‘I am an Anorexic’: Tensions in Discursive Relationships of Gender, Identity and Health Through a Case Study of a Pro-Anorexia Website

Despite the vast amount of research done around anorexia nervosa, anorexia as an identity, rather than only a disease, has barely been explored. Within Giddens' 'late modernity' concept, the growth of technology has caused individuals to use machines as mirrors to evaluate their image within society. This has created an opportunity for women to evaluate themselves with the Internet as a tool, and with this tool women have reappropriated a stigmatized identity from the medical discourse, causing tensions to arise in feminist and identity discourse. The establishment of a theoretical framework that supports the understanding of the body in the late modern age, highlighting the shift that the Internet has caused in learning, and showcasing the establishment of the body as an action system. Critical discourse analysis will be used to show how the development of contextualized truth claims determine whether an online community with a (positive) anorexia identification on the Internet can possibly suggest a position within, or a stand against conventional identity categories. While this research discusses anorexia as a reclaimed identity due to growth in technology and how users understand technology, it is the personal goal of the researcher to have this paper act as a vehicle to understanding the reappropriations of other stigmatized identities regarding feminism and body property as displayed in online social spaces