Agency in Eating Disorders: American Literary and Visual Memoirs of Anorexia and Bulimia

In my dissertation I examine the representation of self-creation through anorexia and bulimia in memoiristic narratives, blogs, and YouTube videos in contemporary American culture. I argue that the highly crafted characterizations and structures of the anorexic and bulimic memoirs and blogs implement the disorders into temporary tools of self-care that grant the subjects agency through their pursuits of maturation and identity creation and cannot be simplified into mere warnings and retellings of the dangers of the eating disorders. I am locating my research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to encompass the emergence of eating disorder memoirs, Ana and Mia blogs, and My Anorexia and Bulimia YouTube videos in American culture. With its focus on literary, visual, and formal conventions this Humanities-based approach to self-representation and disordered eating adds to and distinguishes itself from the work of psychologists and physicians who conduct scientific and medical studies on disordered eating in clinical studies. In this study I begin with an exploration of the role of confession, branding, subjection, and shame in YouTube’s My Eating Disorder Story videos. These videos differ from the memoirs and blogs that chronicle the creation of a self and care of the self through anorexia and bulimia. I then investigate Wasted and the author Marya Hornbacher’s creation of self through the culture of disordered eating and memoir writing. The third chapter outlines how bloggers use the hupomnemata medium of blogging and disordered eating in order to understand the self and better the self. I conclude with an examination of Dana Shavin’s memoir The Body Tourist and her narrative of truth telling and recovery. Through the dissertation I push for new readings of the representations of disordered eating and to give voice to the writers rather than


Introduction
Some write that people stop eating just to lose weight, while others argue that the media is the dominant influence contributing to people's attempts to reduce their appetite. Other groups of scholars and scientists claim not eating and purging are "disorders" and women are the only ones affected, while others lecture the only avenue to recovery is the constant monitoring and control of affected bodies by clinical gazes. Still others view anorexia and bulimia as infectious diseases that become contagious to all who are exposed to them. Numerous writings and debates This work will examine memoirs, blogs, and videos of anorexia and bulimia to explore a genre of writing and story-telling largely untouched by literary, feminist, philosophical, and cultural scholars. The scholarly writing that does exist on "eating disorders" within feminist, philosophical, and cultural theory is not focused on representations of anorexia and bulimia and the majority of literary criticism and theory on narratives of eating habits that does exist is limited to Pro Anorexic and bulimic blogs. When feminists, philosophers, and cultural theorists write about anorexia and bulimia they often objectify the practitioners into symbols of patriarchal influences such as the media and family, and imply the people are too weak to resist bodily pressures of being slender. The literary criticism also places women (most of the criticism is focused on blogs of women with "eating disorders") into the position of an object without an identity by claiming the blogs are too dangerous for young readers and will lead to the spread of anorexia and bulimia.
By focusing on representations of "eating disorders" in memoiristic texts and videos instead of clinical cases of "eating disorders" my dissertation, unlike the majority of current theoretical work on anorexia and bulimia, avoids turning anorexic and bulimic people into objects without identities and people who are only shaped by patriarchal influences. This work instead argues that the highly crafted characterizations and structures of the anorexic and bulimic memoirs, blogs, and videos published and created between 1998-presnet, use the "disorders" as temporary tools of self-care that grant the subjects agency through their pursuits of maturation and identity creation. By agency I mean the assertive act of self-creation and care for the self that occurs through the practices of anorexia and bulimia that lead to understanding of one's subjectivity and how one is made a subject by one's historic moment, culture, and the networks of power that subjugate. The texts of "eating disorders" cannot be simplified into mere warnings and retellings of the dangers of anorexia and bulimia.
My readings of anorexic and bulimic memoirs, blogs, and videos rely on the later writings of Michel Foucault and his interpretation of the Ancient Greeks' use of care of the self and parrhēsia, also known as "truth telling", to explain how the memoir subjects and online communities engage in parrhēsia for understanding of the self, self betterment, and identity creation. Through the free and candid writing and speeches in the blogs, memoirs, and videos, the subjects write or talk about their life experiences without restraint in order to better understand their selves and their positions in the historical moment. By better understanding the self and the relations of power that subjugate them, the subjects attempt to transform their current social positions, leading to the memoir subjects' self-creation. My work does not aim to romanticize or encourage eating disorders, or to overlook the tragic effects of the eating habits. Instead my dissertation shows how representations of anorexia and bulimia in the memoir texts and videos are largely not about objectification of the subjects, but are about self-understanding, fulfillment, and betterment. By bringing a humanities perspective into the domain of "disordered eating" many of the overlooked questions and components of the "disorders" from other fields can be applied through tools of literary analysis that examine the language, structures, aesthetics, and character constructions in representations of anorexia and bulimia.
Above I place the terms "eating disorders" in quotations to highlight the appropriation of the medical classification into a term of agency that defies the label of disorder and idea of uniformity. Henceforth however I will use the terms without quotations to avoid the quotations marks becoming unyielding to the reader.
In what follows I will give a brief history on the cultural consensus of eating disorders in American popular culture from the 1970s to the present, provide an overview of theoretical work that already exists on anorexia and bulimia, and then outline the importance of the later work of Foucault and his discussion of care of the self, the true life, and parrhēsia.

Cultural Consensus of Anorexia and Bulimia in American Popular Culture from
Post WWII-present: Although my research will be focused on texts from the 1990s-the present, in order to understand the culture of anorexia in the 20 th and 21 st century, the phenomenon of eating disorders needs to be traced back to the post WWII period.
Before the 1960s anorexia was largely understood by the psychiatric establishment as a disorder unrelated to the desire to lose or maintain weight. Instead it was classified as a neurotic illness and fasting was a psycho physiological reaction (DSM-1). This theory mirrors the early work on anorexia that began in France when doctors such as Fleury Imbert, Louis-Victor Marce, and Pierre Briquet noticed young girls refusing to eat. The doctors did not connect the behavior to the attempt to control weight and considered the lack of appetite to be caused by internal stomach problems or hysteria

. William Withey Gull and Ernest Charles
Lasegue were the first to use the term anorexia nervosa and by 1873 the disorder was recognized by the medical community, although doctors still did not relate anorexia to fear of fat or desires to lose weight (162)(163)(164)(165)(166)(167)(168)(169)(170)(171)(172)(173)(174)(175). In the early 1970s with the work of psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch thoughts on anorexia no longer focused on biological causes and instead theorized on psychological causes of anorexia (180). In 1973 Hilde Bruch published Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. Bruch relates anorexia to problems of body image and anorexic women's inabilities to have an accurate perception of their own bodies. Bruch also argues anorexia is a result of society's pressures to conform to an ideal body type .
Highlighting the emergence of the medical world's theories on anorexic women's desire to lose weight is not to suggest that weight loss is the only or most important quality of eating disorders. Instead I am highlighting this history because the longing to lose weight and actual weight loss are still the qualities most recognized by the medical community and the media when diagnosing someone with anorexia or bulimia.
The contemporary medical community's concept of bulimia and anorexia collided with popular culture in the late 1970s when Karen Carpenter became a public figure for anorexia after the success of her musical group was followed by her increasingly rapid weight loss and the media's and fans' commentary on her emaciated frame. Shortly after her death in 1983 from anorexia related medical complications, news segments were quickly released diagnosing her as anorexic.
Because Carpenter was from a middle class white family, her economic background and race were suggested to be a trigger for her eating problems. Carpenter's death continued to be sensationalized in the late 1980s when the made for TV movie The Karen Carpenter Story was released in 1989, which depicts Carpenter as a tragic victim to standards of beauty . Due to the media's coverage of her death Carpenter's anorexia and its effects became more widely known and her tragic demise became a symbol of the dangerous consequences of unrealistic beauty standards on women's bodies, thus entrenching the idea that eating disorders are a result of these impossible standards of feminine beauty and women, specifically white middle class women, are naturally more susceptible to being influenced.
Carpenter's death also brought attention to the change in standards of beauty at the time. Beginning in the 1950s slender bodies became the cultural obsession when magazines and advertisements equated fatness to weakness. Post WWII American society's dedication to losing weight was connected to fears of Americans becoming soft and weak after the war. With stronger and healthier bodies Americans would be able to defend their country and defeat foreign enemies . The desire to be healthy was reflected in the rise of health food stores at the time.
According to author Roberta P. Seid, this slender ideal applied to both men and women but was more contagious to women due to gender pressures that equated female identity to beauty (4-6). Seid also explains that unlike representation of male bodies, female bodily ideals became emaciated instead of strong and healthy and were represented in a greater abundance in magazines, advertisements, television, and film. The new standard of beauty post WWII was reflected in the international popularity of the model Twiggy (6). The Twiggy standard of beauty was a contrast to pre war standards of beauty, as well as standards of beauty during the Victorian age, which valued slim corset adorned waists but fuller hourglass figures .
The ideal size of women continued to get smaller and smaller in the 1980s and 90s. In the 1980s due to the rise in popularity of aerobics and gyms the media featured slender but muscular female bodies. The 1980s was also the time when bulimia became more widely known. This corresponded to the DSM-III's inclusion of bulimia in their 1980 edition. Unlike anorexia, bulimia often led to a slender but not emaciated body type, similar to the aesthetic ideal of the 1980s. Society's value of smaller body sizes escalated again in the 1990s when extremely skinny women were valued as possessing the ideal version of beauty due to the popularity of heroin chic (Wykes and Gunter 65). The new standard of beauty made popular by Calvin Klein advertisements featuring Kate Moss and other models, depicted emaciated women with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes. Because the women looked close to death and on drugs, many political leaders, including President Clinton, critiqued the fashion industry for glamorizing a strung out look. Because the models were so tiny and often spoke to the public about using drugs and other methods to control their weight, anorexia and bulimia and their dangers continued to be part of the public's consciousness (65-66).  (James). Since then Ana and Mia sites have remained popular and active despite censorship. The websites can be extremely troubling due to the cult-like mentality of the writers and followers and are thus labeled by the media and some feminist theorists as promoting self-starvation and purging. Author Paula Saukko describes the media's and public's response to the websites as a moral panic, seen through search engines like Yahoo's attempts to shut down the sites (Saukko 60). As social media technology developed, concern with the danger of the websites and eating disorders in general also grew.
Psychologists and feminists warned the public of the dangers of the websites and social media in spreading the contagion of the disease. Through the public warning against the sites, the blogs and posts were viewed as reflections of mental illnesses rather than autobiographical pieces of writing (Hess).
Notably the films, websites, advertisements, and changing standards of beauty have mostly been culturally associated with white, young, and middle class women, creating the assumption that women of color and men were immune to pressures to be thin (Bordo 46).
To reiterate, discussing the changing standards of beauty after WWII is not to claim there is a pressing need to research anorexia's relationship to the media or claim the media is the dominant cause of the eating practices. Instead, it is to explain the general understanding and culture of the disorders in America.

Overview of Literary Criticism on Eating Disorder Memoirs and Blogs
Little literary critical work has been done on the representations of eating disorders in literature and social media. Marya Hornbacher's 1998 anorexia and bulimia memoir Wasted is a bestseller and is often identified as the most famous memoir on eating disorders. Despite the book's praise, literary criticism on the work is lacking and the criticism that does exist often only focuses on the book as a psychological tool to understand the disorders or a book that triggers disordered eating. These critical approaches ignore the literary technique at play in the memoir such as use of literary allusions, genre conventions, syntax, characterizations, and other devices. Emma Seaber's 2016 publication on Wasted does make similar arguments as I do when I analyze the memoir, and insists Hornbacher uses disordered eating in order to create a non-normative story of anorexia and bulimia. Her article though differs from mine in that she criticizes Hornbacher's use of disordered eating as a form of identity and suggests that Hornbacher misreads and misrepresents her past relationship with anorexia and bulimia. According to Seaber the lack of representation of the negative aspects of anorexia and bulimia results in a glamorization of disordered eating and although accidental, the memoir is thus what she refers to as a disordered reading of anorexia and bulimia (498-503). Seaber's argument is fascinating, but suggests that there is a correct way to present a story of disordered eating and even that there is a correct way for Hornbacher to remember her own story. Her problematic article further supports my claim that more scholarly writing on Wasted is needed.

