‘I Love you to the Bones’: Constructing the Anorexic Body in ‘Pro-Ana’ Message Boards

With reference to an ‘online ethnography’ (Ward, 1999) carried out in the ‘Anagrrl’ [1] pro-anorexic (ana) asynchronous [2] web based community, I explore the radical, underground web-based pro-ana movement. The ‘pro-ana’ movement challenges established biomedical ideas surrounding the treatment of anorexia, based on the ‘normalisation’ of the body shape and weight. For participants of the pro-ana movement, the anorexic condition represents a form of stability and control: a state to be maintained. The group offers non-judgemental support and guidance in managing anorexia. Referring to feminist writers such as Bordo (1993), MacSween (1993) and Brain (2002), it is suggested that feminism enables a conceptualisation of anorexia that prioritises social and cultural discourses, which emphasise the bias in the West towards representations of female beauty focusing on the slim, lean body. Feminist approaches to anorexia have also highlighted the emotional and psychological factors inherent in anorexia and building on this integrated approach I use the data to illustrate the way in which the pro-ana movement enables the emergence of an embodied anorexic ontology and epistemology. It is suggested that the emergence and perpetuation of this group offers a model of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ that facilitates the emergence of a coherent anorexic subjectivity. This is sustained by the development of an ‘ana-language’ and the formalisation, legitimation and validation of ana rituals and behaviour patterns.