A Feminist-Psychoanalytic Reading of Female Body Image in Letting Ana Go and Picture Perfect

Abstract

This study examines the representation of female body image as a contested site of sociocultural regulation and psychic negotiation in contemporary American fiction. While existing scholarship has largely approached female body image through either sociocultural or psychological frameworks, a gap remains in integrative analyses. Addressing this, the paper undertakes a feminist-psychoanalytic reading of two contemporary American novels: Anonymous’ Letting Ana Go and Alessandra Thomas’ Picture Perfect to explore how female body image is constructed, internalised, and resisted. To achieve this aim, the study performs a qualitative close reading and comparative textual analysis of the novels drawing on feminist theories of embodiment, surveillance, and neoliberal self-regulation alongside psychoanalytic concepts of repression, identification, and misrecognition. The analysis reveals that the novels’ protagonists internalise dominant body ideals that equate thinness with women’s beauty, self-control and worth. However, their trajectories diverge: Ana’s story in Letting Ana Go culminate in anorexia and death as a destructive assertion of agency, while Cat in Picture Perfect, recovers through therapy, creative expression, and resistance to external validation. The study concludes that while sociocultural factors may influence women’s embodied experiences, access to support and ideological resistance can significantly determine outcomes.