Reflective Essay

 My precursor is an auto ethnographic study interrogating the way young women seek to perform and represent identity through the construction of an online presence for my younger self.

Research Background

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This post contains excerpts from a manifesto I wrote ahead of this project.

My research question explores the social implications of the use of the hashtags fitspiration, thinspiration and clean eating on Instagram and Tumblr. At first I hoped to approach an embodied, subjective analysis of the way young women aged 12-25 use these hashtags to perform and represent eating disordered behaviours, however I quickly realised the impossibility of gaining the necessary ethics clearances needed to approach an understanding of the way an especially vulnerable group in society consumes potentially triggering material. Since I am only able to analyse the hashtags discursively in the scope of my final project, I wanted to use my Precursor to exorcise a desire I have to study the lived experience of a group who fascinate and disturb me.

My precursor is a contribution to the field of Digital Anthropology, a research community investigating the way human beings use digital artefacts to represent the human experience. Research emanating from this area commonly comprises ethnographic and auto ethnographic modes of analysis to interrogate how the offline manifests in the online and vice versa (Digital Anthropology 13). An ideal target audience within this community are researchers from the Young and Well CRC, a cluster known for their work promoting safe and healthy online behaviour to young people.

An inspiring piece for this precursor is Crystal Abidin’s digital ethnographic study of Singaporean bloggers, “‘Cya IRL’: Researching digital communities online and offline”. As part of her research practice, Abidin created a Facebook account to interact with the bloggers participating in her study, as well as a personal blog documenting her research journey.

She writes,

 In order to access and be socialised into the blog community, I had to ‘live’ within their shared social space and ‘perform’ as they would. This included adopting communication and behavioural norms just as any anthropologist entering a physical field site would. (Abidin 8)

Through this precursor I have also adopted behaviours I’ve observed as normative in the community I’m studying, particularly in relation to hashtag use, tone, form and emoji selection. 

Research Contribution

The piece is a valuable exegetical artefact for a research area investigating the evolution of the way young people perform and represent identity. The diary entries are written before a time of readily available methods of anonymously distributing private thoughts publicly online. Moreover, the historical images I have used to form the content of my Instagram account are also an interesting study of the way young girls  represented themselves before the invention of the front facing mobile camera and the selfie. Taken together, both mediums used in this project are an attempt to imagine what it would look like if such technologies of extension were available to me at the diary entry’s time of writing.

The artefact is presented within a purpose built website capable of linking out to content on other platforms. As such, the form of the piece is appropriate to a technologically literate research community interested in seeing research presented in an accessible and aesthetically pleasing way.

evolution

When I first created this precursor, I developed it as an aesthetic artefact to be studied as a text. I conceived of the Instagram and Tumblr accounts as static objects which would be viewed only by those who understood its purpose in academic inquiry. In putting myself at the centre of this project, I also saw the precursor’s first incarnation as a way of validating and discovering the personal motivations behind my choice of research topic.

But, as I checked back on the profiles after Precursor 1, I was shocked to find that people were actually interacting with the artefacts. I saw an opportunity to interact with this community and test my assumptions about the nature of the posts this audience found engaging.

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Before I approach a discussion of my findings from this precursor, I must note the ethical anxieties that came with this project’s development. Each time I saw a comment or a like on one of my posts I felt a pang of excitement at a gateway into new knowledge of the type of posts the community found engaging. But this went hand in hand of with immense discomfort at the strangeness of the deception that achieved that interaction.

Here I was, a healthy 21 year old Honours student posing as my emotionally immature 14 year old self.

 I went through a period of in depth content analysis of pro-anorexia accounts situated within the hashtag, thinspiration and found myself unconsciously posting images using similar hashtags. When these images achieved lots of likes and followers a particularly sickly feeling pitched its tent in my stomach as I realised I was achieving these insights by contributing to a movement which daily facilitates and validates eating disordered behaviours offline. This really hit home when an anorexia recovery blog began to follow me. Even though these posts were made in service to research which may hopefully contribute to healthy online behaviours, I was confronted with a dramatic justification of the ethical constraints research at this level must follow, for which I am glad of going into semester 2.

