The Construction of Bodily Transgression in Virtual Communities
MA Thesis
Comparative Cultural Analysis 2014-2015
Student: Yasmina Faiz (10215379)
Supervisor: Drs. Marie Beauchamps
Second Reader: Dr. Jules Sturm
University of Amsterdam
Table of Contents
Introduction...2
1 Biopolitics and the Construction of the Healthy Body...6
Introduction...6
1.1 Biopolitics and the Regulatory Body...7
1.2 The Health Imperative Online...14
2. Embodied Narratives, Accountability and Morality...18
Introduction...18
2.1 The Pro-Ana Community: Pathology and Normativity...20
2.2 The fatpeoplehate Community: Rationality and Morality...29
3 Posthuman Bodies and the Idea of the Body as Original Prosthesis...38
Introduction...38
3.1 The Controllable and the Transgressing Body...40
3.2 Embodied Intelligence...45
Conclusion...50
Introduction
Let me begin by saying that my first initiative for writing this thesis has much to do with my personal interest in the discursive and physical crossing and blurring of prevailing cultural and social demarcations. In part, I believe, this interest might be due to the modern-day information overload and inescapable focus on being and getting healthy. Pressuring narratives of health made me feel numerous times that health, rather than being a possibility, is a social obligation I must meet. I must eat healthy, or else what will people think of me? I must enrol in a gym, take vitamin supplements and disinfect my entire house twice a week, because I do not want to be at fault if I do happen to get ill. The weight of these sorts of responsibilities for the maintenance of health is, however, not limited to my own experiences. After speaking to many of my friends and family members, I found out that every one of them experiences these duties or burdens in everyday life routines. Yet, contrary to my own experience, most did not see these behaviours as being negatively imbued. On the contrary, they saw them as positive behaviours. They enjoyed these repetitive actions, because it gave them a sense of satisfaction and safety, like they were in control of their own future and personal happiness at that moment.
Because this experience has fascinated me ever since, I aim to write this thesis looking for that same friction between experiences of health and the body. I will look at this friction as a productive field of knowledge to understand the difference and experiences of bodily transgression. I would like to uncover how dominant health narratives are manifested in our everyday conduct and our thoughts on the sovereign self and others, and especially how this might reflect the ways in which we experience
embodiment through intercorporeality. To do so, I look at two websites that are part of two different virtual communities that focus on the regulation and manipulation of the body: myproana.com, a website used and generated by people in the pro-anorexia (also known as pro-ana) community; and the subreddits on reddit.com which fall under the community of /r/fatpeoplehate.
To start, Foucault’s theory on the emergence of biopolitics is the main focus of chapter one and also surfaces throughout the rest of this thesis. The notion that the body in biopolitics is thought of as regulated rather than disciplined, and that power can be productive as well as repressive, creates a subsequent need to question how power is exercised in the construction of modern day knowledge about health. For instance, what perceptions of health are legitimised and how are bodies discursively constituted and positioned as healthy or unhealthy? Here, I believe it becomes important to look at those bodies that are represented as being abnormal and digressive on multiple levels – to examine how health is instated as a tool for self-regulative control over the body by setting the objective of attaining the socially recognised status of ‘healthy’ person.
In the second chapter, I introduce the two main virtual communities of interest, the pro-anorexia community and the fatpeoplehate community as indicated above. Because these communities are lived through virtual environments, they are not containable within one particular website or platform, but are a dynamic online presence. By that I mean that they are operative throughout the internet instead of based on one particular website. In this sense they could be called movements, in a non-traditional way, since they use shared views and interests to gather and express their own experiences in the spaces that they see fit for it. For example, both the pro-anorexia and the fatpeoplehate communities use websites, forums, tumblrs, instagrams and many other platforms, which all might differ slightly due to differences inherent to the
platforms, but all serve to display and engage with the respective communities. For the purpose of this analysis I have therefore selected two platforms of both communities: MPA.com, a pro-anorexia community and reddit.com’s subreddits on fatpeoplehate, which entails subdivisions such as /r/TalesofFatHate, a community of people who express hate for others that are visibly fat or obese. By looking at their radically different principles, yet also the similar ways in which they make use of techniques of normalization and dominant health discourses on the body, I intend to show how the subjectivity of health discourses are enabling narratives that affect the body beyond its corporeal boundaries.
The living body, or abilities-machine, plays an important role in online environments. This is, firstly, because of the online environments’ initial idea of being a disembodied one and secondly, because the body in biopolitical power structures depends on the ability to govern one’s self identity. However, online environments construct a broad platform where counter-discourses are difficult to regulate and monitor, which opens up many different narratives on the body that would otherwise not become so visible for so many people at once.
Through analysis of, on the one hand, a community that is centred around one’s own body, and on the other hand, a community centred around the bodies of others, chapter two creates a twofold view of the cultural politics of the body that is vital to understanding bodily transgression in virtual communities. I aim to show how both communities must first perpetuate a standard of what is and what is not acceptable, in order to then be able to digress from it.
Lastly, I turn to somewhat more speculative theory on the concept of healthy bodies by engaging with posthumanism and related fields such as transhumanism. This will allow for a reflection that understands bodily transgression as something that
shapes all bodies by “... changing its dimensions, not by getting smaller or larger, but by being rhythmed across different sets of relations.” (Halberstam and Livingston, 18). Through contestation of the liberal subject, the body can be more actively constructed as
the original prosthesis and therefore always already having a hybrid identity (Hayles 2).
By extending the relational implications between and within bodies themselves, health narratives can be understood as social structures and personal experiences instead of normative guidelines.
1 Biopolitics and the Construction of the Healthy Body
Introduction
For many people being healthy is more than the opposite of being ill. It has become a notion so firmly wired into modern narratives of everyday life that it has manifested itself as a social benchmark of identity. Therefore, health as a concept must be read not only as a biomedical signifier, but also most certainly as a metaphorical one. Viewing health as a rhetorical tool through which meaning is articulated to construct certain aspects of reality provides a greater understanding of the effects of health discourse. As Tim Dean states in his work on healthism and barebacking culture, the idea that “[we] want to be healthy because we want to be normal” reflects a powerful objective of normalcy that lies behind the collective striving for healthy bodies (63).