Overview of Feminist Theory on Anorexia and Bulimia:
Philosopher Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body has a canonical position within feminist writing on anorexia and bulimia. Published in 1993, Unbearable Weight examines images of women in popular culture, cosmetic surgery, and dieting practices to understand the prominence of eating disorders in American culture. Unbearable Weight is an important text in the history of gender studies and critical theory because it is one of the first texts to investigate the social meanings behind the media's influence in contributing to an anorexic and bulimic aesthetic of beauty. The majority of the texts outside of psychology instead only blamed the media for escalating rates of eating disorders in young girls and did not explain the cultural significance of this issue . The little work on the cultural meaning of anorexia and bulimia pre Bordo was conducted by feminist writers such as Suzie Orbach, who claimed anorexia was the result of the then current (1970s and early 80s) struggles of women in America. According to Orbach the women were attempting to find self worth by denying their biological needs to eat during a period when concepts such as gender were radically changing due to the effects of second wave feminism (2)(3)(4). Although works of Orbach such as In Unbearable Weight Bordo attempts to locate the specific reasons behind the media's influence in sparking eating disorders and claims the physical effects of anorexia and bulimia are enactments of the ideological constructions of femininity that govern women's bodies and silence their voices. Because the dominant culture enforces a specific ideal body, which is a skinny body, women achieve that ideal through self-starvation and purging. The secrecy of anorexia and bulimia, many people who practice eating disorders do so in secret, also relates to the media's representation of women and eating because most ads feature women eating in isolation, compared to ads where men eat joyfully in groups of people .
Bordo goes on to explain that because of these cultural pressures and images, "the anorectic thus appears, not as the victim of a unique and 'bizarre' pathology, but as the bearer of very distressing tidings about our culture " (16). Anorexic women are embodiments of dangerous cultural ideas of female beauty. For Bordo, anorexia and bulimia then become political statements about the deadly consequences of gender expectations, and through the protest society becomes aware of the demands of femininity. Eating disorders become protests even when the anorexic and bulimic person is not consciously protesting against the requirements of femininity (121)(122)(123)(124)(125)(126)(127)(128)(129)(130)(131)(132).
Women with eating disorders also represent the contradictions between the media's enforcement of capitalism and constant consuming and the media's enforcement of a standard of beauty that values emaciated female bodies. In the book Bordo argues that self-starvation is the result of American women living in a consumerist society that requires Americans to constantly consume products to support capitalism, but also demands that women have slender bodies and therefore not consume food products. The media attempts to manage the contradictions by showcasing women in diet ads where food, and therefore products, can be ingested, but only the company's products will prevent weight gain. Anorexia and bulimia are also unconscious responses women engage in to manage the contradictions of a consumerist culture (154)(155)(156)(157).
In 1994 feminist theorist and sociologist Becky W. Thompson published another key theoretical text focused on eating disorders. Her book, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep, unlike Unbearable Weight, uses psychology to focus on the social contributions to anorexia and bulimia and argues the eating practices are connected to class, racism, sexual assault, depression, and other issues unrelated to the media.
Thompson explains the goal of her book when she writes, Talking with Latina, African-American, and white women-including both heterosexual and lesbian women -reveals that the origins of eating problems have little or nothing to do with vanity or obsession with appearance. In fact, eating problems begin as survival strategiesas sensible acts of self-preservation-in response to myriad injustices including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The women I interviewed for the book told me stories that starkly expose how eating problems often begin as an orderly and sane response to insane circumstances (1-2).
Thompson's focus is rare for the time because the cultural consensus of eating disorders in the 1990s, as explained earlier, was believed to be a problem that mostly affected white middle class girls and a problem mostly related to the media and standards of beauty. Unfortunately later works in the field of feminist theory, in focuses such as psychology, sociology, post-modernism, and cultural studies often label anorexic and bulimic women as objects affected and controlled by the media.
These writings are in opposition to Bordo's claim that the women are active protesters, although unconscious protesters, who are not just objects unable to resist bodily pressures enforced by the media and other patriarchal institutions.
In the 2011 article "A Perfect Loathing: The Feminist Expulsion of the Eating Disorder" author Stephanie Houston Grey outlines the problems of dehumanization in feminist literature on eating disorders. Houston Grey explains the goal of her article when she writes that her essay, examines the strategic negation of the eating-disordered person within this political context as the anorexic/bulimic subject was transformed into a projection of patriarchal visual codes. Finally, this work discusses the political and social ramifications of the containment strategies through which the eating-disordered person was symbolically purged as a non-woman (indeed a "non-being") and ultimately as a patriarchal tool. Only by understanding the history of the eating disorder as a product of dramatistic motive can the contours of isolation and stigma associated with these conditions be appreciated (Houston Grey). Houston Grey argues that transforming an anorexic or bulimic woman into a projection of patriarchal influences is problematic because it is essentializes all women into having the same experiences (Houston Grey). She also argues that feminist theory that claims anorexic and bulimic women are acts of conscious political commentary is problematic. Because the women are treated as symbols of institutional resistance only, Houston Grey argues their own identities and experiences are erased and they become non-entities who only stand for the patriarchal control of women's bodies (Houston Grey).
The erasing of anorexics and bulimics as people is seen through groups of feminist writers who preach the dangers of Pro Anorexic and Bulimic blogs. By censoring the blogs, the actual voice of the anorexic and bulimic person is lost and all that remains is the voice of the theorist who then speaks for the community (Houston Grey). Houston Grey is not arguing that anorexic and bulimic women are never making political comments about the effects of the patriarchy, but instead is claiming the protests are unconscious and linked to the women's unique identities and lives, identities and lives which must not be silenced or essentialized.
The 1996 collection of essays Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, edited by Patricia Fallon, Melanie A. Katzman, and Susan C. Wooley, represents many of Houston Grey's criticism of feminist studies' approach to anorexia and bulimia. It is important to note when overviewing feminist theory that treats anorexia and bulimia problematically, I am not claiming the writings have no value or that the media does not play a role in women developing eating disorders. The media does play an important role in the culture of anorexia and bulimia, but the media is not the only role and it does not turn women into voiceless and vulnerable objects, but to use Bordo's language, results in women's unconscious protest of patriarchal standards of femininity. Alternatively, a few essays in the collection avoid problems of essentializing anorexic and bulimic women into objects, but these alternative essays do not form the major focus of the book. Instead the overview and critique of certain feminist theory is to outline the limitations of theory that is only interested in the effects of the media and the implications involved in labeling anorexic and bulimic women as objects whose identity is always tied to their weight. The scope of this introduction does not allow for examinations of all the feminist theory that overvalues the media and concerns with weight, so I will only be able to point to key feminist texts that repeat these issues.

Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders is an important text in the history
of feminist writing on eating disorders because it was one of the first of its kind. In the introduction the editors write, It is strange, really, that this book should be among the first collections of feminist writings on eating disorders, and stranger still that it should serve as the occasion for many contributors to write their first explicitly feminist pieces. For although feminist perspectives have informed this field since its inception -commanding increasing attention in recent years-a list of published works with a feminist orientation could easily fit on the cocktail napkins used at conference receptions (ix).
Because it is one of the first edited collections of essays on anorexia and bulimia, its content needs to be addressed.
The first section of essays in the book contains essays exploring the history of eating disorders in the United States and their connection to fashion, representations of the feminine form, dieting, advertisements, fat prejudices, body image, and standards of beauty (xiii-xiv). Although a history and explanation of the media's involvement and influence of anorexia and bulimia is important by 1996, when the essays were published, this concept had already been well established. The 1996 collection of theoretical writing on eating disorder is what is notable about the collection, not its focus on the media's contribution to disordered eating. By focusing only on the role of the media, instead of other factors or reasons women practice anorexia and bulimia, these essays again limit female identities to their bodies and label women as weak people incapable of resisting patriarchal appointed standards of beauty.

Similar to essays in Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders Maggie
Wykes' and Barrie Gunter's The Media and Body Image: If Looks Could Kill is also focused on the role of the media and images in producing anorexia and bulimia. The introduction of the book argues that the authors will address the lack of research on the media, body image, and eating disorders by bringing together new empirical work on both media representations and audience responses, within a broad discussion of socio-cultural change, gender politics and self-identity… [The book] investigates the contemporary 'moral panic' over the media and the body and the lack of detailed analysis of the mediated material blamed for the current health crisis by theorizing the role of the mass media in gendered discourses and analyzing textual examples from print and screen (9-10).
The media's contribution to eating disorders has been repeatedly documented by feminist theory, notably by Susan Bordo and the authors of Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, making the goal of the book less groundbreaking than the authors intend.
The authors also equate eating disorders to weakness when they claim anorexics and bulimics are too weak to resist damaging inscriptions placed on the body (25-33). The authors come to similar conclusions when they study body schema theory. Women with body dysmorphia often have eating disorders because they cannot accurately perceive their own bodies. Anorexic and bulimic women instead see their bodies through the lens of the present body, the socially represented body, and the internalized ideal body. The present body is how one currently perceives her body, which is different from the body the person actually possesses. The socially represented body is the ideal body created by the media and society and the internalized ideal body is the combination of the socially represented body and the present body (145)(146)(147). The authors' research on body schematics present valid and intriguing ways to look at disordered eating. That is not in question. What is in question is the author's singular focus that ignores other personal experiences that contribute to anorexia and bulimia and thus essentializes the anorexia and bulimic experience and does not explore how disordered eating can actually be used to resist or challenge society's control of women's bodies.
The Modeling Industry, Eating Disorders and the Law", Hildesheimer and Gur-Arie examine the 2012 Israeli law that restricts weight of professional models in ads, forces models to present documentation proving they are of suitable weights, and requires commercials to air disclaimers when the image of the models' bodies are overly manipulated (105). The authors are in support of the law but claim it overlooks other areas of the media, such as celebrities, toys, beauty contests, and magazines that also can trigger disordered eating (109-110). The authors later argue that the difference between the 2010 law and 2012 are very problematic. The 2010 law not only forbids models who do not have a high enough BMI from commercials, but prohibits agencies from employing the low weight models. The law was later changed after models complained the law violated their personal rights and choice to have a slender body (118). The authors claim the choice to have a skinny or anorexic body is a non-existent and false choice because it is the result of the media's influence, regardless of whether the model is consciously choosing to be skinny. The models' rights to their emaciated body types is also problematic, according to Hildesheimer and Gur-Arie, because the 2012 law values the models' rights of emaciation and employment over the public's exposure to the unhealthy standards of female bodies (126). "Thus, the Modeling Act of 2012 reflects a shift from protecting the dignity of the public, and mostly women, in the positive sense to protecting the advertising and modeling industries" (126). The authors' reasoning and phrasing place all women into the position of people who need to be protected from depictions of emaciated models' bodies. Moreover, the authors objectify the models into voiceless non-entities, a common issue of feminist writing according to Houston Grey. The models in the article become symbols for the contagion of anorexia and bulimia physically through their emaciated bodies and mentally through the women's desire to remain emaciated.
In summary, the essays and books addressed in this section are not actually the problem. The body of work represents the essentialist focus on eating disorders in fields of feminist literature and the need to find new approaches that do not claim women's, or anorexics' and bulimics', entire identities are based on their appearance or their eating habits, and that women are just objects who are susceptible to the media's influences. By analyzing the representations of eating disorders in memoirs and visual texts, the problems of dehumanizing and overvaluing the role of the media in encouraging anorexia and bulimia can be avoided. Because the representations of anorexia in memoirs, blogs, and social media are complex texts involving character development, literary techniques, and genre conventions, the narratives of eating disorders cannot be limited to simple critiques or portrayals of the effects of the media's influence and women's failure to resist those pressures.
The later work of Foucault is focused on care of the self, truth telling, identity creation, and challenging of discursive systems' constructions of subjectivities and is useful in analyzing the role of self creation in the eating disorder memoirs and blogs and the role of subjection in the videos. By applying the later works of Foucault to memoirs, blogs, and social media videos, not only can gender studies move away from limited focuses that essentialize the anorexic and bulimic experience, but the gap between gender theory and literary criticism can be bridged.

The Need to Turn to the Later Works of Foucault:
Beginning in the 1990s with the works of Susan Bordo many feminist writers have incorporated theories of Foucault into their writings on anorexia and bulimia.
Many poststructuralist and postmodern feminist writers use Foucault's theories on technologies of the self and subjectivity to ask questions regarding the struggles of the self and disordered eating under networks of power such as psychology. Paula Saukko asks if Foucault can be used to understand the limits of subjectivity imposed on anorexic and bulimic women by the psychiatric community (Saukko 17). Susan Bordo relies on Foucault to argue the false concept of a natural femininity is due to discursive powers' inscriptions and constructions of subjectivity .
Marce Burns claims anorexia and bulimia are technologies of the self that are practiced by women to adopt or resist social inscriptions of identity .
Other writers such as Elspeth Probyn also turn to Foucault to examine eating habits as signifiers of culture and identity that have been inscribed onto people as codes of conduct enforced by systems of power (Probyn 4).
Despite the importance of Foucault in feminist approaches to women and disordered eating the later writings in Foucault's body of work have remained mostly untouched by feminist writings allowing the chapters that follow to take up Foucault's work on care of the self, parrhēsia, and the true life. In the following chapters I use Foucault's writings on power relations and the Ancient Greeks' and Romans' use of care of the self and parrhēsia, also known as truth telling, to examine the subjects of memoirs and online communities and how they engage in parrhēsiastic conversations for self understanding and betterment. Here I outline important concepts of Foucault's work that are essential to the proceeding chapters.

