The Discursive Regulation of Female Corporeality in Social Networks: the Thin Line Between Skinniness and Anorexia in Conventional and Pro-Anorexic Discourses

Abstract

Modern culture, public policy and the market all make special demands on female bodies, especially young ones. Women bodies take on special significance in public discourse, resulting in apprehensions about one’s body size and shape. Such anxieties become, in turn, prescribed and normative. “Normative discontent” with the body, routine monitoring of its shape and size, and comparing one’s own body with others becomes an everyday part of youth and female experience. In this context, the Internet functions as a new media that, on one hand, actively (re)translates images of “ideal” and “normal” bodies and discursively produces the guidelines of beauty and success. On the other hand, the Internet opens up possibilities for enhanced communication, allowing the elaboration of individuals’ own versions of corporeality and bringing with it a collective reinterpretation of the imperatives behind “body culture”. This article focuses on two analytically distinguishable discourses of body discontent: the conventional and the pro-anorexic. The aim of the article is to compare the discursive production of normative (healthy, slim, athletic) with those of “anorexic” bodies, thus determining the boundaries between body norms and dis-norms, and comparing images of "perfect" bodies and the strategies employed to achieve them. The empirical base of this research includes groups and communities that relate to this theme in the social networking website "Vkontakte". An examination of communities dedicated to women's weight loss, which can be seen as essentially pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia in nature, sheds lights on how the shared idea of ​​corporeality and bodily experience can become the basis for solidarity among young women.  Those groups give rise to exchange of knowledge and experience, as well as the formation of common views on what the desired form of body should be and the agreement on the legitimate ways to achieve this. “Conventional” groups reproduce a traditional discourse on female bodies as being young, slender, smart, sexy, healthy and heterosexual. By the means of various techniques, such as posting motivating pictures or conducting a collective evaluation of this through various comments made on photographs and diaries of participants, those groups discursively set the parameters and norms of physical beauty, as well as the acceptable ways of achieving the “perfect body”. Meanwhile, pro-anorexic (pro-ana) communities set fundamentally different bodily ideals (not-feminine, asexual, unhealthy) and ways of achieving them (hunger, vomiting, self-harm). In these communities, a previously marginalized status is transformed into membership of an elitist practice. The commitment to the group identity appears to be very important in this, as the exclusivity of anorexic and bulimic bodies is affirmed and the difficult bodily experiences connected to this practice (fainting, dizziness) are aestheticized.