Through an analysis of the feminist literature on anorexia as a social problem, this paper shows that the different theoretical renderings of this phenomenon, closely linked to the social and historical context in which they are produced, inform the transformations of normativity and individuality at least as much as those of anorexia itself. From 1970 up until today, the interpretation goes from an alienation paradigm to an analysis of the discursive production of the anorexic subjectivity. We now see emerge a relational understanding of the anorexic subject and experience. Those fluctuations in the analysis translate the current evolution of society.