Power Relations, Subjectivity, and Confession
In a 1984 interview "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault offers a succinct account of his view of power relationships. Relations of power are between individuals and other individuals, or between individuals and social institutions such as schools or families (283). In power relations an individual or institution attempts to direct or influence the behavior of another. In the interview Foucault clearly expresses what he means by relations of power: in human relations, whatever they involve verbal communication such as we are engaged in at this moment, or amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, a power is always present: I mean the relationships in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other (291-292).
Relationships of power incite the actions of others and are always present within human interactions. The relationship of power can be more intimate such as between romantic partners, or more formal such as between a teacher and a student. Or, a relationship can be between a practitioner and the church. Regardless of what type of power relation a person is in, the power relations influence individuals' behavior in various ways.
Power relations can also be challenged because "these power relations are mobile, they can be modified, they are not fixed once and for all " (292). The relationships of power do not have to be balanced or equal, as in the case of student and teacher, but even with the imbalance of power, change to the relationship is possible, even if unlikely. Because relationships of power are everywhere and are capable of being transformed, power is also not inherently good or evil and people must be free in order to resist, change, challenge, or obey the power relation (292).
Because there is power, freedom is possible. By freedom Foucault means that people can respond in various ways, such as opposing or obeying the mode of power that influences their behavior (Foucault,"The Subject and Power" 342). For example, one can rebel against a teacher by not completing homework, or abide by the teacher's authority and complete the homework. Regardless of the person's behavior the subject has various options in the response to the relation of power. Power relations can then be summarized as the way individuals and social institutions aim to conduct and determine the behavior of a free subject (Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of .
Because freedom is a requirement for networks of power, relationships of power are not the same as power exercised by dictators or other totalitarian systems.
The type of power that prevents any type of resistance or alteration is a state of domination. In "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault describes states of domination as when "an individual or a social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced with what may be called a state of domination " (283). Because there are no methods of resistance or only very unlikely possibilities to change the relationship of power, these methods of power are states of domination rather than power relations.
As a result of power relations' abilities to influence or incite the behavior of individuals or groups, the networks of power subjugate people by attempting to determine their behavior (Foucault,"The Subject and Power" 331). Foucault explains the meaning of the subject here. "There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to " (331). Subjectivity or how one is made subject to a mode of power marks the individual, "with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces" (Foucault,"Questions on Geography" 74). To describe subjectivity in another way individuals construct themselves; or the self is constructed through and in relation of power. Foucault often uses sexuality to explain subjectivity. Individuals and society construct themselves through sexuality, a mechanism of power, by identifying themselves and other people through labels of sexuality such as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgendered, and so on. A truth is then produced about one's sexuality. The mode of power of sexuality determines people's behavior by determining how people recognize the so called truth of themselves and are recognized by others as sexual beings (Foucault "The Subject and Power" 327). This is shown on dating websites where one must choose a sexual preference, forcing a person to subjugate themselves through the language of subjectivity created by the website. To summarize, subjectivity, or how individuals think of or construct their sense of self, is influenced by relations of power and makes people subject to that power relation.
In "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault clarifies that when a subject constructs him or herself as a sexual subject they are not creating the language of sexuality to use to identify themselves. The power relation has already constructed this language of sexuality. In the interview when explaining his interest in the subject he remarks "I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself.
They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group" (291).
In the same interview Foucault explains that when people construct themselves as sexual subjects it is different from how people construct themselves as political subjects; how people present or establish themselves then depends on the relation of power (290). There are countless types of power relations present in society that affect subjectivity or how one constructs the self but Foucault often focuses on certain mechanisms of power relations. In "The Subject and Power" Foucault explains that his work has always been concerned with how people are made into subjects. Through his research he has contemplated subjection through three modes of objectification. The first mode of objectification Foucault describes is modes of inquiry through science. The subject is constituted through disciplines of science and sociology such as biology, psychology, medicine, criminology, linguistics, sexology, and other discursive modalities (326). This network of power is what Foucault often refers to as biopower (Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978. Within this relation of power one can construct the self as anorexic or bulimic, terms created within medicine and psychology to understand and label the eating practices. The second mode of objectification Foucault's work has been focused on, according to him, is "dividing practices". Dividing practices are the ways an individual is objectivized into categories of people and differentiated from one another such as mad versus sane, sick versus healthy, or normal versus perverse (Foucault,"The Subject and Power" 326). Within this chapter, dividing practices are how the subjects and characters of the videos construct themselves as disordered eaters versus non disordered eaters, or anorexic versus bulimic, or not recovered versus recovered. Subjectivity is constructed through a binary label. The final area of objectification Foucault explores is the focus of his final work and concerns how "a human being turns him-or herself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality -how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of 'sexuality '" (327).
In "The Subject and Power" Foucault explains Christianity as a form of power that is "salvation-oriented (as opposed to political power)… it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth-the truth of the individual himself" (333). Foucault further argues in the article that pastoral power is about renunciation or self-sacrifice in order to acquire salvation (333). He clearly links confession to pastoral power when he writes "this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets" (333). Although pastoral power has lost part of its efficacy during the 18 th century, it was disturbed into the modern state (333-334) and changed to being no longer about "leading people to their salvation in the next world, but, rather, ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the world 'salvation' takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents" (334). The new form of pastoral power is exercised through police, the family, schools, medicine, but also through the individual who constructs him or herself through those power relations (334-335).

Parrhēsia and Care of the Self:
In the winter of 1984 Foucault taught at the Collège de France as a public lecturer, a position he held from 1971 until his death in June of 1984 (Ewald and Fontana xi). From February 1 st to March 28 th he discussed the concept of care of the self in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and society, the true life, and parrhēsia.
Stylistically the lectures more closely resemble essays and were published in 2008 under the title The Courage of Truth: Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984 and is one of the key texts in Foucault's work on care of the self, the true life, and parrhēsia. Foucault's discussion of care of the self and parrhēsia in essays such as "What is Enlightenment", "The Subject and Power", "The Ethics of the Concern For Self as a Practice of Freedom", and "The Hermeneutics of the Subject", will also be crucial to my application of the concept of care of the self and parrhēsia to characters and subjects in eating disorder memoirs, blogs, and videos.
In "The Ethics of the Concern For Self as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault explains the Ancient Greek concept of care of the self "as knowledge [connaissance] of the self… but also knowledge of a number of rules of acceptable conduct or of principles that are both truths and regulations " (116). Care of the self is selfunderstanding by contemplating and critiquing how modes of behavior and one's subjectivity are shaped by relationships of power. Through self-knowledge, selfmastery emerges and people are able to expel influences that have a destructive effect on their lives and subjectivities (116).
Care of the self thus leads to ethos, or understood in Ancient Greece as a way of living and being that is apparent to others (117). Ethos is also the way a person forms one's self as a moral subject (Foucault, The Courage of Truth 63) and the codes and practices one lives by. In living by one's own morality, one creates the self and is not subjected by a network of power, but practices subjectivation (Gros 511). It is an art of life. In connection to care of the self, ethos is then a behavior that emerges after self-understanding, self-knowledge, and self-mastery, and is the practice of a way of life where harmful appetites and influences have been overcome ("The Ethics of the Concern For Self as a Practice of Freedom",Foucault 116). Through ethos one is able to practice parrhēsia and engage in truth telling about the self, others, and society because a person lives by his or hers ethos and therefore lives what one understands to be a "true" life. When writing about the memoirists' and bloggers' creation of a self, I am referring to their subjectivation and how the creation of self is in resistance to subjection.
Parrhēsia is the practice of telling all without holding anything back (Foucault, The Courage of Truth 9). The subject is a parrhēsiast when he or she is also not reluctant to speak the truth and speaks only what he or she believes to be the truth to a listening interlocutor (6). The interlocutor's qualification to hear the truth is not determined by an institution, it is determined by the interlocutor's own use of parrhēsia (6). The contemporary interlocutor's lack of qualifications determined by biopower for example, separates the interlocutor from the position of doctor or priest whose position and authority is regulated by biopowers. Because the parrhēsiast speaks the truth, the interlocutor always accepts what is spoken as the truth. The interlocutor does not question what the parrhēsiast says.
Truth for the Ancient Greeks, and for my work as well, does not refer to an internal truth of the individual that is unearthed. It is opposed to the idea of a universal humanism that is inherent since birth. Instead the Greek idea of truth (alēthēs) or the true life (a-lētheia) etymologically means what is not concealed or hidden, what is sincere and does not deceive. Alēthēs also means what is not supplemented or "mixed with something other than itself" (218-219). The truth is also straight and direct. The truth is free from twists and turns that would conceal or distort it. Lastly, alēthēs refers to "that which exists and remains beyond any change, which remains in its identity, immutability, and incorruptibility" (219). The truth is the truth because it can never be changed through manipulation or deviation (219).
Because parrhēsia is truth speaking, what is spoken is free of distortion and concealment. Truth for the memoir and blogs then means when the subjects are speaking sincerely, openly, and without tools of manipulation. Although parrhēsia is not manipulation, parrhēsia is not always straightforward. Fiction and other artwork for example can be parrhēsia. In literature and even the blogs, the truth is often written or shown through literary conventions such as irony or satire and visuals such as editing, filters, and other devices. Literary, digital theory, and visual tools are then needed to understand the truth spoken through the prose. The truth is not concealed through irony, satire, or a video's editing, but astute readers are needed to comprehend how the literary and visual devices tell the truth.
The parrhēsiast must also take a risk because the truth spoken may jeopardize the parrhēsiast's relationship with the interlocutor or even jeopardize the parrhēsiast's life (11). In truth speaking the parrhēsiast takes a risk because the truth spoken has the possibility of "offending the other person, of irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be extremely violent" (11). The risk is what differentiates a parrhēsiast from a teacher, for example, teaching a truth of geometry or astrology (10-11).
It is important to not confuse parrhēsia with rhetoric. In contrast to truth telling rhetoric, is a method of persuasion where the person speaking may not even believe what he or she is stating. Foucault writes rhetoric is "a technique, a set of processes which enable the person speaking to say something which may not be what he thinks at all, but whose effect will be to produce convictions, induce certain conducts, or instill certain beliefs in the person" (13) he or she is speaking to.
Moreover, the person listening to the rhetorician believes, through the manipulation of the rhetorician's speech, that what is spoken is the truth. Because rhetoric is not about stating a truth, there is no bond between the listener and the rhetorician.
Foucault claims that no bond exists between the rhetorician and the listener, it is already destroyed through the manipulative act of rhetoric (13). Parrhēsia lacks manipulation and the desire to persuade because with parrhēsia "there is no question of saying anything other than what one thinks" (13) and therefore everything spoken is the parrhēsiast's truth. Parrhēsia is also a stance or way of life instead of being a skill one acquires as in rhetoric (14).
Although the second chapter of the dissertation will more thoroughly address the challenge of applying Ancient Greek and Roman concepts and practices to contemporary texts and videos, here I will briefly acknowledge the issue here. In the interview "On The Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress" Foucault answers questions regarding the relevance of care of the self to late twentieth century life, gender and civil rights issues in Ancient Greece, and the practice and adaptation of methods of care of the self after the time of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Early in the interview Foucault explains that Ancient Greek citizens were concerned with moral conduct and following one's own ethics instead of following a moral code associated with religion or the law. Citizens were not interested in questions about the afterlife or the legality of their conduct. Instead one was invested in constructing an aesthetic of existence (355). This idea of morality is different than morality in Christianity that is concerned with afterlife and behaving morally in order to get into heaven. According to Foucault the common social dissociation of ethics with religion and the law resembles the then, the interview is from 1983, current state of life. Foucault comments I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any practice on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. I am struck by this similarity of problems (355-356).
Late twentieth century life is related to the ancient Greeks in that, like Greek citizens, people want an ethical way of life to understand their desires and other aspects of the self. Although Christianity is no longer the dominant power relation that one uses in order to understand the self, scientific knowledge has become the dominant power to understand the self, despite peoples' attempts to understand the self through new ethics. The current desire to understand one's self through a moral code that is not associated with religion, the law, or science is a desire to care for the self and develop an ethos.
Foucault is not suggesting that society should return to Ancient Greece or that it is even possible to return to former historic periods. He directly states this in the interview when he explains that contemporary problems cannot be solved by recreating a past historic moment and uses the exact tools people once used to solve a similar problem (256-2559). Foucault further suggests that Ancient Greece is not a time period current day citizens would desire to return to due to societal sexism and slavery (256). Instead, Foucault is arguing that society's desire to understand the self and create a way of life is similar to the Ancient Greeks' desire to live a life of truth. "We don't have to choose between our world and the Greek world. But since we can see very well that some of the main principles of our ethics have been related at a certain moment to an aesthetics of existence, I think that this kind of historical analysis can be useful" (261). By understanding care of the self in Ancient Greek culture, one can adapt the technique to current times and change it to better fit in the contemporary world. Throughout history methods of attending to the self have resurfaced and been altered by the historic period. For example, Foucault clarifies that during the Renaissance groups, of people resisted the Church and attempted to find their own way of life (278). As Foucault points out then, we "can see, therefore, a reappearance, up to a certain point, not of the culture of the self, which had never disappeared, but a reaffirmation of its autonomy" (278). I will argue that the genres of the memoir are blogs are contemporary altered tools of care of the self. By altering the method of care of the self to contemporary life, one is not recreating a way of life through the Ancient Greek practices, but is creating a way of life that is unique to the late 20 th and are early 21 st century and is akin with the Greeks' desire to create an aesthetics of existence. The current day methods of care of the self can be practiced by women and thus adapted and not limited by the sexism and classism that existed in Ancient Greece.
Through anorexia and bulimia, the YouTube video creators use anorexia and bulimia to confess their disordered eating ways and are thus made subject to pastoral powers. The memoirists and bloggers use disordered eating to understand their subjectivity and then care for the self by knowing the self, mastering the self, and bettering the self. Care of the self leads to the memoir and blog subjects' self-mastery and agency. Through self-mastery the subject resist networks of power that subjugate and produce ways of life, as well as other self-destructive behaviors. The bulimic and anorexic subjects of the blogs and memoirs engage in subjectivation, in contrast to the subjects of YouTube who are subjugated. The eating practices in the memoirs and blogs temporarily become the memoir and blog subjects' mode of behavior and a way of life that is visibly reflected through the subjects' choices and bodies.
In my chapters the memoirists and bloggers illustrate the process of care of the self, ethos, and parrhēsia. The first chapter will focus on the genre of the "My Eating Disorder Story" on YouTube and the video creators' use of the medium of YouTube, social media, and branding as a means of confession. This chapter will argue that these subjectifying narratives are in opposition to the narratives of the memoirs and the bloggers where the writers attempt to create personhoods in opposition to systems of power. My second chapter will explore Wasted and the author Marya Hornbacher's contemplation, alteration, and creation of a self under networks of power such as family, school, gender, and the medical community. For my third and fourth chapters I focus on texts that feature subjects that begin to care for the self, develop an ethos, and then speak truths to their collective of readers. In the third chapter I argue the Pro Eating Disorder bloggers' writing is a modernization of the Ancient Greek use hupomnematas. Through the act of disordered eating and blogging, the bloggers gain knowledge of the self and attempt to better the self. The fourth chapter on Dana Lise Shavin's memoir The Body Tourist proposes that the memoir is a parrhēsiastic narrative of recovery that challenges cultural notions of what recovery means and how one becomes recovered.