This chapter aims to clarify the context in which health has come to operate as a metaphorical signifier in the construction of everyday life. Using terms from the fields of biopolitics and biopower, it focuses on the extent to which living bodies have been positioned at the intersection of physicality and politics. I will start off by discussing Foucault’s perspective on biopolitics and governmentality, which will lay the groundwork for looking at health discourses as something which is not a stable and fixed signifier, but rather becomes intelligible as something flexible and subjective that coincides with many other developments throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics. Then, to further elaborate on the role of the body in the modern day health imperative, I will turn to texts by Tim Dean and Nikolas Rose, among others, which elucidate the importance of ethics and morality in health discourses. Ultimately, with
this first chapter, I would like to explain and underline that the ways in which power is inscribed are a significant place/space for deconstruction of norms
1.1 Biopolitics and the Regulatory Body
Michel Foucault developed the concept of ‘biopolitics’ in a series of lectures at the Collège de France during the late seventies, in which he explains how this new technology of power is an extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population. In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault explains how and why technologies of power have transformed over time from a sovereign power structure over life and death into a biopolitical power, regularizing humanity race-wide, considering men-as-species (240). According to him, both forms of power are distinct modes of governing, each relating to historical dominant power structures, with the transition having occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The main characteristics of these power structures are the following: sovereign power relies on disciplining the individual body by preserving the right to kill as way of governing; biopolitical power instead relies on the regulation of the human race as a whole, retaining the right to, more subtly, “make live, and let die” (Foucault 240). Although these are different methods that developed over different periods of time, Foucault also explains that they are not mutually exclusive, and can change into a multitude of varieties across different times and spaces. Ultimately, both mechanisms reveal how “life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which... fall outside the field of power” (Foucault 240). Instead, they are phenomena that lie within the realm of power, because through government over the right to life or death, these phenomena become something the subject has to earn and does not naturally have.
Foucault paradoxically states that, “the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive,” meaning that subjected to time-specific and culturally dominant ideas and conceptions, seemingly mere biological concepts are constructed within a certain structure and are always invested in discursive formations (Foucault 240). By extension, this also means that subjects must first prove to be worthy of life and prove their value to society prior to earning the right to be understood as a living body.
With this transformation from sovereignty to biopolitics, Foucault, in his book
The Birth of Biopolitics, further explains the change in emphasis from the body as such to
the living body. Such emphasis on the living body implies a division between what is seen as mere body and what is seen as an active and worthy participant in society. In other words, a certain dynamic of inclusion and exclusion is created in order to justify the foundations of a normative society. This shift in power structures concurred with the rise of neo-liberal ideology and the emergence of a socioeconomic theory of human capital (Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics 1979). Whereas before this shift in power structures the human body was a domain not considered economic capital, it now became part of the economic model of capital.
This insertion of the human body into economic discourse implies a redefinition of what the human body entails. Transformed into an “abilities machine,” the body fits the definition of capital as “that which makes a future income possible” (The Birth of
Biopolitics 224). This discursive transformation implies that one’s personal ability to
work and act appropriately, one’s labour skills and capacities, are all determining factors in making it possible for someone to earn a “future income.” Indeed, it makes for a structure in which capital “in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it.” (The Birth of Biopolitics 224). That way, in the economic conception of the
human body, everything in a subject’s existence, from social relationships to personal interests and education, becomes a capital asset valuable in economic terms.
From this identity between the subject with his or her ability to work, or to do something, and Foucault’s argument that these are inseparable, comes the necessary question and reformulation of personhood. What does it mean for a person to be inseparable from that which he or she does? Just by naming this new perspective on the human body as an “abilities-machine,” Foucault seems to aim at a certain level of behavioural automatisation. Further, the term also suggests that there is an ideological grounding for human behaviour, depending on the sort of structure one is in. In this case of the (Western) economic structure, this ideological grounding influences subjects to the point where, when given a choice to make, the subject is obligated to choose whichever is best for progression in improving his or her skills and abilities, thereby earning one’s right to live. As Foucault explains, this division between the self and product becomes a very constricted matter for the neo-liberal subject:
(...) if capital is thus defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it [the breakdown of labor into capital and income] is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it. To that extent it is not like other capitals. Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker's skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, (...). (The Birth of Biopolitics, 224)
This excerpt explains how the struggle over the working body is not merely a symbolic one, but is acted out through practice and must be internalised by the subject in order to meaningfully participate in society at large. In return, the lived experiences and habitual daily practices of a subject are partially formed by this capacity for attending to his or her body-machine. So the ways in which someone behaves, what someone’s occupation is, how someone looks, are valuable assets for self-identity as well. Hence, from reading human capital as the accumulation of capital, wage and income, self-identity becomes an operative tool for governing the human body.
This economic model of the self in the twenty-first century explains how self-identity becomes part of biopolitical power strategies. In this complex relation of product and producer, health is instated as an instrument of human behaviour. It belongs to biopolitical power strategies, in the sense that it plays a central part in regulating the population’s productivity by maintaining its overall well-being. Being able to make sure that, within these structures, the human body is self-regulatory and is kept in an optimal state, is an effective method for lowering (healthcare) costs and increasing labor and productivity rates.
Looking at health from a biopolitical perspective is first of all a way to uncover normative views about physical corporeality. From this viewpoint, biopolitics is thought of as a power strategy that acts as a control apparatus over a mass of people. Understood as such, it reflects a struggle over the physical and the political in which the healthy body is a viable asset for control. The healthy body is more than a tool to be regulated, it also makes the distinction between health and illness visible as strength or weakness of the individual’s own will to health. Physical corporeality in biopolitics becomes a matter of willpower and choice between strength or weakness, which is
effective in creating dominant standards for bodily appearance and ideals of beauty that operate on multiple levels.
Furthermore, biopolitical perspectives on health emphasize the effective link that exists between social behaviours and the moralization of health. In practice, healthcare clinics and other institutions set up to regulate disease and battle illness have contributed to this link by incorporating a statistical approach in their operation. Dean illuminates this linkage by explaining how the remoralisation of health and illness in the twenty-first century is closely linked to an increase in the value and capitalization of scientific research. This is of particular importance here since it fits with the body being perceived as partially automated and machine-like. He explains that:
The emergence of modern epidemiology thus laid the ground for a remoralization of illness, based on a renewed sense that susceptibility to disease could be controlled by the stringent regulation of diet and exercise, as well as by avoidance of the risks associated with smoking, alcohol, illegal drugs, and sexual promiscuity. Rather than sources of pleasure, the latter were redefined as sources of danger, and the new emphasis on behavioral determinants of disease reinforced a sense that the pursuit of health was the individual's moral responsibility. (61).