My fieldwork within this precursor also showed me how readily the pro-ana community validate and reinforce eating disordered behaviours by creating online and offline opportunities to connect. It is very easy for the rational mind to view pro-ana with a sense of abject horror and disgust- a feeling I experienced most of the time – but I was quite shocked at how gentle and friendly much of the discourse within the space was in service to creating a sanctuary for people whose behaviour had been rejected by society.

assumptions

danah boyd writes:

If I have learned one thing from my research, it’s this: social media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults. (boyd, 10)

I approached my research with a similar sense of alarmist horror at the new ways young women are interacting in digital spaces. However, I emerge from this study with the view that though the technologies young women are using to represent the human experience are radically different, the behaviours and experiences they are being used to represent are actually the same as they have always been.

This is why something I wrote in 2003 can be repackaged in a shiny new way, but can still gather you up and plop you right back into the moment of its original writing.

To close with a quote from Horst and Miller:

We may employ technologies to shape our conceptualisation of what it means to be human, but it is our definition of being human that mediates what the technology is, not the other way around. (“Normativity and the Principle of Materiality” 108)

 Works Cited

Abidin, Crystal. “Cya IRL’: Researching digital communities online and offline.” Limina Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies (2013): 1-17. Print.

boyd, danah. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014. Print. (case selection preferred by author)

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. “The Digital and The Human.” Digital Anthropology. Ed. Heather Horst and Daniel Miller. English ed. London: Berg, 2012. 3-13. Print.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. “Normativity and the Principle of Materiality: A View from Digital Anthropology.” Media International Australia 145 (2012): 103-11. Print.

Fieldwork // influencer study

A photo posted by @hollyat14 on

This is the post that made ‘skinny me tea’ follow me. Using the right hashtags I was able to draw this influential account to my profile. Skinny Me tea has come under fire for promoting unhealthy attitudes toward weight loss through their product, a tea which consumers solely drink and eat for a week in a detox. Interestingly, they don’t use thinspo hastags on their pictures…..

Thinspiration and Abjection: defining that feeling in your stomach

Abjection is important to my thesis and doubly important to narrating my horror at some of the stuff I’m seeing on thinspo sites.

Kristeva’s theory uses Freudian psychoanalysis to define the abject as a concept excluded from the accepted cultural order, hovering at the borders of the subject’s existence and threatening to loosen its claim as the dominant subject. To Kristeva, the abject manifests itself  in “what does not respect borders, positions, rules: the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (14), an example being the sight of a corpse, a powerful symbol of the abject as something mediating between the borders of life and death. Interestingly for my own study of eating disordered behaviour, Kristeva identifies the first form of abjection as that of “oral disgust”: “Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (11). Douglas’s original work contends that a fear of dirt has less to do with a wariness of hygiene than the avoidance of the symbolic disorder exemplified in certain types of food, and similarly Kristeva denies food loathing has any basis in a wariness of hygiene, “it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (11).

Debra Ferreday’s work places the feeling of abjection in the mind of the concerned outsider, encountering pro-Anorexia blogs with a feeling of instant anger and revulsion. Like the Kristevan revulsion at the corpse, Ferreday narrates the onlooker’s “moment of disgust…. as the defining moment in which the boundaries of the ‘healthy’ body are threatened by an encounter with the anorexic body” (“Unspeakable Bodies” 291).  As imagery of ‘thinspiration’ causes the onlooker to retch, pro-Anorexia content  “brings about a final ironic assault of the boundary between the anorexic and the healthy subject in which the onlooker is forced into a parodic repetition of anorexic praxis” (291). By producing a very visceral sensation of revulsion, the anorexic body breaks down the distinction between the healthy subject and the abject other and it is this moment of anger and panic that fuels the aggressive desire to delete sites of this nature. 

Works Cited

Ferreday, Debra. “Haunted Bodies: Visual Cultures of Anorexia.” Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 10.2 (2011): 1-22. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Lab work // crude renderings of Precursor 2

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Here is my crude rendering of my precursor 2. On the left I was asked to draw my project and I thought the best way to do so was drawing the photo of myself that inspired this whole second half (you can see it in the background of my blog). The drawing induces abject horror at its terribleness but also visually represents the personal side of my work I think. I’m  just saying it’s interesting that that is the visual symbol I went with being given a few minutes to render it. On the right are the decisions I’ve made in approaching the second half of my precursor program. They reflect loads of stuff that has happened outside of my lab and this artefact like:

  • arriving at a greater understanding of and passion for what I’m researching this year
  • knowing how and why I got to that stage
  • talking to people
  • discovering research methods I didn’t know existed

I’m then asked to write what these have in common with my revamped artefact at the general concern and fascination remains the same: the way young women represent themselves through the image.