Chapter 1: Confession, Branding of Anorexia and Bulimia, and the YouTube Subject in My Eating Disorder Story Videos
On 22 January 2016 Cassey Ho fitness YouTube Celebrity and creator of blogilates posted a 15-minute long video on her YouTube channel called "Why I will NEVER DIET Again." The video starts with a fake infomercial for an unnamed diet product where a spokesperson, played by Ho in a wig, promises magical weight loss and the chance to have a fit celebrity body. As the video continues Ho explains that between 2012 and 2013 she developed the eating disorder of orthorexia in response to the guidelines of a personal trainer and the strict diet she was on when she competed in a bikini contest. Ho claims that she wants to be honest with her self and YouTube community in order to help others avoid her own experience with disordered eating, as well as reject the harmful influences that made her develop orthorexia in the first place (blogilates).
The video has been watched over 1 million times and has been featured on online health and celebrity culture sites such as HelloGiggles, health.com, DailyMail, MSN, and others. When Googled the video has over 500,000 results concerning blogs and other news sites that have featured and discussed the video.
The video and the sensation the video caused on the Internet represents the growing popularity of the My Anorexia and Bulimia Story videos, but also Ho's rebranding of her YouTube channel and self into a subject of eating disorders and a subject of the mechanisms to present narratives of disordered eating on YouTube.
Ho's video follows the codes and conventions of the My Eating Disorder Story genre.
Although the beginning of the video is a recreation of an infomercial, the rest of the video in contrast is simply framed and features a stationary camera on Ho as she sits in her living room and talks directly into the camera. The rest of the video is composed of intercuts of photographs of Ho as she struggled with her weight, jumpcuts, stills of the word truth over photographs of diet products, text, zooms, photograph advertisements for blogilates, and muted clips from an anti dieting Lean Cuisine commercial. All of these traits are repeatedly found in the My Eating Disorder Story genre on YouTube.
Besides the videos' aesthetics and composition, the content and tone also mirrors the disordered eating story genre of videos. Like the other videos, Ho discusses a former type of eating disorder, features scrolling or frozen text concerning disordered eating and recovery, discusses her sense of self and its connection to In the videos the uploaders are also depicted as subjects of YouTube and other systems of power. Ho's dialogue and the medium of YouTube are all rooted in language and ideology that is about essentialist modes of classification that divide subjects. For example, in the video Ho says, "I was working out for all the wrong reasons" and "I want us all to live a healthy and fulfilled life that is not based around the way that we look" (Ho). Wanting individuals to find value outside of their appearances is not a bad idea, but her use of the world healthy and the rest of the statement suggests that one cannot be fulfilled by one's appearance, so there is a certain way to then be "healthy" and find "happiness". There is thus "healthy" and "sick". She does not define what "health" or "happiness" means, or what the right reason to work out is, but based on her pledge not to diet and the content of the rest of her channel, health and happiness occur by following her Cheap Clean Eats guidelines and working out for reasons other than being skinny.
In the video Ho also links to a Lean Cuisine video marketing their gadget that monitors how often the word diet is used online. Although the linked website is not selling the "Weigh This Diet Filter", it is a company that sells diet food, so not only is Ho's pledge to not diet contradicted by her endorsement of a Lean Cuisine product, but is linking to another site that is instructing people that there is a certain way to eat healthy, which is eating Lean Cuisine. Ho's video is also engrossed in the essentialist ideology and culture of branding on YouTube. Because YouTube is a business that profits from the success of YouTube personalities, the more popular a personality the more revenue YouTube will earn from views and advertisements. Unlike the chapters that follow, this chapter explores how the videos are about the subjection of disordered eating, YouTube and other relations of power, rather than subjectivation and rebellion through anorexia, bulimia, and memoir and blog writing.
It is important to analyze the narratives of disordered eating told on YouTube, and how they differ from the narratives of disordered eating that occur in the memoirs and blogs. The videos also represent the typical narrative of disordered eating that is found in made for television movies, interviews with celebrities, criticism of the fashion industry and standards of beauty, and narratives about Karen Carpenter. The videos are part of the culture of disordered eating that is written about in the introduction. In the videos disordered eating is associated with shame, secrecy, embarrassment, isolation and a part of the YouTuber's self and life that he or she must renounce in order to find happiness and salvation. In contrast, disordered eating in the memoirs and blogs becomes the inspiration and method the authors use to create a self, rather than being subjected, and are eating habits that bring anorexics and bulimics together, and eating habits to be proud of and even worship.
In what follows I will outline the history of My Eating Disorder Story genre of videos and how YouTube resembles Foucault's concept of dividing powers.

Aesthetics of My Eating Disorder Story Videos and Shame:
Disordered eating narratives are part of a larger genre on YouTube called "illness narratives" (Holmes 6). The genre consists of videos concerning teenage suffering and are focused on topics involving bullying, self harm, and disordered eating (6). The genre of videos has also been referred to as "pain memes". Amy Shields Dobson explains that the videos all have similar aesthetics, star young girls or boys, and use written text and emotional music to convey their suffering and grief (1).
Su Holmes further defines the genre of disordered eating narratives as ranging from about 3.5 minutes to 11.5 minutes (Holmes 6), although I will include videos that are slightly over 15 minutes long. The majority of the videos are also represented by white young girls between the ages of 13 and 19 and are native English speakers (6), although I will also consider videos created by people who identify as male and who are older then the average age range. Due to the abundance of the videos on YouTube, as well as the website's inability to search from reverse upload date, it is difficult to locate a date when the videos first began to be uploaded onto YouTube.
The oldest video I found was posted on February 7 th , 2007 by Charlxttte, and is called Ho and their YouTube discussions of their former disordered eating habits (Lodi).
Despite the popularity of the videos, little has been written about them.
There are two types of My Eating Disorder Story videos, a slideshow style video of text and images, and the confessional style of video where the YouTuber is on screen and talks into the camera. The slideshow style of the videos feature only selfies, title cards of text, music, and sometimes old videos of the uploaders. The current day uploader is never seen by a moving camera and no cinematography occurs because the video usually consists only of photographs. Confessional style videos also consist of photographs, text, and music, but feature the uploader talking directly to the camera or webcam. In these videos filters are often used, jumpcuts occur, and the backgrounds of the uploaders' bedroom or other spaces can be seen.
The videos can be professionally produced like Ho's video; these videos use a high quality camera and lighting, or, as is more common, are produced by nonprofessional filmmakers who just use a webcam to make the videos. In the confessional style videos the uploader largely use webcams to film themselves as they discuss their eating disorder story directly to the viewer or camera, also making the face the center of attention. This occurs in rocket girl's "MY ANOREXIA STORY TRIGGER WARNING". In the video rocket girl is in front of a plain white wall and the entire video consists of her talking to the camera. She is in the center of the frame during the entire video and the viewers see her exclusively from her chest to the top of her hairline because the top of her head is cut off. The video is unprofessional in that she is talking to a camera, and the only types of edits that occur are jumpcuts. The framing is also in contrast to traditional cinema in that she does not follow the rule of thirds or leave headroom. The top of her head is cut off by the frame and because she is in the center of a plain white wall, no depth of field can occur. Her face is the only visual interest in the frame and is the central focus of the video. This is reinforced by certain jumpcuts in the video that cut her off in mid sentence. These jumpcuts do not undermine rocket girl as a speaker, but the visuals and audio once again draw attention to the self on screen. Jumpcuts are also a type of cut that is often attributed to experimental cinema and French New Wave where the edit is used to draw attention to the medium of film due to the jarring effect of the non continuity edit. Here the jumpcuts are less abrupt because the angles are all identical, only the position of rocket girl's head changes, but because the jumpcuts break up the continuity of the video, often when she is speaking, the medium of the YouTube is called attention to. Because YouTube is about the "You" of the video the face of rocket girl once more becomes the video's focus. Her words are not always then the focus, but her face is. The use of multiple long takes in the video also further draws attention to her face, because the camera remains on rocket girl uninterrupted for long periods of time.
Other videos such as NikkiPhillippi's "My Eating Disorder" uses a webcam that also draws attention to her self. In her video she uses jumpcuts and speaks directly into the camera, but she uses other technical features such as slow motion, voice filters, and sound effects. In the beginning of the video she starts by singing "Testing, testing, 1,2,3" through a high pitch voice filter and a cinematic filter that makes the image appear as if it has wavy lines like a vintage television. In another moment she uses a slow motion effect to repeat the words "eating disorder", and when she compares herself to Olive from the Popeye cartoon, she edits her snapping fingers with a sound effect that is in time with the popup of an image of Olive. The use of slow motion and sound filters make her the center of attention by giving her a strange voice and slowing down time so her words and her corresponding facial movements are exaggerated and last longer. The video is edited to focus longer on her face. She is also always in the center of the frame and only jumpcuts, slow motions, and insertions of photographs on the side of the screen occur. She never leaves the frame. These visuals that call attention to the self setup the act of confession by creating aesthetics that highlight the self and the words spoken by the uploader.
The verbal or written content of the videos are similar. Most of the confessional style videos start off with introductory remarks to the audience, explaining that the videos will be about the uploader's former use of disordered eating. Often the YouTuber's former use of disordered eating is presented as a reveal though, even though the title usually makes the reveal obvious, and a truth that must be spoken if the YouTuber is going to remain honest with his or her YouTube community. Sometimes the YouTuber, such as Ho, will dramatize the reveal of her use of disordered eating and explain how it may come as a surprise to her viewers that she once had an eating disorder. In the video Ho states, Today in this video I want to share with you something that I've been really ashamed of, and I didn't want to tell you for a really long time, in fact for like three years, because I didn't want to admit to myself that I had a problem, and this is going to be a very emotional, I think video, and I never talked about it publicly, and like I said, I refrained from doing that because I felt like it could be controversial, or could be, a lot of people could judge me for it, but, you know what, I want to be super honest with you (blogilates).
Ho then goes on to state that when she trained for a bikini contest, she developed an eating disorder. The video then cuts to a title card that states "Time to get real." (blogilates), before she chronicles what lead to her disordered eating. Stating that she never revealed her disordered eating past before and was ashamed of her disordered eating suggests that not only are eating disorders something to be embarrassed about, but something that must be confessed. The eating disorders cannot be kept to an individual, but must be confessed to the public. Ho must be honest or "get real" (blogilates).
NikkiPhillippi starts her video in a similar way by stating that "Today I am going to talk about and address something that I never blatantly talked about or made a sole video about on this channel" (NikkiPhillippi). When she finally states that what she never talked about before is her eating disorder, NikkiPhillippi uses a slow motion voice effect to slow down "my eating disorder" so the reveal becomes dramatized and the words are exaggerated. Similar to Ho, NikkiPhillippi also clarifies that she no longer has an eating disorder. Like Ho, she then also goes into the story of how she developed an eating disorder. NikkiPhillippi's use of the statement "I never blatantly talked about or made a soul video about" (NikkiPhillippi) is similar to Ho's language of confession and secrecy. Her disordered eating was something she previously hid and now is finally confessing to her audience about her obsessive thoughts concerning her weight and eating habits. Similar to Ho, the language of confession and declaration that she no longer has an eating disorder further places disordered eating into a category of shame, because it is something one must shed in order to get to the stage of confessing.
In Izzy D's video "I blamed Blogilates for my exercise addiction" she is framed similarly to rocket girl's video where the later speaks directly to the camera, is in the center of the frame, and the shot has cut off the top of her head. She is outside, but the background of trees also distorts the sense of space, making the scenery all blend together. The visuals then are similar to the other videos and call attention to the self. In the video she states "I" before pausing and leaning closer to the camera and then back again, as if getting ready to tell a secret, and then states "used to be obsessed and addicted to exercise" (Izzy D). The gesture of turning to and away from the camera and pausing sets up the statement of being obsessed with exercise as a revelation and something to confess. As the video continues, she analyzes blogilates and Ho in her attempt to explain how she once obsessively watched the videos and then mistakenly blamed the videos for her eating disorder. Her analysis of Ho occurs when she comments "I thought blogilates, Cassey herself, and anyone else who followed blogilates, must also have this unhealthy weird relationship with exercise" (Izzy D). Although in the video she says she was incorrect to associate blogilates with her own eating disorder and to assume Ho had an eating disorder, she contradicts herself by embedding a link to her reaction video to Ho's "Why I will NEVER DIET Again". The embedded link says "and I was right!!! :o" (Izzy D) and links to her reaction video titled "Blogilates admits to ED & I am blocked on her instagram :( Response from comments". The use of the title "Blogilates admits to ED" and writing "and I was right!!! :o" (Izzy D) further emphasizes that in the videos disordered eating is something one should be ashamed of and hide at first, because it is something one has to admit, but also something that others are actively trying to figure out, and then out the person for having an eating disorder. And again, Izzy D presents herself as someone who no longer practices disordered eating or mistakenly associates blogilates with disordered eating, which is contradicted by making a reaction video about Ho's disordered eating. Regardless of the contradiction, she is presenting her self as someone who does not practice disordered eating any more, and therefore is capable of confessing her story. The video, as well as Ho's and NikkiPhillippi's videos, suggest that eating disorders can only be confessed, when they are no longer being practiced. The aesthetics that call attention to the self highlight the act of confessing and expelling a truth of one's self, a truth that needs to be expelled in order for the uploader to become honest or real.
Other confessional style videos more directly turn the video into a confession: I can't live my life without telling you guys, cuz you guys are so important to me, and I just want to make something clear right now… Recently I've been feeling like I've been living in two worlds, this one perfect YouTube life, and I was so happy and I love you guys and everything seems so perfect. Perfect family, perfect room, perfect like makeup, outfit, everything, that is not the truth, at all, not even close (Megan Hylands).
Through her language the video is linked to confession and an urgency of confession by words and phrases such as "I can't live my life without telling you guys", "that is not the truth" (Megan Hylands), suggesting that her disordered eating past is her truth, and the truth that she must confess or produced in order to stop living the lie of being a perfect YouTuber. This use of language is similar to the language Ho uses when she uses a title card that states "Time to get real" (blogilates). Again, the representation of anorexia through Hylands' video suggests it is something one is obligated to confess in order to be real or truthful.  (Meyer).
The song is about facing one's addictions or demons and fighting the war within one's self, and for indiefox187 to face her demons, she must first confess her anorexia and come out of the darkness to move on or go through the door of one's life and start over.
AdamJernberg uses a song in a similar way. In his video "My Anorexia Story (Through Pictures)", he plays Goo Goo Dolls' song "Iris". The song is about a narrator attempting to connect with a female lover, and the conflict in his desire to hide aspects of himself from everyone but her. The chorus of the song states "And I don't want the world to see me/ 'Cause I don't think that they'd understand/ When everything made to be broken/ I just want you to know who I am" (Goo Goo Dolls).
Through the video AdamJernberg is telling the YouTube community who he is through text and pictures of his former anorexic self. Again, he is confessing.
The idea that anorexia, bulimia, and other types of disordered eating habits are something that need to be confessed in order for one to move on, equates disordered eating with shame and something one should at first hide because it is too unpleasant or controversial for one to discuss openly. Ho directly equates disordered eating with embarrassment and the sensational when she states that she was ashamed of her disordered eating and that discussing her disordered eating is controversial. She also confirms that while she had orthorexia, she was obsessed with how she looked, and that now looking back she thinks of herself as being vain and superficial for being happy over her slender body (blogilates). In Ho's video then, orthorexia or other types of disordered eating are not just shameful, but are linked to one's vanity, which further places shame onto disordered eating.
Psychologists have also written about the presence of both shame and pride in anorexic women. In his article "Shame and Pride in Anorexia Nervosa: A Qualitative Descriptive Study", the author Finn Skarderud explores the presence of the contradictory emotions in anorexic patients. In his study, female anorexic patients were interviewed by the author and asked various questions, some which concerned shame. In his results he found that a large portion of the anorexic people interviewed expressed shame over being vain and wanting to lose weight, shame of not living up to one's ambitions, shame in having an eating disorder when others' have to live with more serious problem like war, shame in being sick, and disgust of their bodies and eating (7-12). But others interviewed also explained their pride in being able to starve their bodies and be anorexic while others fail, the pride in being different from others by being exceptionally thin, and the pride felt when a person commented on their slender body (12-13). According to the author, shame and pride co-existing in anorexic patients conveys the complexity of the eating habits (14). The paper concludes by expressing the importance of patients openly discussing what they are ashamed of in order to end silence associated with shame that then prevents the patients from opening up and talking to their therapists about taboo or uncomfortable topics (15).
In Elspeth Probyn's book Carnal Appetites: Food, Sex, Identities, a chapter is focused on shame, disgust, and eating. In that chapter she starts with a story of her own disordered eating past.
Like many, I spent much of my childhood feeling disgusting. However, any evidence of that time is scant. Of the series of photographs that document my childhood, there is an absence that occurs about the time that I was severely anorexic. The reason for the lack of previous documentation is simple: why or how could such a sight be documented? Even now my eyes turn in aversion from memories tinged with a mixture of shame, disgust, and guilt. At the same time, I do remember the splinters of pride that accompanied the disgust; pride at the beautifully prominent set of ribs, the pelvic bones that stood in stark relief, causing shadows to fall on a perfectly concave stomach. Looking back at my experience, I wonder at the forces of pride and shame doing battle in a body that know itself to be disgusting (125).
The quote emphasizes the contradicting thoughts regarding disordered eating. It is something both shameful and disgusting, yet something to be proud of. She also questions how the sight of anorexia can or should be documented, if one is both proud yet ashamed of one's former disordered eating.
As the chapter advances Probyn analyzes the meanings of shame, pride, and disgust, as well as representations of body acceptance movements in photographs.
The first photographs she analyzes are a series of pictures that showcase an obese body and then an emaciated body. In the obese photograph the body is covered in rolls of fat and in the anorexic photograph the model has sharp bones that jut out. In both pictures the identities of the models are hidden by framings that cut off the models' faces, and the photographs end with information on fat acceptance groups and anorexia support groups (126). Probyn explains that the photographs force the viewer to at first be disgusted but then to feel shame about the former feeling of disgust when first looking at the photographs. Shame of one's disgust then leads the viewer to possibly learning how to accept the obese and emaciated bodies that have been othered by the photographs (126-127). As the chapter continues, Probyn explains that the former disgust over different bodies or people, like obese and anorexic bodies, often is transferred into guilt (129).
Although Probyn's chapter focuses on the disgust and shame experienced by the viewer when looking at obese or emaciated bodies, her argument can be applied to the evocations of disgust, shame, and pride of the creators and videos in the My Eating Disorder Story genre. In the videos though, shame is associated with one's disgust over one's former emaciated body, but also one's disgust with his or her former pride over the emaciated body and the effect the eating disorder had on the uploader's family. As explained above, Ho states that she now feels like it was superficial to enjoy and be proud of her more slender body while she was training for the bikini contest (blogilates). Her former pride over her orthorexia, as well as the orthorexia itself, can then be inferred to be what she means when she states that she was ashamed of her disordered eating past. Like in Probyn's argument, Ho's former disgust over her body and superficiality turns to about wasting time on such trivial thoughts as one's appearance.
It is notable that Ho says in in her video that she wants "to share with you something that I've been really ashamed of, and I didn't want to tell you for a really long time" (blogilates), indicating that she is no longer ashamed of the disordered eating, but just ashamed of her vain enjoyment of losing weight. The video then suggests that disordered eating is something one should be ashamed of because it leads one to becoming superficial, but it is also something that one needs to confess in order to be honest. Once one confesses or is ready to confess, then the shame disappears and is replaced with the cathartic experience of confessing. This idea relates to Skarderud's article that ends by stating the importance of patients' discussing what they are ashamed of in order for therapy to be successful and remove the stigma of shame (15). Like the uploaders, the patients needed to confess their shame.
The depiction of disgust and pride is more complicated in the slideshow style of videos. Through the use of photographs, editing, and music, the uploaders' intent seems to be to showcase their emaciated bodies as sites of pain and disgust. The shame is also present through the texts of the videos that highlights how the uploaders felt guilty for hurting their families by practicing disordered eating. But, the uploaders' use photographs from when they were anorexic and therefore were taken when the uploader's intent was to showcase or exaggerate their weight loss as an achievement or source of pride.
The intent to evoke disgust through pictures of emaciation is most apparent in AdamJernberg is it impossible to know if he felt pride over his slender body, but because he writes that he found his body attractive, and then took pictures of that attractive body, he valued or had pride over those slender body parts initially, until he recovered and then found them disgusting.
The suggestion of pride created by the selfies is similar to the pride Probyn remembers while thinking back on her own time as an anorexic. "I do remember the splinters of pride that accompanied the disgust; pride at the beautifully prominent set of ribs, the pelvic bones that stood in stark relief, causing shadows to fall on a perfectly concave stomach" (125). The mixture of pride and disgust is also shown in AdamJernberg's video when he writes "I THOUGHT I WAS FAT.. I THOUGHT THIS WAS ATTRACTIVE" (AdamJernberg). The statement is contradictory because it states that he felt fat, something he desperately was trying to shed; on the other hand he thinks he is emaciated and therefore attractive.
The back and forth between feeling pride, disgust, and shame that Probyn refers to is perhaps why she questions "why or how could such a sight [anorexia] be documented" (125)? The videos suggest that anorexia or other disordered eating habits can only be documented once the uploaders admit and confess their disordered eating habits and view their former disordered eating bodies as disgusting, and the desire to lose weight as something shameful.
The styles of the video are linked to confession and, by implication linked to Christianity and pastoral power. The videos are also linked to branding through their existence of YouTube, so the uploaders are not just subject to Christianity, but are subject to branding and YouTube as a system of power. In what follows I will analyze YouTube and the brand of YouTube and My Eating Disorder Story as a relation of power.