From Dean’s eloquently stated argument Dean, we can see how healthy bodies became influenced by biomedical research outcomes and turned into modern day narratives of the self in which an individual’s moral accountability for his or her conduct reaches far beyond judicial rulings and legislation, entering an individual’s daily routines and life choices. Disease management enables institutions to redescribe health and illness in
terms of risk, turning personal well-being into a matter of choice of conduct. Either you exercise and diet, minimize risks and choose health, or you ignore or defy these standards (do not exercise, and eat a poor diet and drink alcoholic beverages), increase the risks and choose illness. The impact of this sort of risk politics is that it allows for a differentiation of desirability between behaviours. This in turn allows for a differentiation between individuals or groups as either intrinsically good or bad, and considered to be healthy bodies or unhealthy bodies by adding up the number of behaviours which are determined to be “risks.” Whichever side is concerned, the fact remains that health is perceived as an individual’s personal responsibility, therefore someone who does not follow the behavioural patterns for maintaining a healthy body is likely frowned upon by others who do follow the ‘right’ behavioural patterns. In this way, societal structures of (self) surveillance in a biopolitical state apparatus contribute to ‘technologies of the self,’ directing individuals towards preferring a certain dominant, space- and time-bound standard of the body.
Since these definitions of risk concerning the regulation of the body en masse are always also highly political in nature, I now turn to Nikolas Rose’s book on biopower and politics, The Politics of Life Itself. Rose claims that health can be described as a “transactional zone between political concerns for the fitness of the nation and personal techniques for the care of the self” (3). With the notion of “the care of the self” Rose is taking up a Foucauldian concept from The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982). Foucault uses this term to refer to the way in which “the principle that one must take care of oneself became the principle of all rational conduct in all forms of active life that would truly conform to the principle of moral rationality” (The Hermeneutics of the Subject 11). From this perspective it is clear how techniques for the care of the self are fundamentally woven into the actions of everyday life.
This interconnectedness between the care of the self and one’s everyday actions also implies a connection between self-identity and the prevailing moral rationality, which in this case is the construction of health and the associated regulation of behaviours. Because the care of the self is thus partially an internalised process of self-regulation, it influences the subject’s conduct and the ways in which others might then interpret them. Quoting Giorgio Agamben, Rose underlines the outcomes of this aspect of biopolitics: “…when the collective body of the people becomes the principal resource for politics, the purging of defective individuals becomes an essential part of the care of life” (Agamben 1998, qtd. in Rose 3). In this “transactional zone” of health, Rose thus argues that health is simultaneously operating on a political as well as on a social level. I believe that if we elaborate this statement, it also implies that health can be seen as a power strategy which works at least in part through manipulating the notion of identity. Because it is a preeminently flexible concept at the interplay between two different levels that are always in a state of ‘becoming,’ such as the self and the other, groups of individuals and a society, it also means that it is capable of being a powerful concept on both of those levels.
To summarize, what we can establish from the theories described above is the following: firstly, the body in neo-liberal ideology is always already subjugated to a division between its discursive implications and its material reality. Secondly, the increasingly dominant biomedical perspective on the body as primarily an object of study and vulnerable vessel of a collection of molecules has enabled the redefinition of certain risk behaviours as dangerous, resulting in a health narrative that evokes moral responsibility not only for one’s own health status but also for that of others around one. As a result, the current structure enables and encourages the neoliberal subject to be invested in the self as product as well as machine. In this sense, the “transactional
zone” (Rose) in which health operates, is the space where economic structures are directly projected upon social structures and consequently influence behavioural acts in everyday lives.
1.2 The Health Imperative Online
When abilities, skills and behaviours are deemed an intrinsic part of the self while simultaneously constituting the possibility of earning a future income, then the body can indeed be regarded as an “abilities-machine” or body-machine. For a better understanding of healthy bodies it is important to incorporate this human capital theory, because it explains how economic values and structures influence the body, and how bodies in turn continuously reinstate these economic values and structures in order to be allowed to participate in society. In other words, the body as an abilities-machine does not only physically enter the sphere of capital, but also enters into the language of capital, investments and entrepreneurship on a discursive level.
To see how discourses work to invigorate the manifestation of the body-machine as human capital, Foucault offers an explanation of how rational conduct is at the heart of neoliberal ideology using the metaphorical figure of the homo economicus, or ‘economic man’:
Homo Economicus is someone who accepts reality. Rational conduct is
any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables. (The
On the one hand, the productive body-machine, or homo economicus, as outlined here is someone who uses rationality as a moral compass or truth mechanism throughout everyday life circumstances to legitimize the choices that he or she makes and thereby protect his or her capital value. On the other hand, these economically grounded systems that govern the body also preeminently determine the shape of this reality that is continuously “accepted” with such a rationale. It is in this interplay between the individual who “accepts reality” and “the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables” that is economics, that terminology from the field of economics can get transferred and redefined when introduced into human capital and manifested in daily conduct.
The imperative of health is a strategic element in biopolitical governing, enabling the rational subject to regulate himself or herself to function in “a non-random way, in a systematic way,” taking part in, and contributing to, the maintenance and ongoing self-improvement of the human body. This implies valorising a certain state of superiority over others, hence establishing a normative framework in which the body becomes formatted. This normative framework is maintained by biopolitical power strategies, because instead of a sovereign form of punishment for not conforming to the normative regularities, this maintenance of bodies is upheld by individuals’ own sense of moral responsibility regulated amongst people as well as by (governmental) institutions. This is where “the acceptance of reality” as a fundamental aspect of homo economicus becomes clearer; as Rose puts it: “Every citizen must now become an active partner in the drive for health, accepting their responsibility for securing their own well-being.”
(6). Homo economicus is here viewed as an almost statistical and static outcome of these
others and displays a ”systematic nature of responses to environmental variables.” Following this logic of homo economicus as rational subject pur sang, he or she is always pre-reflexively taking into consideration and acting upon the views of others. Yet the resulting behaviour and/or perspective, predetermined by taking in the expectations that others might already have, is thought of as one’s own view and can become part of one’s individuality and selfhood. In chapter two I will return to these concepts of rational conduct, self-censorship and homo economicus as metaphorical figure in more detail.
Having laid out my theoretical framework, I believe that, in order to productively analyse these normalizing power structures that regulate the contemporary body, it is important to look at examples in which struggles over the body take place. Following Foucault’s thought, “I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn’t be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it” (Power/Knowledge 58), I will turn to online and virtual environments to search for contemporary narratives of the body.
