This interaction follows a post I did about Evan Peters, an actor most famous for his appearance as Tate in American Horror Story, Murder House. His celebrity is affirmed in a lot of pro ana accounts who seem to worship him and discuss his character in highly sexualised terms ie. Comments abound of fantasies of the character taking their virginity for example. This worship is disturbing, as Tate in AHS is a mass murderer and rapist. His character is a social outcast with a famous often reposted mantra “normal people scare me”, which seems to be where the pro ana audience relate to him most. When he undertakes his attack on the school, he paints his face like a skeleton which seems to represent in striking visual terms his outcast status, or the fact he is already dead inside. This seems to be a particularly relatable image for many pro ana accounts, who seem to use the still from the show of him in this makeup as a representation of the secret side of their anorexia. As an indicator of how active the hero worship of Peters is, I reposted an image of him and was immediately contacted by a fan site of his asking for ‘2 likes for 2 likes’.

 

This one was a really useful exercise in thinking ‘through’ a preposition. I’m a big fan of using concepts as vehicles through which we can move toward something else. Note that I used about 2 or 3 prepositions there myself! I chose: toward, since and within as you can see on my devil scratchings above.

It is hitting home to me how cool it is that even though I’m doing a thesis I still am getting the opportunity to do some exegetical work in thinking through an artefact I have created. Where in thesis writing we usually think through or within a certain concept or framework we ourselves didn’t create but actively chose, doing a project is centring our claims on something we ourselves have done. I think this is attractive to me as a person writing a thesis in contribution to a research area with a fairly long and momentous tradition. I get to have a bit of fun now in an act of pure creation!

When I first began this project, I feel it was very much an act of self help. I started by putting myself at the centre of the project so I could remove it later, a choice which I explored a lot in my first precursor. Additionally I felt a personal connection was behind my idea for the project, having a little sister active in an environment where she may be hypothetically exposed to this imagery, popular with girls her age. It was out of a sense of strange protectiveness that I embarked on a process of digitising my younger self.

I was grappling with a research question which I didn’t know why I wanted to spend a year of my life researching. What I wasn’t doing was grappling with an eating disorder. Much literary discussion of eating disordered behaviours through the lens of cultural theory is written by women who have been through these illnesses. Probyn is an example of a famous theorist who has made a large contribution to our understanding of the social meanings behind anorexia, who states explicitly she is a surviver of the illness and embeds it into her discussion of the physical experience of the disorder.  I have not ever experienced eating disordered behaviours in my life yet I have spent a lot of my life being absolutely fascinated by them. Conducting the kind of micro ethnographic study I have done through my observation of the interactions between followers of pro ana in this precursor I believe is further validation of this morbid fascination I have always held.

Like any rational person, I view lots of this stuff with abject revulsion. That’s one of the things doing this precursor project in both its incarnations has really affirmed for me. This has been an important realisation for me as it has made me reassess the gaze I’m placing upon these images. I’m not sure how I can remain objective in my research if I am still imposing my own personal feelings of anger and revulsion at these images. I don’t think I ever can remove these feelings from my process of viewing thinspiration but what I’ve realised along the way is in no way can I make conclusions at this level of study about the actual physical, offline process of the user who views these images. I simply can’t. It’s easier to remain a bit objective once I figured out the research method I’m using is discourse analysis, looking at the language used by contributors to thinspiration and making claims as to how this is reflective of social values. My approach means I am able to reassess the gaze I’m placing on these images as now I evaluate them as symbols/signs of society reproduced in small on a social media platform. I cannot claim they are anything else in one year of study.

One of the most shocking and confusing things about analysing pro ana is the communal aspect of user’s interactions. They appear to express a genuine wish to support each other and it is easy to assume that there is a sympathetic aspect to the movement when you imagine a group of vulnerable young girls who find solace in friendships realised online. Many of the accounts I perused last night used language of suicide, suffocation and self harm in relation to ‘ana’. What was interesting was the comment sections of their posts where sympathetic language was used to address other users commenting on their images. Users referred to each other as “lovely”, “babes”, terms I myself use to address close friends. They offered messages of love and support to each other ie. “Remember you are beautiful and I love you hon” which at first glance seem a bit out of place with my own assumptions about the community. I guess I expect these girls to be constantly putting each other down, not affirming that the other is ‘beautiful’ as she is. I have to keep reminding myself that these messages of support aren’t actually genuine lifelines to steer girls on a path toward healthy mental states, they are reinforcements of eating disordered behaviours.