The Subject of YouTube:
As explained earlier, the language, aesthetics, and goals of the My Eating Disorder Story videos are linked to confession through the uploaders' declarations that they need to finally be honest, the videos' editing that dramatizes the reveal of images of disordered eating, and the use of a webcam that is connected to a language of confession due to its history of use in reality television. These aspects clearly connect the videos to pastoral powers. The uploaders feel like the must be honest or get real to confess inner truths of themselves, which is the inner truth that they once had an eating disorder. The act of confessing is an act or renunciation because the uploaders state how earlier they attempted to hide the truth of their disordered eating and were ashamed of their disordered eating past. But, in order to be honest with the YouTube community, which is repeatedly stated to be very important to the YouTubers, they must confess their innermost secret. Only through confession can the YouTuber finally be honest and move on from his or hers disordered eating past to find salvation. The YouTubers are actively using a language of salvation even if most of them are likely unaware of Foucault's writing on pastoral power and may not identify as Christian or as someone using a Christian practice of confession. The YouTubers are also then subject to the redistribution of pastoral powers in the modern state.
The YouTubers identify themselves through the language of systems of power such as psychology and by explaining that they only got better, or acquired salvation, when they admitted to having a disorder or accepted medical help in order to get healthy. Ho never was hospitalized or officially diagnosed as having an eating disorder, or at least she does not reveal this in the video, but does explain how she became healthy. She first explains that when she developed orthorexia, she initially "didn't want to admit to [herself] that [she] had a problem" (blogilates), but once she got fed up with her obsessive dieting and gaining weight even while working out and only eating "clean", she decides to start eating "healthy and normal again" (blogialtes). Eating normally then lead to her being "at peace" and a "state of balance health is what lead to her salvation and finally being content and at peace with herself. Through her use of language Ho also then becomes a subject of not just religion, but dividing practices where "the subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others" (Foucault,"The Subject and Power" 326). Ho is divided in herself by creating a binary between healthy and unhealthy, eating normally and not eating normally, and orthorexic and not orthorexic. Ho's conscious or unconscious use of language of division further highlights her subjecthood.
Ho's salvation is also similar to the salvation acquired through getting healthy that occurs in other videos. Most of the slideshow videos start with title cards and pictures of the time before they were anorexic, and therefore a time when they were healthy and happy. Mitchell states this explicitly in her video through the title cards.
"I was healthy and I had a lot of friends/ I laughed, I smiled, & talked all the time/ I was happy, really happy/ But then things changed/ I was more self-conscious of my body" (Elizabeth Mitchell). In between these slides are pictures of Mitchell's pre anorexic self, and show her smiling and interacting with friends. The photographs showing her anorexia are in contrast images of her alone and often without any expression. Once Mitchell begins to recover, the photographs change and again showcase the happiness she has after she stopped being anorexic (Elizabeth Mitchell).
Happiness is something one is then rewarded or is a salvation one acquires by renouncing disordered eating.
Other YouTubers also use language of dividing practices to tell their stories and link the idea of happiness to the concept of healthy. In AdamJernberg's video, halfway through the video he writes that at 145 pounds he was not healthy, and at that lowest weight when the paramedics had to be called for him, it was then that he decided to begin his "JOURNEY TO FIND HAPPINESS" (AdamJernberg own motivation are what lead to his recovery, rather than an eating disorder rehabilitation center, because the meaning of the word recovery is linked to recovery in the medical world, he is engrossing himself and his video in the language of psychology, and therefore is a subject of psychology.
A similar effect occurs through the use of the terms anorexia, bulimia, orthorexic, and disordered eating in the My Eating Disorder Story genre. As conveyed in the introduction, the terms are from psychology, and imply that there is a correct way to eat, which is not being anorexic. These terms then create a truth of the proper way to eat or behave, which means one then needs to be corrected in order to reach salvation and find happiness. By explaining the terms' of disordered eating connection to the system of power of psychology, it is not to argue that the psychological community is wrong in how they treat and label anorexic people, but is to point out how the use of a uniform language to tell the stories of disordered eating is rooted in systems of power. The uploaders then can only understand themselves and their past disordered eating behavior by using language that subjugates them into subjects of psychology and disordered eating. The use of the phrase My Anorexic/Bulimic/ Eating Disorder Story title for all of the videos further highlights how the uploaders must use language of a power relation to present themselves through YouTube. But the subjects of the videos are also constructing themselves through the language of YouTube.

History, Medium, and Branding of YouTube and My Eating Disorder Story
Genre: YouTube first began in 2005 as a site where individuals could easily upload videos, watch videos, store content, and comment and follow others' YouTube uploads (Banet-Weiser 278). The ideology of YouTube as a user friendly site available to everyone, as well as a site about communicating with others, is noted through YouTube's early use of the slogan "Broadcast Your Self" as well as the name YouTube, a play on words joining You with Tube, a slang for television.