Although virtual environments might initially seem to be nonmaterial and therefore at odds with discussions on the body, a material matter, this duality is inherent to virtuality as much as it is inherent to materiality, which is why the crossing points are preeminently sites where informational patterns can become evident. It can elucidate how the duality between virtuality and materiality is also inherent to both virtuality and materiality. With these virtual sites of bodily representation coexisting alongside and through the material body, informational patterns, or stands of data, become inextricably linked to the body. In this linkage, I will make use of Katherine Hayles’ understanding of virtuality as “the cultural perception that material objects are
interpenetrated by information patterns,” which enables a more layered reading of the body through cybercultures (14).
However as we have seen from Dean’s argument on modern epidemiology, reducing every perceivable reality to a mere culmination of atoms or binary codes also has its fallacies, since it tends to decontextualize what or who is being studied from the personal lived environment and also blurs the demarcation between the object and subject of study. Especially concerning health discourses, there is a plethora of different narratives on the body online, where techniques of normalization of the body are constructed through virtual environments. Health blogs, fitness communities, pro-anorexia forums, fat-hating tumblrs, thin privilege blogs, thinspiration instagrams, and superfood themed pinterests, all have in common a central focus on maintaining or attaining a ‘healthy body’ and therefore speak to the self-regulative, malleable aspects of the neoliberal subject. After all, in this rational logic, why would anyone not opt for a socially and culturally desirable body? This question reflects many underlying assumptions and subjectivities, but it is the assumption that one always has a choice over what one’s body looks like that plays a significant role here and is a persistent and justifying way of looking at ourselves and others around us.
To conclude, health can be seen as a powerful, strategic element in biopolitical governing, because it uses the body in self-identity as a tool for (self) regulation. The primarily biomedical health narratives on the body enable and call for a neoliberal subject who can engage in this framework with his or her own body and others’ bodies through rational conduct. Thus the subject embodies Foucault’s description of Homo
Economicus as an individual who ”accepts reality”, and will always find (economical)
2. Embodied Narratives, Accountability and Morality1
“It is not by food that we survive but by the gaze of others; and it is impossible to live by hunger unless we can be seen or represented doing so(...). Self-starvation is above all a performance (...) it is staged to trick the conscience of its viewers, forcing them to recognize that they are implicated in the spectacle that they behold” Kafka, The Hunger Artist
Introduction
In this chapter I will focus on two seemingly opposed paradigms, namely eating disorders and fatness. However, despite their differences, they also turn out to share a number of commonalities. In general, one major common trait is, of course, that they both revolve around the signifier of the body, maintenance of the body and the creation of narratives about what constitutes the ‘normal’ and healthy body. However, it is also not difficult to see the ways in which they differ from each other. For instance, while the participants on MyProAna are mostly engaged in describing and sharing their own lived experiences of their bodies, fatpeoplehate seems to be more occupied with describing and sharing their experiences of encounters with other bodies, specifically those who, in their perspective, are at fault by transgressing from what is deemed normal. Scholars from various disciplines have expressed their theories on precisely this viral existence of communities, because it brings together several discourses and spaces. It includes topics such as cyberculture, virtual bodies, illness and identity, pathology and corporeality, to name only a few.
1 Parts of this chapter have been previously submitted in full through blackboard in the first block of the second semester in January 2015 as a Term Paper assignment which was part of the Master’s programme for Comparative Cultural Analysis 2014-2015.
Throughout this chapter we will be looking at dialogues between participants, general texts on the sites and the visual elements of the websites as social spaces of connection and expression. What interests me most about these narratives in particular is the incredible diversity in meanings that are ascribed to them by a variety of agents, and that when this happens there always seems to be a high level of discomfort in publicly discussing these meanings. In part I think this has to do with the visible popularity rates, its contents and the personal experiences that are on these websites, which have to be acknowledged in some way or another in order to either disagree or agree with. I imagine that at least part of this anxiety can be found to be rooted in a recognition of similarity between these narratives and general narratives of fitness and health from popular culture,2 rather than in their radical otherness from it. And this
duality of sameness and difference might even be an ongoing process grounded, not separately in a variety of different bodies, but simultaneously in specific individual bodies. By looking at the discourses used in these communities and placing them in a dialogue with examples from discourses on health and healthy bodies from popular website magazines, I would like to try to move beyond the discussion of whether these sites are to be thought of as either right or wrong, good or bad. Instead, I would like to try to think of the clashes in these generally heated debates as opportunities wherein a better understanding of the ways in which bodies are continuously inscribed with multiple meanings, and revolt against them, can be inferred. I will select pieces of text by focusing on either the topics labelled as “hot,” indicating their popularity among online participants, or by looking at recently posted and trending threads and discussions. This will give the best sense of what the website is like and what it is about. My hypothesis is that both communities continuously mirror and threaten normativity through their
2 See, for example, figure 1: a screenshot from Health Magazine’s website, retrieved on 24th November 2014.
engagement in, and thereby possible unwilling exposure of, the subjective nature of the very normativity they use to produce these spaces.
2.1 The Pro-Ana Community: Pathology and Normativity
MyProAna (abbreviated to MPA), is an Anglophone online forum and is
completely user-generated. Every member or participant on the forum can independently create forum threads, create a personalised profile, post messages everywhere, and join in on or keep track of online weight loss information. One of the main reasons for looking at this particular website is that it is strikingly popular. The website has had about 11 million views in total and has an average of 408,000 unique viewers each month.3 It originated from a need for a space for discussion of everyday
lived experiences that differ slightly from what is usually thought of as ‘normal’ (Cashmore and Yi 2014). One administrator on the forum adds that ”[w]e started with a simple creed: ‘No judging others’ and everybody has embraced this and helped shape the community to what it is today. We remain sharply cognizant of the fact that members make our community. Without members, we're simply software and servers.” (admin, “MyProAna - State of the Union”).
Just from viewing MPA’s overall structure and website headings, a strong affinity can be seen with respect to popular culture and health, exercise and diet magazines (see figure 1). MPA’s forum is divided into several topics such as: ”MPA,” ”Diets,” ”It’s Only Physical,” ”Touching Topics” and ”Support.” These are subdivided into threads such as: ”Thinspiration,” ”Competitions and Challenges,” ”Accountability,” ”Media and Art,” ”Food and Recipes,” ”Fasting and Cleansing,” ”Beauty and Health,” ”Exercise” and ”LGBTQ.”.” Strikingly, in the attached figure 1, the initial headlines on the homepage of the website
are, for example, ”Healthy & Happy,” ”Food & Recipes,” ”10 Weeks to a Slim New You,” ”The Top Fat-Burning Foods” and, my personal favourite, ”Best and Worst Nuts for your Health.” Thus similarities can be found in the usage and combining of concepts and notions to engage in discussions on bodily matters and health topics.