This post is a case in point. I came across the hashtag “anabuddyneeded” on a few popular accounts. It is used either by girls starting out their ‘ana journey’  or by established accounts using their influence to draw potential ‘ana buddies’ to accounts that don’t have as many followers. This one depicts an account by a user with only a handful of followers who is looking to advertise for an ana buddy, a virtual friend who will fast in real time with her for the established target of 4 days. A number of accounts volunteer, as you can see, providing a ‘kik’ username (kik is an IM site popular with young girls where anyone can contact you if they have your username) to extend the discussion privately.

This comment section discusses the user’s fear of their families finding out about their instagram accounts, which all repost imagery of suicide, eating disordered slogans and imagery, tips on fasting and maintaining secrecy. The four different accounts share stories of their visceral fear at discovery by a family member. It’s interesting how brazen and open thinspo accounts are, documenting everything about their lives down to a potential date of suicide, but the language of these comments hints at the fear, anxiety and shame the girls feel at the threat of discovery. They sound vulnerable and its a reminder that the stuff I’m looking at is created by a vulnerable tween and not a monster. I’m forgetting that and perhaps letting my own hatred and fear of thinspo cloud my study of it.

When I was 10 and she was 11, my best friend Age and I spent the day re enacting a Girlfriend Magazine photoshoot frame by frame. We did each other’s makeup and each took turns being model and photographer. Aside from the squeals of embarrassment at seeing these photos again which erupt from my body from a place of abject horror and affection for our former selves, the images are an interesting study of how young females represent themselves through the medium of the image. This was 2004, when front facing cameras had not yet revolutionised self expression in the form of the selfie. The camera these were taken on was a disposable left over from capturing the memories of grade 5 camp, meaning there was little opportunity to take the picture and look back at it before it was developed. This seems to show in the images in how strangely at ease we both look in front of the camera, as the pictures are taken we aren’t constantly checking back at them, fixing our fly aways or wondering how we can stop that slight lazy eye look one does in a selfie when you look at your own face on the screen instead of the camera. But the images are also undeniably strange and unsettling. This is because frame by frame depictions of the actual photoshoot by two normal girls cannot but look like they are trying too hard. Additionally, there is a strangely sexual undertone to a couple of the images, namely the ones depicting us on Age’s bed, lying down looking distant. The adult in me feels a bit of bile in my throat looking at this attempt at hyper sexualising ourselves by creating a carbon copy of a photoshoot we saw in a magazine she was lucky enough to have a subscription to at the time. You can tell I’m much more into the whole thing than Age is, the fact that she doesn’t really want to be there makes the slightly objectifying photo of her looking over her shoulder vulnerably look even worse. She’s posed in an even more extreme sense since she didn’t really want to be the model as much as me. Characteristically, I seem to lack the stiltedness of Age’s discomfort in my photos due to the fact that I was and still am the more precocious child.

What I’m interested in here is the gaze that inflects these photographs. In the context of Age’s driveway, working with the limited materials we had to make magic (i.e.. Her mum’s makeup and avocado face mask) the shots are as faithful to the magazine spread as they could possibly be. Therefore, the strange, hyper sexual gaze that seems to inflect magazine spreads depicting young girls posing docile on beds, eating chocolate, frolicking in fabric, is present in our photos. On the other hand, our photos we taken without an audience in mind. Had we taken these about 4 years later, there is no doubt they would have been published on Myspace and we would have the biases of a specific audience in mind. But our pictures were for our eyes only. This means that the gaze inflected and inflicted on these photos is perhaps our own, a projection of our own normative ideas of what it is to be pretty or beautiful.  Finding these photos is also a massive bonus for my instagram artefact as now I have more historical source material to draw from to create my fake posts. I’m excited by this.