Starving in Cyberspace: The Construction of Identity on ‘Pro-eating-disorder’ Websites

Abstract

‘The self’ has often been central to analyses of ‘eating disorders’ and problems with food and ‘body image’. However, in mainstream psychology notions of the self have often been situated within a false dichotomy between the subject and the social world, a dichotomy that has been deconstructed by critical theorists, particularly those writing from a social constructionist perspective (e.g. Burkitt, 1991). This chapter explores these debates and trends in theorising of the self, and reports on a study that analysed the discourse on pro-eating-disorder websites from a feminist social constructionist perspective. The analysis highlights the active discursive construction of feminine identities within these spaces and how this is closely bound with punitive regimes on the female body such as self-starvation. Through our analysis, the chapter challenges notions that the self can be understood as a separate, ‘pre-existent’ or static entity in understandings of self-starvation. Rather, ‘anorexic selves’ are constructed, worked on, multi-faceted and shifting, and an understanding of the discursive locatedness of these is important for fuller understandings of body modification and the self.