The general layout of the forum is quite plain, consisting of various tones of blue, and does not have any pictures or photos on its homepage. However, when you click on a forum thread, you can see that almost every member has an individualised, fixed footnote at the end of every message they post and most members also have small profile pictures included in their posts. The footnotes can be quite sprawling and usually contain text or pictures, ranging from lyrics and popular quotes to pink, glitter gifs spelling psychopath, signifying an amount of mockery and irony towards psychiatric and legal opinions, and showing a high capacity for self-reflexivity. Adding to the footnotes is usually a planned schema for future weight loss, containing detailed, statistical information such as BMIs (i.e. body mass indices), current weights, highest weights, lowest weights, goal weights and ultimate goal weights 1, 2, 3, etc. (sometimes elaborated through ultimate goal weight number 10 or more). The profile pictures are mostly images containing parts of girls’ bodies, such as (very) thin thighs, body parts were bone structures are visible through the skin, such as ribcages, collarbones and hipbones, either from own selfies or from (partial) images of celebrities.
One of the forum’s topics that I find bears many visible similarities to non-pro-ana communities focused on the improvement of the human body, is the “Competitions and Challenges” topic. The topic is subdivided in many independent threads, but all have in common a collective effort to lose weight, one way or another, in a short period of time. For example, “500 Calories a Day for 30 Days!,” and another one is called “Lose 10lbs in April,” or “Liquid Fast Week”.” Whereas, for example Health.com has strikingly
similar threads under the topic name of “Diet & Fitness,” where among others there are threads like “Lose 8 pounds in 2 Weeks,” or 25 Ways to Cut 500 Calories a Day,” apart from this there is even a separate and descriptive topic called the “30-day weight loss challenge”.” As we can see, the pro-ana community uses recombined elements from dominant discourse on the body to engage in non-conventional discussions of the body. So, on the one hand this could be inferred as an overarching conformity to social and cultural standards of normalcy and as an inherent imperative for health. In a sense, the participants on the forum display an irrefutable wish for ‘a perfect body’ gained through behaviours that result from popular discourses on health and bodies. However, on the other hand, their behaviours counter the subjective perception of the healthy body and the individual’s own drive for health in it.
However, the opinions on what the ‘perfect physique’ might entail not only differ from member to member, but also differ in a more general sense from popular opinions in contemporary health discourses. The Body Mass Index (BMI) represents a case in point. Biomedical discourses calculate a BMI based on a universalised model of the measurable aspects of the human body. This norm is being challenged on the MPA website. For example, in the thread called “Your Dream BMI” member VervainBones comments by saying “If I reached my ugw [i.e. ultimate goal weight], my BMI would be 17.6 But if I could choose my own BMI, it would be 15.” Here concepts from medical discourse (the BMI scale) on the body, designed and used to measure, control and diagnose what is seen as demarcating bodies between healthy and unhealthy, are used by pro-ana members to describe their own perspective on their ‘perfect physique’ and then are merged with their own standards and demarcations (such as another interpretation of ultimate goal weight). However, the numbers that VervainBones lists here as ideals are considered to be far below the average medical standard BMI number
that ranges from 18.5 at the lowest weight to 25 at the highest weight (www.medicalnewstoday.com). Thus, possibly unknowingly, pro-ana communities are constructing a certain counter-discourse, or tactic, by integrating medical language into personal narratives relating to their own lived experiences, thereby revealing the subjectivity, performativity and interrelatedness involved in both discourses.
Overall, the structure of MPA results in a virtual environment where biopolitical strategies of (self) surveillance and regulation are overtly in place and are maintained in a way that deviates from dominant perspectives on healthy bodies. It mirrors back the effects that these dominant perspectives can have when “decentralised biopower becomes the principal instrument of regulation, supported by an inescapable system of normativities that both constitute and categorise embodied subjects” (Shildrick, “Transgressing the Law” 31). It also shows how the aversion towards or active dissociation from the pro-ana community is inherent to the imperative of health (in the sense that Dean described it to be in the previous chapter) leading to a self-governing of bodies by an all-encompassing striving for the maximization “of vital forces and potentiality of the living body” (Rose 23). Although always clearly deriving its notions and narratives from normative, dominant discourses in power practices, it is this amalgam through which these communities become visible to the general public. Finally, they result in a liminal space that, to a certain extent, enables a (re)construction of notions and narratives on the body to fit personal needs and individuals’ lived embodied experiences.
However, in order to be able to give a thorough analysis of the workings and relationality of online pro-ana communities as dynamic spaces of intersubjectivity, I believe it is important to take into consideration the prevailing discourses that have hitherto produced the most dominant knowledge on the subject matter. Pro-anorexia
communities have been pressured by website hosts, eating disorder experts and public health organizations to stop their online activities, since they are considered a potentially harmful influence to vulnerable groups in society, such as young people seeking diet tips online and people recovering from eating disorders (Paquette 2002). These communities are, among other things, accused of evoking dysfunctional behaviour and possibly causing an increase in mental and physical illnesses. I would like to look at how different discourses and narratives of embodiment come together in this supposedly disembodied cyber-environment.
At first glance, the discussion surrounding the pro-ana community is mainly conducted through biomedical and clinical discourses. An aversion towards the websites and the people actively participating in them prevails, as Mary Paquette’s study illustrates:
By offering validation and creating an insular camaraderie in virtual reality, the sites can make seriously ill women more committed to their illusions and less receptive to the voices from the outside world who want them to put flesh on their bones and vitality back in their lives. They thus increase the possibility that visitors to the sites will pursue their obsession to its fatal conclusion. (39)
Underlying assumptions are expressed by the end of the first sentence: Paquette refers to the online participants in pro-anorexia communities as “seriously ill women;” moreover, she pejoratively speaks about the experiences and thoughts of people on pro-anorexia communities as “illusions” (39). Implicating that there exists a certain
hierarchy in lived experiences, Paquette’s argument maintains a clear line between what is true and false. The fact that the online participants are considered to be “seriously ill women” comes with the subsequent conception that they are therefore not rational human beings and should not be listened to as if they were. This value of rationality in validating one’s point of view as most just or accurate immediately underlines the importance of human capital, showing how economic values are crossing over to social fields and can thereby reinstate and reshape certain behaviours to be perceived as amoral. Most importantly, however, I believe her describing them as being “less receptive to the voices from the outside world” directly implies that pro-ana community members should not be talking in the first place at all, but should listen instead. In this sense, we can see how biomedical discourses can contribute to the silencing and stigmatizing of those who do not listen to what is considered to be ‘normal’ and how they are thus highly invested within power strategies and discursive acts of violence.
