TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘To the horror of experts’: reading beneath scholarship on pro-ana online communities
AU - Holland, Kate
AU - Dickson, Andrew
AU - Dickson, Anna
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Pro-ana online communities in which people share their experiences of eating disorders have attracted concern among scholars and health practitioners because of fears about their potential to encourage disordered eating. This article draws upon concepts from feminist psychoanalysis to ‘read beneath’ a selection of scholarly work on pro-ana communities and consider the implications of this reading for theory and practice in public health. In particular, we draw upon Julia Kristeva’s work to ‘uncover’ how sections of the academy have attempted to manage the horror inherent in the abject in relation to pro-ana. To support our reading we also draw upon critical feminist and sociocultural research on pro-ana, critical public health scholarship and the Foucauldian notion of ‘care of the self’. In accordance with our intent to overcome dichotomous thinking we locate our approach in the context of cultural studies of psychiatry, which is concerned less with clarity and non-contradiction than it is with the social, cultural and political relations of psychiatric knowledge production. This orientation is suited to capturing pro-ana’s complex relationship with medical/psychiatric authority and the nuanced subjectivities of those who participate in such communities. We invite public health scholars and practitioners to appreciate a way of engaging with pro-ana communities that is geared less towards the impetus to control, censor or clinically intervene and more towards understanding them as sites through which individuals living with eating disorders can be in the world, and that both reveal and help us understand the centrality of ambiguity and contradiction to subjectivity.
AB - Pro-ana online communities in which people share their experiences of eating disorders have attracted concern among scholars and health practitioners because of fears about their potential to encourage disordered eating. This article draws upon concepts from feminist psychoanalysis to ‘read beneath’ a selection of scholarly work on pro-ana communities and consider the implications of this reading for theory and practice in public health. In particular, we draw upon Julia Kristeva’s work to ‘uncover’ how sections of the academy have attempted to manage the horror inherent in the abject in relation to pro-ana. To support our reading we also draw upon critical feminist and sociocultural research on pro-ana, critical public health scholarship and the Foucauldian notion of ‘care of the self’. In accordance with our intent to overcome dichotomous thinking we locate our approach in the context of cultural studies of psychiatry, which is concerned less with clarity and non-contradiction than it is with the social, cultural and political relations of psychiatric knowledge production. This orientation is suited to capturing pro-ana’s complex relationship with medical/psychiatric authority and the nuanced subjectivities of those who participate in such communities. We invite public health scholars and practitioners to appreciate a way of engaging with pro-ana communities that is geared less towards the impetus to control, censor or clinically intervene and more towards understanding them as sites through which individuals living with eating disorders can be in the world, and that both reveal and help us understand the centrality of ambiguity and contradiction to subjectivity.
KW - Abject
KW - anorexia
KW - care of the self
KW - containment rhetoric
KW - cultural studies of psychiatry
KW - eating disorders
KW - pro-ana online communities
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85032204243&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE140100100]
U2 - 10.1080/09581596.2017.1382681
DO - 10.1080/09581596.2017.1382681
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85032204243
SN - 0958-1596
VL - 28
SP - 522
EP - 533
JO - Critical Public Health
JF - Critical Public Health
IS - 5
ER -