The ideology of YouTube changed in 2006 after Google bought the site and
YouTube then became about profiting from "You" instead of just a website about broadcasting "You". Authors Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars explain in the introduction to their book The YouTube Reader, that after the buyout, Google eventually allowed advertisements to be placed in front of videos, increased competition with platforms such as Hulu, and uploads of content of music and films became more frequent. YouTube's goal changed to profit and became focused on increasing economic gains, shown through the creation of content designed to generate more views so more advertisement deals with corporations would occur. At the same time amateur video uploads continued to be popular, but those videos also usually featured advertisements before the video or embedded advertisements on the bottom of the video (10-11).
In order to make profits from "You", the website became similar to a video store, where through meta information a viewer's interest can be monitored, and then targeted in order to get that viewer to watch more videos, which results in YouTube making more money from advertisements. As defined by Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schafer in "Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management System", meta-information are the key words, titles, and info boxes uploaders use to describe their videos, and the key words, titles, and phrases users type while searching for videos (281). Popular searches and keywords become saved by the system, so if one searches for "Cassey Ho diet" YouTube can suggest her video titled "Why I will NEVER DIET Again" based on others who used the phrase earlier to find the video (284). YouTube then uses this information to perform the viewer's interest and offer him or her categories to choose from that matches the person's previous videos and interests, which results in more views and money for YouTube if people watch the videos they are recommended. Because YouTubers also want more views, for money or just to have an interactive YouTube community, they also have to perform viewers' interest or become a specific brand.
The uploaders can also use other social media platforms to promote and categorize their YouTube brand and videos. On other social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram users can tag their posts themselves creating a personal categorizing system that functions as a form of data structuring (Cocq 275 interests to then suggest other videos to watch, the use of keywords to describe their videos on other platforms results in user controlled keywords. Other people can also link to the videos through Twitter or other platforms and then create their own keywords and hashtags to mark the YouTube content. This style of a collaborate classification system is known as folksonomy. Cocq describes folksonomy as "a usergenerated taxonomy" (275). Folksonomy was coined in 2004 by Van der Val and refers to any type of tag or label that indexes online content to make it easy for others to catalogue and find. Hashtags and other styles of folksonomy grant the tagger the ability to organize content around specific interests and identities (Salazar 17). When YouTubers use hashtags on Twitter to link to their videos they are not just publicizing their videos and channels, but they are devising their own classification system. The taggers' use of the keywords sires a brand of various interests to associate the videos with. When other people re-tweet the video the previous tags are repeated and the retweeters can also add their own tags, creating a cycle of keywords that advertise the content of the video in certain ways and continues to brand the videos. Through the synergy of folksonomy the video creators and viewers control the brand of the YouTube videos and channels.
Branding can be used to just create a YouTube personality to attract others with similar interests of that YouTube personality. Sarah Banet-Weiser writes on branding in her article "Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls' Video Production and YouTube", and states that due to the structure of YouTube and "the site's dynamic capacity for individual public performances and viewers' comments and feedback, it has become an ideal space to craft a self-brand" (278). Self-branding occurs through YouTube because the platform allows one to create a personality through the performance of the videos, or brand, to then form and interact with a community. By performance I mean the design of the videos, personality of the uploader, subject or genre of the videos, how the uploader interacts with his or her community, and the aesthetic of the YouTube channel. Performance is related to the entire content of the YouTube channel, videos, and community.
And as expressed before, the brand can be commerce based or amateur, so corporations and casual YouTubers can create a brand. For example Ho created the original pilates YouTube channel, blogilates, that uses pop songs in the workout. Her performance is her role as pilates instructor, use of pop songs in her workouts, unique pilates moves, and friendly, supportive, and bubbly personality. Through these performances Ho quickly developed the brand of blogilates into a YouTube channel where one could find original pilates workouts, contemporary music, and an encouraging and engaging instructor. Her unique personality/brand is also showcased through the design of her YouTube page that is decorated in pink texts, contains a pink heart and an image of her jumping from her icon, and videos that often begin with the blogilates' logo covered in colorful electronic glitter. The aesthetics of the videos and channel match the lively personality of Ho. Eventually blogilates became so popular that Ho was able to transform her loyal followers, called Popsters, into customers by selling her workout clothes, book, and real life meet ups through her channel. Her branding was successful and she now currently has 3.1 million subscribers (blogilates). Although Ho never states that her videos are professionally made by a friend or hired filmmaker, the quality of the videos have drastically changed since she first started, suggesting that the videos were originally self produced but were later likely created by professional video makers. Because she states that she creates the workouts, designs her own clothes, and writes her motivation slogans, Ho still presents herself as controlling and creating the performance of herself and blogilates, making the people or company that likely creates her videos unimportant. Instead, the brand that she has created is not just about the content of her videos and the aesthetics of her channel, but is about her as a lone and individual performer.
But not all brands on YouTube are used as a platform for a business, but the subjects of the videos are still subject to the effects of branding. For example, Because the My Eating Disorder Story videos are mostly identical, the uniformity of the videos not only creates an essentialist narrative of disordered eating, but also imposes a truth of disordered eating. The videos are also mostly identical through the use of tone, photographs, and music. The confessional style of the videos is usually more upbeat because the videos mostly consist of the uploader talking directly to the camera. Although music is often used, it is used as a piece of background and the sound is leveled down in order to make sure the speaker can be heard. The uploader is also usually smiling and welcomes the viewers. Even though the uploader is serious and often shows emaciated pictures of themselves when they practiced disordered eating, the nature of the videos largely feel like a friendly conversation between the uploader and the viewer, making the videos' tone light even if the content of the video is discussing an unpleasant part of his or her life.
The tones of the slideshow videos in contrast are much darker and use editing, music, and photography to depict the period of disordered eating as a traumatic moment in the uploader's life. This is not to suggest that the period of disordered eating was not tragic for the subject of the confessional style videos, but because those subjects are almost always happily and calmly discussing their disordered eating past, the past use of disordered eating is presented in a less traumatic way.
The isolating effect of disordered eating is shown through the use of selfies and photographs. This is seen in indiefox187's video "My Anorexia Story", which consists of edits between title cards and photographs, which are shown as the Meyer song "War of My Life" plays. These photographs, edits, title cards, and sound draw attention to indiefox187's emaciated body and anorexia's alienating and fragmenting effect on her. For example, the selfie that occurs at the 1:54 minute mark features indiefox187 in what appears to be a hallway. Due to the high angle of the camera, her full body, minus her left arm, is the only element that is actually discernable in the frame. The white wall that is on the left side of the screen as well as the right side of the frame that ends with indiefox187's body encloses her into the frame. At 1:23 indiefox187 includes a photograph that appears to be picture of the uploader with a group of friends on their way to a school dance. The picture is clearly cropped to edit out the friends that were on the right and left side of indiefox187. The result is a claustrophobic image where indiefox187 is again incased in the photograph, but also the black screen that fills the rest of the YouTube video player, and the frame of the television, phone, or computer the video is playing from. Her self is all that there is to look at, and she is alone. The framing of the photographs can be argued to illustrate her obsessive thoughts concerning her body and how anorexia consumed her both physically and symbolically through the claustrophobic photographs, which lead to her isolation from her peers. This isolation from her peers is most notably seen in the photograph where indiefox187 cropped out the friends around her.
In other photographs she does not crop her friends out, but those moments occur when she is attempting to recover and is the process of gaining weight, moments when her disordered eating did not alienate her. The only photograph that does not crop out others and is not during one of her phases of recovery is the photograph at 1:37. In that photograph she is sitting on a bench between several football players during a game. By not cropping out the much older and bigger men, her small disappearing frame is further called attention to, making her an outsider in the picture despite everyone's smiling and welcoming expressions.
Her painful time as an anorexic is further highlighted by the use of the song, "War of My Life", which as explained earlier is about facing one's demons to start over. But, the song is called "War of My Life", so even though the song has an upbeat melody and is about actively taking charge of one's life, the title suggests that taking charge of one's life will be hard, like war.
Charlxttte's video creates similar dark tones. Charlxttte's video starts with a title card that reads "i used to be like you" before cutting to a selfie and then a second title card that reads "anorexic", dividing herself from the viewers. The use of photographs are used similarly as indiefox187 uses them, and again isolates and highlights the emaciated body of the uploader. In contrast to indie187, Charlxttte uses a much more ominous sounding song and only a few photographs, which seem to be stock photographs found online, rather than actual photographs of her, further highlighting her distance and alienation from the world as anorexic by not showing her actual body. The song is called "My Silent Undoing" by Queen Adreena. The song is sung in a breathy voice that is hard to understand, over a haunting melody that resembles a lullaby through the use of xylophones and chimes. The song is also very slow paced and contains lyrics such as "protruding hips and skull, and spine/ ribcage cuts/a clear outline/ oh oh/ all roped up and pinching in/ distorted and disfiguring" (Queen Adreena). Because the song is about an emaciated body, the absence of selfies and photographs in the video does not change the effect of the video, because the song is effective in conveying the pain and isolation created by anorexia. The song also infantilizes anorexia through the lullaby melody. This can connect back to the uploaders' rejection of disordered eating in order to acquire salvation. Besides Ho, all of the uploaders are either teens, or explain that they were a teenager or young adult when they practiced disordered eating, suggesting that disordered eating is usually something one engages in a teen or young adult, and is something one must then shed to move on and become a healthy adult.
Although the camera angle creates intimacy between Ho and the viewer, she distances herself from the problematic she is discussing by referring to it as something she has overcome. We learned that Ho's disordered eating is something that she faced alone in the past. This is true for the other confessional style videos that also refer to the eating disorders in the past. Like the association of disordered eating to alienation in the slideshow videos, the confessional style videos also depict disordered eating as alienating times of one's life. Story videos that all have the same or very similar titles, and all tell stories of anorexia and bulimia in the same way. YouTube may allow anyone to broadcast themselves, but the "You" easily found and accessible on the site will always be a branded YouTube version of "You" --a manufactured "You" of disordered eating that through confession feels both stigmatized and proud.
In the memoirs and blogs it is disordered eating that leads to selfunderstanding and a way of life and anorexia and bulimia are not diseases that must be expelled or renounced in order to save the self. In the next chapter I will argue that in Marya Hornbacher's Wasted the author creates a self through memoir writing by being guided and inspired by the culture of disordered eating, a culture that is similar to the culture that inspired the tone and content of the YouTube videos. Through disordered eating Marya gains self-understanding to care for the self and thus refigures anorexia and bulimia into tools needed to care for the self, instead of eating habits one must renounce in order to be saved. In the book Marya is then rewriting the culture of disordered eating that inspired the videos, into a practice that leads to self-understanding and a creation of self. This conversation results in a screaming match between Marya and her father as she argues he has invaded her privacy by raiding her room and being overly protective.
During another moment in the memoir, Marya is persuaded by her doctors in the mental institution to confess about being sexually abused as a child, an event that never happened. Marya's past is claimed by the medical community who insist they know Marya's history and the root of her anorexia better than she does. After Marya considers herself recovered, her state of existence is completely ignored during a routine wisdom teeth surgery. Before the surgery Marya warns her doctor about the dangers of anesthesia due to her weak heart condition, a side effect of her years of anorexia and bulimia, but because the doctor fails to see Marya afflicted with an eating disordered body now that she is no longer emaciated, her state of being and existence is totally overlooked. She is not treated as a person. Lastly and perhaps the most notable relationship that indicates Marya is a subject to others, is her relationship with her parents. Early in the memoir Marya explains that due to unhappiness, her parents often used their daughter as a tool of competition to determine who was the best parent and most loved by Marya. By aligning with the child, the parents are able to manage the absence of a healthy marital union.
Therefore Marya's function in her family was to compensate for others' insecurities, identity crises, and marital problems.
This chapter argues that Hornbacher develops a way of life through the culture of eating disorders and the act of memoir writing in order to create a self in resistance to subjugation. Through the genre of memoir writing Hornbacher informs the reader of her past self's lack of a sense of an autonomous selfhood, before she was anorexic and bulimic, explains the cultural artifacts and people that instructed her how to better herself through controlled dieting and not eating, and chronicles her declaration of self through anorexia and bulimia. In the act of memoir writing and its focus on disordered eating Hornbacher creates a personhood. The writing and structure of Wasted is a crafting of Hornbacher's literary self as the past representation of Marya crafts her body through anorexia.

By the culture of eating disorders I mean cultural artifacts referenced in
Wasted such as the magazines and books that tell narratives of girls' and women's creation of a new and better self through disordered eating habits. The culture of eating disorders exists outside of Wasted, but for this chapter I will mostly focus on how the culture of anorexia and bulimia is present within the memoir. The narratives in the culture of eating disorders that directly depict anorexia and bulimia always end in recovery, but even though the disordered eating habits are no longer practiced by the female at the center of the story, she still is only able to understand the self and create a sense of self through her anorexia or bulimia. In Wasted the culture of In what follows I will first outline Foucault's writing on care of the self in Antiquity and how the culture of disordered eating is similar. Before explaining Foucault's own thoughts of the relationship between the Ancient culture of self care to contemporary times I explain how Marya is subjectified. I then argue that through the structure, content, and genre of the memoir, Hornbacher develops an ethos through an examination of Marya's use of disordered eating and then crafts a self through the genre of memoir writing. The memoir itself and the work it took to create it can be seen as akin to Antiquity's culture of self care.
Here I should clarify that neither the memoir nor this dissertation is an attempt to promote or glorify disordered eating habits. Instead the work of Hornbacher and my own is to write about how through the use of disordered eating habits, Hornbacher becomes involved in an enterprise to create an ethos for herself. Although disordered eating has detrimental risks to the body, it is the tool Hornbacher uses to craft a self.