Pathologising and criminalising pro-ana online remains a moral pursuit most commonly found within psychiatric and judicial discourse. For example, the online law blog Law Street TM firmly states that “The battle to remove these sites rages on between concerned medical experts and parents; yet pro-ana reigns on as a form of freedom of speech, and will continue to taint the minds of eating-disordered individuals until they are stopped.” (Madeleine Stern, 2014).
It is far from unheard-of for psychiatry and the legal system to work closely together, and they are in many cases two sides of the same coin. Foucault, for example, in his lecture on abnormality, discusses the relationship between these two fields, or as he calls them “doubles,” in light of what he phrases as their main functionality, namely performing techniques of normalization. He states that:
(...) psychiatric opinion contributes nothing to knowledge, but this is not what matters. Its essential role is to legitimize, in the form of scientific knowledge, the extension of punitive power to something that is not a breach of law. What is essential is that it makes it possible to resituate the punitive action of judicial power within a general corpus of reflected techniques for the transformations of individuals. (Abnormal 18)
From this statement, it could be inferred that, because in biomedical opinion, and therefore in this case also legal opinion, all participants in online pro-ana communities are by definition already perceived as damaged, incapable and insane, they are not merely criminalised through a generalised pathology, but also a priori deprived of any sort of agency and are thus also not seen as able-bodied. This ironically is the same dynamic of social exclusion that is partly responsible for leading to the very creation and persistence of these platforms and online communities in the first place. In another example of this medico-legal discourse that aims at applying the techniques described by Foucault to transform and normalize individuals, Professor John Morgan from the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK states his opinion on pro-ana communities in an item for On Demand News by explaining the matter from his personal experiences as a psychiatrist:
We have had patients we’ve treated who have visited these sites, and what the sites do is, in a sense, reinforce the abnormal beliefs of the patients. So they go to the sites and think, well this actually proves that what I am doing and what I am thinking is perfectly normal. And
what my mom and dad are telling me or what my GP is saying is actually rubbish. ... We know Pro-Ana websites have been in existence virtually since the beginning of the internet. But in the last few years, they have proliferated widely. Patients will access them and then they will access even deeper sites and they will be drawn into a virtual world in which the ideals and notions of anorexia nervosa appear perfectly normal, perfectly sane, perfectly rational. (Morgan, Sep. 2009)
Every sentence Morgan uttered in this On Demand News report clearly shows how the associations and images evoked through the discursive practices discussed above are very much related to the dominant model of the Western, liberal humanist subject, defined through recurrent upheld notions of rationality, self-governing, responsibility and objectivity. Thus when Morgan labels certain thoughts and ideas to be “abnormal,” insinuating that others are normal, and when Stern calls for stopping “the tainting” of individual minds, it is clear that this is helping to construct a more firm demarcation between the healthy and unhealthy, the normal and the abnormal. From the argumentation and attitude towards pro-ana communities in articles such as these, it becomes clear how biomedical discourse relies heavily upon normative ethics or morals and a subsequent need to distinguish between categories such as the self and the other, the abnormal and the normal.
From these short analyses of psychiatric and biomedical discourse on pro-ana communities, it can be inferred that the participants on these websites are represented as lacking morals and are therefore neither looked at as being fully human, nor are they perceived as non-humans, in the sense that they are not deemed fully self or other. Their
position lies somewhere in an uncanny grey area. This uncanny state of being goes beyond members’ corporeal differences as such. Feminist philosopher Margrit Shildrick writes about anomalous embodiment when she argues that:
So long as the monstrous remains the absolute other in its corporeal difference it poses few problems - in other words it is so distanced in its difference that it can clearly be put into an oppositional category of not-me; but once it begins to resemble us, or reflect back aspects of ourselves that are repressed, then its indeterminate status - neither wholly self, nor wholly other - becomes deeply disturbing. In other words, what is at stake, is not simply the status of those bodies which might be termed monstrous, but the being in the body of us all. (38)
I believe that the “reflection of ourselves” and “resemblance to us” are aspects particularly clearly highlighted in the public reactions to the existence of and content on pro-ana communities from psychiatry and biomedicine. In addition to pathologising members by placing them in the role of delusional victim, significant effort is put into delineating a distance between “the normal” and “the abnormal.” For example, the similarities in pro-ana communities’ diet regimes to diet regimes from a medical or scientific background can be said to result in an uncanny resemblance. In order to undo this resemblance or reflection that the pro-ana community continuously presents, the “sameness” needs to be altered through biomedical discourse ‘’by inscribing itself on the body and reveal itself as a textual practice that produces particular modes of identity and politics” (Shildrick 17).
With this dominant power structure in mind, we can understand why problematizing these often taken-for-granted health discourses is an important ethical consideration is this analysis. From a biomedical point of view, pro-ana narratives simultaneously signify otherness, contagious deviancy and danger; their incorporation of normative conceptions of healthy bodies generates anxiety because of the possible intrusion or penetration of the carefully demarcated and socially constructed collective body. As Dean states, “it is less a question of weighing the rights of the individual against those of the collective than of calibrating what rights to self-determination may be exercised by a smaller collective within a larger one” (59). This remains just as relevant when looking at a different online community that focuses on the limits and borders of the human body, which arguably might be considered more extremist, but is generally less talked about in popular media than the pro-ana community is.
2.2 The fatpeoplehate Community: Rationality and Morality
“I guess when you have self-awareness you don't get that big” (Member on
fatpeoplestories, 17/04/2015)
In contrast to the pro-ana community, the first thing that stands out on the
fatpeoplehate community is that comments and content are not about the members, but
about others. Fatpeoplehate is a community bonded by a shared focus on people outside of their community who are overweight or obese and who are therefore seen as lacking in skill and ability. In some instances this is an individual person and other times they discuss a generalised group of people based on a written story, for example. Secondly, in
most comments, a claim is made about the fat person’s deficiency in personal techniques of the care of the self and the regulation of health.
However, the aversion to bodily transgression as expressed on fatpeoplehate might not so much be about physical transgression as it is about symbolic transgression. As Margrit Shildrick argues in her introduction on bodily transgressions, based on her reading of Foucault’s text on the abnormal, “the monstrous is constituted not by the otherness of morphological abnormality as such, but by the offence it offers to the law in transgressing the established customs and regulations that set out what is proper” (13). The members of the fatpeoplehate community have encountered others’ bodily transgression of fatness, and have recognised that somehow a shift has occurred in the bodily perimeters of normalcy. Judging from their comments, such bodily transgressions strongly affect them in return.
