pro-ana(rexia) websites have been causing quite a fuss lately. i was once engaged to an anorexic who was also a remarkable political theorist. the shit is life-threatening and must be taken seriously as a problem. but i think it is far more complex and interesting and important than people think. it's usually treated as a mimicry problem: girls mechanically imitating pictures in a monkey-see monkey-do structure. that is certainly an unbelievably impoverished, simplistic, and condescending account. we should think of it as raising issues of the power of girls over their own bodies, as a massive assertion of will or self-control, a declaration of autonomy. we need to think of food as a vector of power between parents/institutions and children, and also as a symbol of our animality and dependence on the world around us, a way the world enters into us and the way it leaves us. anorexia, among other things, is a demanding ascetic discipline, and provides the pains and pleasures, the slaveries and liberations, of ascetic disciplines everywhere. it is problematic on multiple grounds. but it is not simple, and it is not a mere reflection of misogyny or self-loathing. it is full of content, symbolic and actual, emotional, political, physical. it is more than a desire to disappear. it is self-assertion as well as self-abnegation. it is not always fundamentally a matter of false body image or of media effects. i think to treat it, we'd better try to deepen our understanding of it. it's not at all surprising that people find each other and support each other even in such a problematic way on the web; it's one of the things that the web is good for. i would not censor or break it in any way. there are thousands of problematic communities, or communities of people with problems, or people who are exploring ways out, around, through, and into the power structures of our society, and our dilemmas as existing human beings. it's ok. or it's not ok. but it's true. and it's important.



Recent Comments