Care of the Self in Antiquity
To better understand Foucault's writing on the ancient practice of care of the self and its relevance to the twentieth century, I first outline Foucault's writing on attending to one's self, how the culture of disordered eating is a way of life, and why Marya lacks self determination. By summarizing care of the self in ancient Greece and Rome and then discussing the relevance of care of the self to disordered eating, and then, finally explaining Foucault's comments and writing regarding how the practice has been adjusted and reaffirmed throughout history, I am not arguing that Marya or Hornbacher consciously practices the ancient style of care of the self or even knows about the concept. Instead I am arguing that Hornbacher's care of the self through the culture of eating disorders resonates with the ancient Greeks' concern with creating an ethos or way of life that is not founded in religion or the law.
Because many people no longer believe that an ethical existence must be associated with religion, according to Foucault, there is a contemporary search for the creation of one's ethos, which recalls the Ancient Greeks' and Romans' search for ethos outside of religion or the law (Foucault, "On The Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress",[255][256]. In the interview "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom", Foucault explains the Greco-Roman concept of care of the self and ethos. For the Greeks and Romans, ethos was "a way of being and of behavior. It was a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others… extensive work is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ethos that is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable, and exemplary" (286). In order to create an honorable, estimable, and exemplary way of life, or ethos, the Ancient Greeks and Romans first must understand the self in order to live life according to one's ethics. In the quote, "extensive work" refers to the self-knowledge that is In "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom", Foucault also explains that through care of the self a person also develops logos of the self where because one knows the self, one can thus use that knowledge to control fears and desires (286). By knowing one's self, one can "get rid of all the bad habits, all the false opinions that one can get from the crowd or from bad teachers, but also from parents and associates. To 'unlearn' (de-discere) is one of the important tasks of selfcultivation" (Foucault, "The Hermeneutic of the Subject" 97). In Ancient Greece and Rome, through care of the self one expels destructive and harmful influences of the self and transforms and self-cultivates. One can manage one's issues and problems through the act of care of the self. The relationship with the self is reciprocal and Foucault is not suggesting that caring for the self and self-cultivation is an instant process or progression. Instead caring for the self is a lifelong relationship where one is always working on the self and attempting to understand one's way of life and understand how one's self is influenced by others. One is not suddenly affected by false opinions, but must constantly work on the effects of those false opinions throughout life. Moreover, the idea of caring for the self is not about totally eliminating the false opinions that constantly effect one's self, but is about becoming aware of the bad habits and false opinions that influence one sense of self and attempting to resist them. This resistance is possible because as Foucault suggests with power there must be freedom, and with freedom there is always the possibility of resistance (Foucault,"The Subject and Power" 342).
Because ethos is "a certain way of acting, a way visible to others" (Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom" 286), one learns about the act of caring for the self through a mentor or the work of a mentor. Part of caring for the self involves "a relationship with the other insofar as proper care of the self requires listening to the lessons of a master. One needs a guide, a counselor, a friend, someone who will be truthful with you" (287). Because care of the self is about knowing one's self, one can learn truths about the self and one's position in society through a mentor who is also caring for the self and invested in speaking the truth.
One is guided or instructed in how to learn to gain self-knowledge and create an ethos. In Antiquity often people engaging in care of the self could learn about others' ethos through writing. In "Technologies of the Self" Foucault writes about texts by authors such as Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, and others and how the writing instructs the readers' how to study the self in order to gain self-knowledge to then use that knowledge to help others attend to the self (226-230).
In Wasted Marya's and Hornbacher's practice of disordered eating and memoir writing is an adaptation of care of the self within Antiquity because it is about the search for and the development of her own ethos after Marya is objectified and ignored by parents, and peers in her lack of an autonomous self. My use of the word after is not to suggest that Marya was suddenly subjected in school and previously lived free from subjection, but my use of the word is meant to reflect Hornbacher's representation of Marya's objectification. It is only after we as readers are given the story of Marya's objectification that she attempts to resist objectification.
The The first relationship Hornbacher describes as problematic to her desire to have a sense of self is her relationship with her parents because for her parents, she believes she only exists as a tool to aid in their failing marriage and to cope with their own neuroses. In the beginning of the memoir, Hornbacher explains that her parents were always greatly unhappy, did not initially want a child, were neglectful yet overly clingy, and often fought in front of her (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22). Her parents' inadequacies as a couple are highlighted when Hornbacher explains the story of her parents discovering her mother was pregnant. "I was accidental. My conception caused my mother to lock herself in her bedroom and cry for three weeks while my father chain-smoked in the backyard under the cherry tree. They seem to have gotten it together by the time I was born, because I was met with considerable more joy than one might have expected" (17). In the passage Marya's parents go from people incapable of being parents, to loving parents in a joyful state during the arrival of their daughter. Hornbacher's depiction of her parents is thus contradictory. The use of a contradictory description of her parents points out their erratic state, because they go from one extreme emotion to the other, the inability to communicate with one another and desire a child, to working well together and being joyful at the arrival of their child. Before and after she was born, her parents lacked communication skills and coping mechanisms, leading to Marya becoming the couples' coping mechanism. Her use as a coping mechanism is evident in the passage above, which suggest the parents' eventual love for their upcoming child was the only way the couple was able to get themselves together and prepare for her birth. Hornbacher does not reveal how the parents came together and stopped crying and chain smoking, but her vague writing suggests only that they did get it together for the arrival of baby Marya. The contradictory passage sets up the parents as emotionally inconsistent and immature, and also as people who use their daughter as a tool of communication.
Hornbacher further compares herself to a coping mechanism for her parents when she writes about the way her parents handled her picky eating as a toddler.
Marya's refusal to eat as a young child (this is before she began to practice bulimia and anorexia) was often the only time the parents stopped arguing and came together to tell their daughter to eat. Hornbacher refers to her parents' management of her eating as the process where the child becomes a symptom bearer for an unstable marriage. The child reenacts the parents' problems, allowing the parents to momentarily unite to focus on the problem of the child (23). Marya exists only in relation to her parents.
Marya's role as a symptom bearer is also evident through her parents' manipulation of her affection in order to manage their failing marriage. Marya's parents often use food and other treats to win their daughter's favor and become the so-called better parent. While looking back on her relationship with her parents, Hornbacher attempts to understand the competition to be the better parent. She writes "Shrinks also note that, lacking a marital alliance, each parent will try to ally him/herself with the child. The child becomes a pawn, a bartering piece, as each parent competes to be the best, most nurturing parent, as determined by whom the child loves more. It was my job to act like I loved them both best -when the other one wasn't around" (26). By being a symptom bearer used by her parents to momentarily be unified, and as a pawn to manage the lack of a marital alliance, Marya's identity and reason for being was since birth, linked to others and never her own. Her existence for her parents since birth it not to suggest she was not also subjected by other powers since birth, but the power relation of her parents' is one of the systems of power Hornbacher chooses to detail. Marya existing to fix or deny a problematic marriage led to her being made a subject to power relations of her parents.
Marya's subjectivity is also reflected through her parents' expectations. Early in the memoir Hornbacher reveals that her parents did not expect such a loud and illmannered child and therefore were always correcting Marya and trying to mold her into something else. Her parents' expectations and attempts to change Marya, along with her role as symptom bearer and marital pawn, lead to Marya experiencing anxiety over her lack of an autonomous self. This anxiety and lack of a self is reflected here.
I was not what my parents expected. My father expected, or at least hoped for, a child who would adore him and make him feel needed, one who also would remain a child, world without end, amen. My mother, by contrast, expected a miniature adult. Quit acting like a child she'd say… Sit up straight. Use the right fork, put your napkin on your lap, say excuse me, say please, smile for chrissakes, smile, stop crying, quit whining, quit asking why… By the time I was five or so, I began to believe in some inarticulate way that if I could only contain my body, if I could only keep it from spilling out so far into space, then I could by extension, contain myself. If I could be a slip of a thing, a dainty, tidy, bony little happy thing, then the crashing tide of self within the skin would subside, refrain from excess, be still (24-25).
The passage indicates the pressures Marya endured as a child and how she served to soothe her father's insecurities and fulfill her mother's issues of control. Through these expectations, Marya developed a "crashing tide of self" (25), meaning that she was constantly uncertain of who she was and her sense of self was always chaotic.
Her parents' expectations of their child also lead to Marya's fear of spilling out and no longer existing. Hornbacher's use of "spilling out" in the passage is rather complicated in that it can refer to both her desire to form a sense of self that will not be lost to her parents' expectations but also her desire to become skinny and not physically spill out through weight gain. The use of the phrase "spilling out" is clearly tied to Marya's eventual turn to bulimia and anorexia when she states that she yearns to be a "slip of a thing", dainty, and a "bony little happy thing" (25).
Hornbacher's use of these words and phrases importantly come after her discussion of her parents' expectations and how they effect her sense of self, indicating that spilling out is a metaphor for both her chaotic self and her belief that once she becomes slender, or really emaciated, she will become a person instead of a device that serves her parents' needs and whose existence is constantly in danger of crashing into itself.
This disordered eating will also lead to her jubilation because she will be a "bony little happy thing" (25).
Notably in the passage Hornbacher still uses objectifying language that removes her from her personhood. The use of the word "thing" connects to how Marya's parents treat her as an object that needs to be well behaved and idolize her father. The objectification of Marya by her parents is highlighted by Hornbacher's use of parallel writing when she lists her mother's orders of decorum for several sentences. In each portion of the run on sentence Marya is lectured by her mother but the voice of Marya is never heard through a reply or protest. Her mother's endless orders, enhanced by the use of the run on sentences, crush out Marya completely.
Marya's inability to feel like she exists as a person and not a symbol of others' needs or issues is also connected to her sexualization by her peers. Because Marya develops breasts so early she becomes a target of her male peers almost instantly. During lunch boys often snapped her bra strap and commented on her growing breasts (51). In the following pages, Hornbacher connects the boys' bullying concerning her changing body to the cultural concept of puberty. On the next page Hornbacher states that according to health classes, nurses, and the media once a girl reaches puberty she has become a woman, and according to the memoirist, being a women coincides with weight monitoring and society's assumption that women must be slender (52). By placing the scene of the boys' abuse of Marya's maturing body just two paragraphs before she writes on the idea of becoming a woman in American culture, the author is linking her objectification to the cultural ideal of womanhood.
Not only does Marya's entrance into menstruation signify her growing obsession with weight loss, she became bulimic at age nine one year before her first period, but it signifies her sexual objectification and further denial of any type of self not associated with others' desires or issues.
Marya's feeling as though she does not have a sense of self due to the effects of regiments of power such as her family, school, peers, and society can be considered in the context of Foucault's writing on subjectivity and power relations but also psychologists' concept of objectification theory. Objectification theory emerged in psychology in the mid 1990s and is an attempt to understand cultural effects on women's bodies in patriarchal societies and how "the female body is socially constructed as an object to be looked at and evaluated, primarily on the basis of appearance" (Tiggemann 36 [191][192].
Marya's existence and subjectivity is influenced by others and the culture around her. After puberty she is also labeled and objectified as a sexual being by her male peers and her health class. Once again Hornbacher shows how Marya is fit into a category whose sense of self is shaped by others. Through the effects of relations of power, Marya feels she has no individuality, leading to her inability to feel as though she exists. Hornbacher only forms existence for herself after practicing anorexia and bulimia. In the next section I first explain the difference between care of the self and renunciation in Christianity in order to contextualize Foucault's comments on the similarities in thoughts on ethics between Greco-Romans and contemporary people.
Then I will outline how the culture of disordered eating recalls the search for an ethical way of life in Antiquity. What strikes me is that in Greek ethics people were concerned with their moral conduct, their ethics, their relations to themselves and to others much more than with religious problems. For instance, what happens to us after death? What are the gods? Do they intervene or not? -these are very, very unimportant problems for them, and they are not directly related to any social -or at least any legal-institutional system (255).