Reddit is a social entertainment website, host to innumerable separate pages categorised by interest topics that are called “subreddits.” The individual subreddits are completely user-generated and users are authorised to create threads, post comments and upload a variety of content. The fatpeoplehate community on Reddit is divided into multiple subreddits, of which the biggest is fatpeoplehate, which counts about a hundred thousand subscribers. Related but with a slightly different angles to them, there are
TalesofFatHate, a subreddit where people can go when it is a story they want to tell, and fatlogic, a subreddit where people can go to share examples of encounters with what
they perceive to be fat people’s lack of rationality. The umbrella fatpeoplehate is where all these different facets of the community coalesce into a collection of submissions.
Upon first looking at the fatpeoplehate (FPH) community, one immediately sees that it differs considerably in style from MPA. The overall layout is presented such that the first things you see are the website’s banner with pictures of fat people and a collage
of fast foods, along with a number of thread topics, such as “Kicked some Fatty’s Butt today,” “Shopping with Hams Around,” “No One Will Like You if You are too FAT!” and “Fat People that Ride Horses Piss Me Off”.” Interestingly, there is a sidebar next to all subreddits, which sets the rules and overall structure for the community as a whole. The general rules suffice to create an impression: “We are a BMI of 24.9 and under sub. If you are over that (unless you are swole) kindly GTFO;” “Fat People Can’t Post”.” Further down in the sidebar there is also an added list of the elements that make a good FPS (FatPeopleStory), which consists among other things of this guideline: “This sub is a place for you to tell us about hamplanets in your life and your relationships/encounters with them. Remember that hamplanet is not just about the weight, but also the hamentality - rudeness, entitlement, fatlogic, etc. Not all fat people are hambeasts but all hambeasts are fat people.” Beyond the fact that this rule shows the community’s need to coin new words to discuss fat people, it displays an interesting distinction between fatness as bodily characteristic and fatness as personality trait. This distinction situates fatness to be something that does more than merely cross physical boundaries of normalcy, and that can also be found in certain traits, characteristics or behaviours. To give an example of what this entails in the fatpeoplehate community, I will cite the following story that I found to be illustrative and similar to others on the subreddit:
I once was at Walmart in my slightly younger years when I heard quite the fatlogic gem. There was apparently a sale on giant bags of candy bars, and this hamplanet couple were staring at the wall trying to decide which bags they wanted. And I shit you not, at one point the wife says, "You should get the Almond Joys. They got coconut in them, and you need to eat more
fruit." At that, my brain cells sputtered and passed out from the sheer stupid. (“Fatlogic at its finest,” 20/04/2015)
Here, reddit member HeyNowTambourine, who submitted the story, points out the person’s lack of rationality in picking a product, thereby underlining how fat people are fat because they willingly make the wrong choices and are not able to take care of themselves in a rational way. By extension, this is a tangible account of Foucault’s larger argument that in a biopolitical state “the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive.” (Foucault Society Must Be Defended 240). Because the subject here is deemed a failed neoliberal, a failed homo economicus, he or she is a failed person and is thereby denied full personhood as such.
This uncanny grey area between humanness and animality is a common thread in both the pro-ana community and the fatpeoplehate community. Although participants in the pro-anan community and the people that are discussed on the fatpeoplehate community are seen as people, they are not seen to be self-sufficient, rational, logical or invested in the care of the self enough to be fully understood as living bodies. At the same time, their virtual existence and visibility does seem to create a need for protest and disapproval of their behaviours. Bodily transgressions are thus not seen as mere material abnormalities, but also indicate a certain anxiety about a possible infestation of moral rationality and human progress.
Philosopher and feminist Sarah Ahmed writes about the performativity of disgust when she notes that “to be disgusted is after all to be affected by what one has
rejected” (86, emphasis in original). It is certainly true that the content expressed in the
of hate involved, but I believe it is more productive to make an effort to understand this dynamic rather than dismiss it as bad conduct. Ahmed further explains how the emotion and experience of disgust implies an irrevocable connection between the disgusted person and the source of the disgust. This established connection can be seen as the cause for hatred towards the subject. As Ahmed points out, “[t]he slide between disgust and other emotions is crucial to this binding: the subject may experience hate towards the object, as well as fear of the object, precisely as an effect of how the bad feeling ‘has got in’” (88). A similarity can be seen between these sliding emotions connected to disgust and the biomedical narratives that frame the pro-ana community, in the sense that that the humanness of the people being discussed is called into question:
… the bodies of others become the salient object; they are constructed as being hateful and sickening only insofar as they have got too close. They are constructed as non-human, as beneath and below the bodies of the disgusted. Indeed, through the disgust reaction, ‘belowness’ and ‘beneathness’ become properties of their bodies. They embody that which is lower than human or civil life. (Ahmed 97)
What Ahmed seems to be pointing out here is that bodies that are “other” get constructed through the immediate response of disgust, which can differ in intensity depending on what other emotions are bound together with the feeling of disgust. Through this construction then, the “othered” subject becomes a signifier of abnormality and lowlife. Although the content and perspective expressed on
fatpeoplehate can be interpreted as aggressive towards fatness and outside of what can
the elimination of fatness is clearly present within socially dominant discourses of biomedicine and the politics of the healthy body.
For instance, the website called obesitycampaign.org, a website for the American campaign to “end obesity,” presents the following problem statement:
Today, two-thirds of U.S. adults and nearly one in three children struggle because they are overweight or have obesity. The effects of the nation’s obesity epidemic are immense: taxpayers, businesses, communities and individuals spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year due to obesity, including nearly $200 billion in medical costs. Obesity is the reason that the current generation of youth is predicted to live a shorter life than their parents. (“About Us”.” Acc. 9/4/2015)
Though brief, this excerpt carries a certain sentiment and a great deal of information about the ways in which fatness4 is generally perceived. First of all, obesity here is
interestingly not only referred to as a disease, but as an epidemic. An epidemic, according to dictionary.com, is “a disease affecting many persons at the same time, and spreading from person to person in a locality where the disease is not permanently prevalent.” Fatness is thus seen as an infectious impurity that can be spread among groups of people, and an altered state which is of temporary duration. Secondly, it seems that by speaking about obesity as a disease, it loses its body. It is spoken of as a material matter without being part of anything substantial. Fatness becomes a symptom of “the obesity epidemic,”’ that should be overcome or eliminated, implying that a removal of
4 I use this term here, because in many theoretical texts within Fat Studies, the term ‘fatness’, is used in order to redefine it as a neutral word for describing a general characteristic of the human body. Also, it is preferably used as opposed to more medical loaded terms like obesity.(Rothblum and Solovay 2009)
fatness will result in the return to the “natural” or “clean” body. Lastly, the direct link from obesity to the “hundreds of billions of dollars” being spent on medical costs suggests that this particular piece of writing in defence of healthy bodies and for the rejection of fatness as a nation is addressed to the rational, neoliberal subject, and by extension his or her capital. In other words, the reader this statement is directed to is assumed to already be “an active partner in the drive for health, accepting their responsibility for securing their own well-being” (Rose 6), who consequently also becomes implicated in the well-being of others.
