on the most intimate of personal levels.
My interest in the religious experiences of women in the convent grew out of my previous (and ongoing) research on anorexia nervosa. I am particularly interested in anorexia as a contemporary ascetic practice, the way in which anorexia as an illness is defined and constructed within medical discourse, and how this, in turn, shapes the anorexic woman's subjective experience of her distress. Specifically, I interrogate the cultural dimensions of the illness as one in which particular, moralized forms of body ritual assume center stage.
I also conducted research on the Lower East Side of New York City as part of a three-year, three-city project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation evaluating urgent questions of welfare, work, and identity among formerly homeless mentally ill individuals. My particular focus was on questions of the cultural constructions of "mental illness" and "recovery" as projects of spiritual and moral regeneration.
My current research explores the embodied terrains of sexuality and desire in the anorexic condition. This project assesses the ways in which linkages among morality, sexual identity, and food and body concerns are elaborated in the diagnosis and management of this illness in both the clinical and non-clinical (e.g., twelve-step groups) domains. I am particularly interested in the mobilization of spiritual or religious discourses in these contexts as a means of articulating and persuading suffers to accept "permissible" experiences of the body.
For more information see the overview of the department's research in sociocultural anthropology.
Medical Anthropology; Gender, Culture, and Madness; Theorizing the Body
Lester, Rebecca J.
2005 Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent. Univ. California Press.
2000 "Like a Natural Woman: Celibacy and the Embodied Self in Anorexia Nervosa" in Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence, E.J. Sobo and S. Bell, eds. University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 197-213.
1999 "Let Go and Let God: Religion and the Politics of Surrender in Overeaters Anonymous," in Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness,, Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer, eds. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp.139-164.
1997 "The (Dis)Embodied Self in Anorexia Nervosa," Social Science and Medicine 44(4): 479-489.
1995 "Embodied Voices: Women's Food Asceticism and the Negotiation of Identity. Ethos 23(2): 187-222.
