Fat talk in online discourse. A comparison of pro-anorexia and body positivity on social media

This study will compare two online communities; pro-anorexia and body positivity through a retrieval of posts tagged with the hashtags #thinspo (‘thin inspiration’) and #bopo (‘body positivity’) respectively. Two corpora of 120 posts per community were comprised and then processed in AntConc with the aid of a corpus linguistic approach. The data was then analysed with the aid of Arroyo and Harwood’s categorisation of ‘fat talk’ (2014), a typically female type of discourse often containing self-derogatory body commentary, to identify linguistic markers of the two groups. The results showed that body positive posts contained more we-talk, positive affect in terms of affirmation of self and others, as well as describing change of their relationships to their bodies rather than an external change of their bodies. Pro-anorexia discourse showed a general pattern of expressing more negative affect (disappointment, fear, disgust) as well as making negative self-evaluations. Unlike previous research, hardly any ‘we-talk’ was found the pro-anorexia discourse, indicating a lack of community