However, if the person reading this text identifies as “fat,” then the text becomes quite problematic. Because it medicalizes fatness as an illness that can be “cured,” and pathologises it by implicating that it is something separate from the subject that he or she cannot help but suffer from unless one chooses to actively get rid of it. The implication here is that being fat is a direct result of a failure to be “an active partner in the drive for health,” a failure to “accept their responsibility for securing their own well-being,” as Rose puts it. In light of the theories analysed in chapter one, such a sense of failure reads as an inability to function as a Foucauldian homo economicus.
Returning now to the problem statement of the American campaign to stop obesity, we read in the last line that “[o]besity is the reason that the current generation of youth is predicted to live a shorter life than their parents.” This is arguably one of the most feared outcomes of bodily transgressions, in which a fissure is created in the Western tradition of linear thought and the inherent, continuous improvement of humanity and the human body therein. The presentation of something that could possibly undo or set back human development directly contradicts everything the neoliberal subject is expected to pursue and therefore has no place in rational conduct or in the imperative of health. And because obesity, on the one hand, is taken up by
health care as an epidemic, while pro-ana communities on the other hand are taken up as unjustly using and redefining normative views on the healthy body, these communities directly threaten the neoliberal subject’s own capital and calling to adhere to moral responsibility.
Conclusion
Where pro-ana members are judged for displaying too much self-control and incorporating too many different health narratives counterproductively, fat people attacked on fatpeoplehate are judged for displaying too little self-control and incorporating too few health narratives. Consequently, discussions of the underweight body pathologise it by reviewing these bodies as a symptom of a mental disorder. By marginalising people through pathologising them as carriers of an infectious disease that bears visible signifiers, these people become a danger to every active agent in the imperative for health and well-being. Simultaneously, the fat person is medicalised through visible intruders in the body. Since fat is a visible marker, much more easily seen than its counterpart, it is medicalised by locating the fatness of the body on a molecular level, showing bodily transgression as inherent in all bodies. So here we can see how both bodily transgressions are constructed through normative discourses on the healthy body, but whereas the thin body is thought to be resulting from a non-material source located within the psyche, the fat body is thought to be a result of a material source. However, in both cases, the link remains strong between both moral deviancy from the norm and a failure to adhere to “healthy” behaviours.
Here I would like to end by stating my belief that every body is always pre-eminently a material one, but looking at these communities through the biopolitical framework leading up to this creates a broader understanding of why members on
pro-ana communities are seen as victims in the first place. On the one hand, they live up to neo-liberal ideals, but on the other hand they also blur the lines beyond which productivity declines. In the same fashion, looking at these communities creates a greater understanding of why fat people are seen as culprits of their self-inflicted demises, as they are thought to be guilty of not putting in enough effort towards the care of the self.
3 Posthuman Bodies and the Idea of the Body as Original Prosthesis
Introduction
Biopolitical theory has thus far proven to be a fruitful framework for looking at different health discourses. But at the same time, because it is a theory that is inherently all-encompassing, it also has the tendency to reduce the subject’s agency to a purely mechanical attribute. From looking at the two virtual communities in chapter two, we have seen that many elements corresponding to the rational conduct of homo
economicus and normative hegemony as described in biopolitical theory are invested in
contemporary narratives on health and the body. This in turn raises the question of how these communities can enable a better understanding of the consequent implications of these discursive meanings and practices on the body. In other words, how do discourses that clearly deviate from dominant health narratives affect our conception of bodies and bodily transgression? Or alternatively, what can dialogues between health narratives and bodily transgressions tell us about the ways in which the human body is conceptualised? And does such bodily conception impact on personhood?
An important aspect at the core of analysing these virtual communities is the persistent idea that these communities’ existence was somehow due to their lack of full humanness, while they also contained an excess of irrationality and “unrealistic” bodily beliefs and perceptions. The pro-ana community is framed through biomedical narratives on healthy bodies as being merely “delusional,” confused and not accepting reality, in order to become intelligible for normative standards. In turn, the
fatpeoplehate community projects a rationally and morally based framework onto an
envisioned group of people, justified in their view with normative standards for “the” healthy body. In both cases, what persists is the bioethical effort to categorise both
groups as abnormal bodies, because of “the offence it offers to the law in transgressing the established customs and regulations that set out what is proper” (Shildrick 13). In other words, the visibly deviant or abnormal body supposes a bodily transgression by which it affects other bodies and their concurrent lived experiences, possibly altering their views on normalcy and health being its token signifier. On the other hand, by transgressing established norms and values, these norms and values become visible in the first place, as Sara Ahmed writes: “transgression of the border is required in order for it to be secured as a border in the first place.” (79).
In the accounts of the virtual communities where both spaces are occupied by discussing the limits and ideals of the healthy body, the embodied narratives and health discourses are never isolated data. By looking at the metaphorical figure of homo
economicus, we have also seen how the neoliberal subject places economic structures
onto social relations, creating human capital. Further, by integrating these fields of rationale, the body is presumed to be an independent and responsible agent of its own future welfare. However, through close readings of both virtual communities, it can be inferred that this is not the case. In fact the healthy body can be said to be an idealised, metaphorical body that is produced through discourses based on economics and rationality, which is thereby not a fixed substrate underlying all bodies, but instead a figure in the claim for optimal regulation of the human body. As postmodern literary critic Katherine Hayles points out: “… this imagined ‘state of nature’ is a retrospective creation of a market society. The liberal self is produced by market relations and does not in fact predate them” (3). Read through the concept of the healthy body, this means that the healthy body is a representative figure of this imagined state of nature as a potentiality that lies within all bodies and is feasible for anyone willing to work for it. However, Hayles argues that this liberal self is not a natural given and in fact has no
