Such websites affectionately personify themselves as “Ana”, a girl that these sufferers confide in and share destructive information with as a means of normalizing their behaviour. Therefore, these websites provide an accessible and accepting online environment for sufferers to share their stories and tips for staying thin.
It is this social aspect of anorexia and its strong link to social relationships that I find most intriguing. Social anthropologist and professor at Adelaide University, Megan Warin has done extensive research into the social impacts of anorexia and has written a book entitled Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia. What I found interesting about her was that, based on her work with people who have the eating disorder, she found that anorexics often lack a sense of belonging and feel disconnected from society and therefore, by controlling their eating, they end up belonging to a group of people who are “successful” at dieting. Why this is relevant is because she suggests that the existence of pro-anorexia websites provides sufferers with a community where they could share weight loss secrets and become even better at losing weight. Therefore, because many anorexics feel disconnected from society before developing anorexia, these sites give them a place to fit in. In addition, she found that anorexics were avoiding normal everyday ways of relating to each other e.g. catching up over a meal, dinner with family etc and anorexia provided a way of avoiding situations where people usually connect and relate to one another. Therefore, perhaps these online sites are a non-threatening medium that they use as a means of connecting with people that does not put them in a social environment that revolves around food.
Megan Warin offers a supposedly “alternative understanding of anorexia” based on “the everyday acts that comprise relatedness” (Warin 2010: 2). She argues that anorexia develops as a strategy for managing what she terms “the abject”—that is, people, emotions and sensations considered dangerous and unwanted—through intricate practices of containment and self-control. She argues that management of the abject through bodily practices (such as the limitation of food) allows a person to modulate closeness and distance with her own emotions and body as well as with other people. Anorexia becomes a way to manage “dangerous” or “polluting” social relationships through acts on and with(in) the body. It centers on a substance (food) with powerful social meanings and special metaphysical properties that lend themselves to such social negotiations.
Megan could be an excellent interviewee for our web feature as she could provide an intellectual insight into the online medium as a source of connectedness for those suffering from anorexia and she could discuss the repercussions of censoring such websites and its impact on the anorexic community. So we could ask her what she thinks would happen if these sites were to be censored, and she could give some insight into the power of the internet and its seductiveness for anorexics that are attempting to avoid physical social interaction.
Megan Warin offers a supposedly “alternative understanding of anorexia” based on “the everyday acts that comprise relatedness” (Warin 2010: 2). She argues that anorexia develops as a strategy for managing what she terms “the abject”—that is, people, emotions and sensations considered dangerous and unwanted—through intricate practices of containment and self-control. She argues that management of the abject through bodily practices (such as the limitation of food) allows a person to modulate closeness and distance with her own emotions and body as well as with other people. Anorexia becomes a way to manage “dangerous” or “polluting” social relationships through acts on and with(in) the body. It centers on a substance (food) with powerful social meanings and special metaphysical properties that lend themselves to such social negotiations.
Megan could be an excellent interviewee for our web feature as she could provide an intellectual insight into the online medium as a source of connectedness for those suffering from anorexia and she could discuss the repercussions of censoring such websites and its impact on the anorexic community. So we could ask her what she thinks would happen if these sites were to be censored, and she could give some insight into the power of the internet and its seductiveness for anorexics that are attempting to avoid physical social interaction.
Flew, T. 2008, 'Social networking' in New Media: an introduction. pp. 143-167
Warin, M. 2010, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Rutgers University Press, NJ, pp. 1-47
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