This article focuses on the 1970s therapeutic literature on anorexia nervosa that tried to establish the claim that “fat is a feminist issue” (Orbach, 1978). This focus is meant to provide a way to consider how feminist social criticism and psychoanalytic theory did and did not meet at that time and over that topic. Anorexia nervosa, it is argued, is a paradigmatic case, revealing the theoretical issues that need to be engaged as the vexed dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis continues.