Care of the Self versus Christian Morality and the Reaffirmation of
Morality for the Greeks was not associated with the concept of morality within Christianity or even the law. Instead, as explained earlier, ethics was the individual's personal choice in cultivating of a way of life.
Care of the self in Ancient Greece and Rome is about understanding the self and learning truths about the self to create a better way of life suited to one's ethics.
By truths Foucault does not mean that in Ancient Greece and Rome the people believed there was an eternal truth about one's self because all humans are products of human nature and that the soul has been lost or needs to be bettered through self sacrifice to God. Foucault explains this point when he responds to a question about practices of self-freedom. "It is what one could call an ascetic practice, talking asceticism in a general sense-in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being" (Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom",282). In Christianity one must renounce part of one's self and self-sacrifice in order to become a better person that follows the rules of God. In Greco-Roman culture a person engages in care of the self to gain self-knowledge to develop and attain "a certain mode of being" (282).
Although Foucault uses the word asceticism, a word typically associated with selfdiscipline under religion, in the quote he means, as he states, a sense of asceticism.
In "An Aesthetics of Existence" Foucault again explains the difference between care of the self in Ancient Greece and Rome and morality within Christianity. " [I]n Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of the will of God, the principle of obedience, morality took on increasingly the form of a code of rules… from Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules" (49). From Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence (49) What is interesting is that during the Renaissance you see a whole series of religious groups… that resist this pastoral power and claim the right to make their own statutes for themselves. According to these groups, the individual should take care of his own salvation independently of the ecclesiastical institution and of the ecclesiastical pastorate. We can see, therefore, a reappearance, up to a certain point, not of the culture of the self, which had never disappeared, but a reaffirmation of its autonomy (278).
Claiming the right to making statutes for themselves and creating a path to salvation On the one hand, the idealization of certain kinds of bodies foments and perpetuates our anxieties and insecurities -that's clear. But, on the other hand, such images carry fantasized solutions to our anxieties and insecurities, and that's part of the reason why they are powerful… [Fashion magazines] speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but also about how to become what the dominant culture admires, values, rewards. They tell them how to be cool. 'get it together,' overcome their shame. To girls and young women who have been abused they may offer a fantasy of control and invulnerability, and immunity from pain (52).
The images in magazines and advertisements are problematic because they create and enforce an unrealistic standard of beauty, but they also create narratives that tell girls that through the possession of a slender body, one will be beautiful, and with beauty one can control her life and become immune from pain. that she is aware of the culture of disordered eating and is using the act of memoir writing to attempt to understand and tell her story of anorexia and bulimia.
In the first chapter Hornbacher directly comments on the culture of disordered eating.
I do believe that the cultural environment is an equal, if not greater, culprit in the sheer popularity of eating disorders. There were numerous methods of self-destruction available to me, countless outlets that could have channeled my drive, perfectionism, ambition, and an excess of general intensity, millions of ways in which I could have responded to a culture that I found highly problematic. I did not choose those ways. I chose an eating disorder. I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where 'thinness' was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace (6-7).
Although Hornbacher's tone towards disordered eating is negative by referring to it as self-destructive and calling society's obsession with slender bodies highly problematic, for Marya it was the tool she used to channel her ambition and perfectionism. For Marya, because she lives in a culture that associates thinness with a means of attaining grace and views thinness as a saintly act, she was instructed by society to attain grace by being anorexic.
The culture of disordered eating and how it instructs girls to eat is evident in the second chapter and indicates how at five years old Marya already knew that fat is bad and one must eat health food in order to have an acceptable body. In the section five-year-old Marya and her friend Gina are searching for food in Marya's home, but only find weird healthy food. The food described as healthy is unsalted peanut butter, alfalfa sprouts, diet iced tea, and whole wheat bread. After Gina criticizes the food, Marya explains that her parents are weird about food and only eat healthy, which is food without sugar, added salt, and whole grains (10-11). Being weird about food is not eating sugary, salty, processed food, or in other words, not eating fatty foods.
Marya internalizes her parents' weirdness with food when she studies the nutritional value of cereal. "I pull out a box, look at the nutritional information, run my finger down the side and authoritatively note, It only has five grams of sugar in it. I stick my chin up and brag, We don't eat sugar cereals. They make you fat" (11). Despite that Marya thinks the food is weird, she has internalized the idea that fat is bad and that not eating sugar is a source of pride, indicated by her raised chin. Through the use of "We", Marya indicates that she has learned this behavior from her parents. Gina is also aware of the importance of managing one's weight and responds to Marya by stating that she also does not eat sugar and professes that she is on a diet after Marya claims to be on one. Marya is not alone in relying on the culture of disordered eating to change herself because others do as well.
In the scene five-year-old Marya also imagines that if she diets she will be glamorous. After getting in a fight with Gina by calling her mother fat Marya puts on her sunglasses, drinks the diet tea, and imagines herself as the "sophisticated bathing  Her association of disordered eating is also present when she writes, "My eating disorder was for me, as it is for many of us, one of the only things that I could call my own" (67), and later when discussing her time in an asylum, she remarks, "I still had my laxatives, therefore I still had my eating disorder, and therefore I still had myself" (192). The use of "my" is possessive and conveys Marya's growing connection to her anorexia. Anorexia is hers and something to hold on to. Anorexia is herself and something of her own that cannot be taken away from her.
The use of past tense and "us" in the quotes signals the reader to Hornbacher's presence. Because Hornbacher is present here instead of the voice of Marya it is Hornbacher who is creating a sense of self through disordered eating and her repeated use of "my". In her choice to use possessive words and soothing diction such as "calm", "clean", and "in order", Hornbacher, not Marya, is the one developing a desirable ethos and sense of self through anorexia and bulimia. There are other moments in the memoir where Hornbacher uses Marya's voice to depict a glamorous relationship with anorexia, but then undermines that depiction by speaking as Hornbacher and using quotation marks, diction, or other literary devices to point out the lack of glamour actually involved in purging and starving her body. Here, although the quotes are in the voice of Hornbacher, she is not questioning her past relationship with anorexia but is instead embracing anorexia and owning the relationship through the use of "my". It is Hornbacher again who is using literary tools and a literary genre about recalling one's past to create an ethos. The use of "us" in the middle quote suggests that Hornbacher's creation of an ethos through disordered eating is also part of something larger. The "us" refers to all women and girls who developed disordered eating to create an ethos and learned about the disordered eating from the culture of disordered eating.
As I explain in the analysis of the quotes above, Hornbacher's formation of an ethos through anorexia and bulimia is supported by the genre of the memoir and how I became bulimic at the age of nine, anorexic at the age of fifteen. I couldn't decide between the two and veered back and forth from one to the other until I was twenty, and now, at twenty-three, I am an interesting creature, an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified [the DSM's name for someone who practices both anorexia and bulimia]. My weight has ranged over the past thirteen years from 135 pounds to 52, inching up and then plummeting back down. I have gotten 'well,' then 'sick,' then 'well,' then 'sicker,' and so on up to now; I am considered 'moderately improved,' 'psychologically stabilized, behaviorally disordered,' 'prone to habitual relapse.' I have been hospitalized six times, institutionalized once, had endless hours of therapy, been tested and observed and diagnosed and pigeonholed and poked and prodded and fed and weighed for so long that I have begun to feel like a laboratory rat (2-3).
The passage above is full of declarations of existence such as "I became bulimic at age nine", "I am an interesting creature", and "I am considered 'moderately improved, '" (2-3). Although some of the declarations are connected to psychiatric institutions' attempted control of her body, as well as the language of sickness and the phrases "'moderately improved,'" "'psychologically stabilized, behaviorally disordered,'" "'prone to habitual relapse'" (3). Hornbacher's use of parentheses suggests that those labels of identity inflicted by the medical community were only temporary. The parentheses make "'sick'", "'well'", and "'psychologically stabilized, behaviorally disordered,'" transitory states instead of the lasting state of anorexia and its connection to her declaration of self that is shown through her creation of the memoir. The memoir and its ethos of disordered eating will always exist so it is then not just a transitory state of identity. Importantly Hornbacher also includes specific details of her weight and diagnosis, not just to possibly shock and draw in the reader, but also because weight and the ability to fit into diagnostic criteria of disordered eating are common traits anorexic and bulimic women use to identify themselves.
Like the use of "us" in an earlier quote, the mention of her various weights connects the writing to a larger practice of care of the self, where in the culture of disordered eating, the controlling of one's weight is connected to the creation of an ethos and self. The declaration and creation of self through disordered eating is akin to the cultivation of self that occurs through the Ancient Greeks' and Romans' practice of care of the self because creation of self occurs through self knowledge and guidance from a mentor. Hornbacher gains self-knowledge through the act of memoir writing and the culture of disordered eating is her guide.
The declarations of existence through first person also mirror her declaration of birth several pages later when she writes, "I was born in Walnut Creek, California, to a pair of exceptionally intelligent, funny, wonderful people who were perhaps less than ideal candidates for parenthood " (17). Similar to her remarks regarding the history of her disordered eating, Hornbacher uses first person to establish her state of existence and entrance to the world. But because she marks her entrance into the world first through her writing on her bulimia and anorexia the eating disorders become the signifiers of herself and ethos. Her eating disorders' connection to her ethos is further indicated by Hornbacher's comments about her birth in a sentence directly after the passage cited above. The author writes, "It must also be noted that I was not very well suited to childhood and should have been born fully formed, like Mork and Mindy's kid, who hatched from an egg an old man and grew progressively younger" (17). Here Hornbacher is removing her parents and date of birth, concepts typically associated with the beginning of a person's entrance into personhood, of any rights to her identity. Through memoir writing, Hornbacher is born.
It is important to note that Hornbacher affirms early in the memoir that disordered eating "is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of 'sick '" (6). This comment occurs after her long introduction of herself through her description of her early years of bulimia and anorexia, her various weights, and hospitalizations. Through the placement of these details of disordered eating before the disclosure of other biographic details and factors of her identity, the structure of the memoir is attributing Hornbacher's ethos to anorexia and bulimia, even if that is not the intention of the memoirist. Anorexia and bulimia may not be the tools the non-literary Hornbacher used to form or claim an identity, but they are the tools she uses to create the ethos of the literary version of

Conclusion
In the interview "The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault is asked if the concept of care of the self in Antiquity can be applied to modern thought (295). Foucault responds with yes but explains that it is not about rediscovering a philosophy from the past and directly applying it to contemporary times. He concludes this thought by commenting, "Which does not mean that contact with such and such a philosopher may not produce something, but it must be emphasized that it would be something new" (295). The something new that has been produced in the twentieth century is the culture of disordered eating that guides girls in how to create an ethical way of life through anorexia and bulimia. As explained in the introduction, disordered eating always existed throughout time but the language to discuss anorexia and bulimia did not emerge until the twentieth century, and the culture associated with disordered eating did not emerge until the 1980s with the death of Karen Carpenter.
It is through cultural artifacts of disordered eating such as images of women in magazines, her parents' eating habits, and The Best Little Girl in the World that Marya learns about how to craft a better self and find happiness and acknowledgement of her existence. It is Hornbacher though who uses the genre of memoir writing to return to her past to gain self-knowledge and understand how disordered eating made her feel like a person. Hornbacher is the one who uses the genre of memoir writing to create an ethos associated with anorexia and bulimia and it is Hornbacher who declares existence by creating a self through the structure, tense, and language of Wasted.

Chapter 3: Disordered Eating and Blogging as Hupomnemata, Control, and Means of Care of the Self
In "Self Writing" Foucault explains the importance of writing in Antiquity in order to meditate on the self to gain self-knowledge and to then use that knowledge to master the self and transform one's existence into an ethical way of life. "It seems that, among all the forms taken by this training (which included abstinences, memorizations, self-examinations, meditations, silence, and listening to others), writing -the act of writing for oneself and for others -came rather late, to play a considerable role" (208). Self-examinations, meditating, and listening to others is part of the practice of caring for the self. As explained in the previous chapter caring for the self entails gaining knowledge of the self to reach self-betterment. One needs a guide or to listen to a mentor to facilitate caring for the self. In the article Foucault goes on to directly equate the meditative use of writing to the act of attending to the self. According to Foucault self-writing in Antiquity, and specifically the writing of Epictetus and Seneca, was exercised in two different ways.
One takes the form of a linear 'series': it goes from meditation to the activity of writing and from there to gumnazein, that is, to training and trial in a real situation -a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality. The other is circular: the meditation precedes the notes which enable the rereading which in turn reinitiates the meditation. In any case, whatever the cycle of exercise in which it takes place, writing constitutes an essential stage in the process to which the whole askesis leads: namely, the fashioning of accepted discourses, recognized as true, into rational principles of action. As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos (209).
In writing about the self one first must meditate on the self in order to engage in the activity of writing about the self. Writing becomes a process of self-training because with the training of self meditation through writing one reflects, assimilates "and in this manner prepares itself to face reality " (209). Through writing one is trained to work through problems and to learn to face those problems in reality. Self-writing in Antiquity also allowed for further meditation by allowing one to reread one's writing to then further self-meditate, grow, and face one's problems.
The self reflective use of self-writing is seen through Pro Ana and Mia blogs.
The medium of blogging has often been associated with self-reflection and selftransformation. Mia Loveheim (338) and Brandi Bell (96) have written about the selfreflective practice of blog writing, and Deborah Silverman Bowen argues that the journal-like practice of blogging provides a source of truth telling for writers and an avenue to encourage self-transformation (311-325). Furthermore, the collective space of blogging allows one to not only write about the self but to include random images, poems, songs, and links to others blogs that further stimulate self-meditating. The blogs are contemporary styles of the Ancient Greek practice of self-writing called the hupomnemata which is similar to a notebook and served as guides for one's ethical behavior. The notebooks consisted of significant quotes, records of events, and self-reflections. The hupomnemata served as an aid for memory, as an aid to selfexamination, self-reflection, and self-regulation… The notebooks were meant to be reread and consulted; they provided a framework for meditation, reflection, and conversation (McLaren 149). In the post PoisonedShadow is reflecting about how she will continue to navigate through her depression without the coping mechanism of her psychiatrist. It is an act of self-reflecting to train herself to face the reality of her situation. Through writing and disordered eating she is able to face the reality of her problems and overcome them, or at least begin to overcome them. PoisonedShadow expresses the importance of writing in engaging in self-reflecting when she comments "I really need to start writing regularly again. I miss it. This is my one outlet, and it works well" ("It's Been a While <3"). Self-writing is her outlet to reflect, and as indicated in a later post, disordered eating is the action to use to cope with her depression and other problems. " and control her emotions in the "real" world, it is the coping mechanism she is prioritizing on her blog to feel better about herself and overcome her problems.
Disordered eating and blogging about herself is the way for PoisonedShadow's online self to face the reality of her situation.
In the previous chapter I argued that through the mentor of the culture of disordered eating and act of memoir writing, Marya constructed a self after being subjugated by others. This chapter will continue my argument regarding the mentor relationship of disordered eating but rather than arguing how disordered eating and the online space of blogging creates a self for the bloggers, this chapter will explore Because this chapter explores the role of controlling one's body and emotions through disordered eating and blogging, I will define control and my use of the term.
For this chapter control means the bloggers' attempt to physically control her body when circumstances beyond her control such as traumatic events, parental power, and romantic relationships claim ownership or affect the blogger's body. Control of the body is a type of power the bloggers use to alter the power relation between herself and her abuser, herself and her parent, or herself and her romantic partner. By controlling her body and documenting the use of disordered eating to manage one's body, the bloggers hope to gain control over their bodies when previously they did not feel like they were in control. As explained by Foucault power relations are always changing ("The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom" 283), so the control of one's body through disordered eating and blogging documents that shifting relations of power between the bloggers and others, organizations, and social norms who earlier subjugated the bloggers.
The bloggers' gender also need to be addressed. Although I have been using female pronouns to address the bloggers, the pronouns do not suggest that only people who identify as female create and visit the blogs. This is incorrect and through my research I have found male commenters and blog creators, but those commenters and creators are rare. I will use female pronouns because the majority of the blogs are presented as being created by women, the bloggers refer to themselves as girls, have feminine gendered names, and when posting pictures the poster appears to identify with the female subjects of the photographs. Because there is always a certain level of anonymity online the use of female pronouns, names, and pictures do not mean that the bloggers and commenters are female or identify as female, but they are presenting themselves as female online and therefore I will use female pronouns unless the blogs and commenters indicate otherwise.
In what follows I outline the history and structure of the Pro Ana and Mia blogs, the plethora of scholarly writing that exists regarding the blogs, and how the bloggers use disordered eating and blogging to meditate on the self and better the self. As blogging continued throughout the late 1990s the blogs became more popular. "It is estimated that websites that cater to discussions about eating disorders number anywhere from 200 to 400… to over 500 (Schott and Lagan 1159).

In Karen Dias' 2003 article 'The Ana Sanctuary: Women's Pro-Anorexia
Narratives in Cyberspace", like Schott and Langan, she also proposes that the sites are acts of resistance. In the beginning of the article she lays out her theoretical goal.
In this paper I explore cyberspace as a space in which women who are struggling with anorexia can potentially find sanctuary from the surveillance and regulatory mechanisms of control of the public sphere… Taking seriously the voices of these women can be viewed as a transgressive act, in contrast to hegemonic biomedical and psychiatric discourses of anorexia that portray women with eating disorders as 'irrational' and 'in denial' of their behavior, and pathologize and medicalize their experiences (31).
The websites give voice to women with disordered eating rather than giving voice to the medical communities that pathologize the women and labels them as victims.
In habits, and appearance self-efficacy that women exposed to Pro Ana and Mia websites were not more dissatisfied than participants exposed to only websites that promoted body positivity, fashion magazine websites, or non disordered eating websites (323-331).
Kathleen Custers' paper "The urgent matter of online pro-eating disorder content and children: clinical practice" offers a bridge between the contradictory findings of the two articles summarized above. According to Custers' research in certain cases the supportive community of Pro Ana and Mia has been beneficial to people with eating disorders, but at the same time numerous studies have shown that people exposed to the websites are more likely to copy the disordered eating tips and to feel dissatisfied with their bodies than those who did not visit the sites (430-431).
Custers' assertion that despite the effect on viewers' eating habits and body satisfaction, the websites are an important source of clinical study that need to be discussed in recovery programs due to the high use of the websites for people with eating disorders. Doctors should also not discourage the use of the websites due to the emotional support provided by the Pro Ana and Mia community (431).
Through a review of gender theory and sociological and psychological research on Pro Ana and Mia websites it is apparent that thoughts on the sites are divided where gender theorists in general find the sites to be sources of community and resistance against systems of power, and sociologists and psychologists have found the websites to provide emotional support for people with disordered eating, but are sites that may or may not be harmful for recovery and may or may not promote disordered eating habits in viewers. Regardless of the contradictory findings by the scholars, the researchers are focused on the websites' ideologies and effect on the public rather than the creation of individual narratives through the websites by the creators of the blogs. In the next sections I will explore the journal-qualities of the blogs, how they are related to the ancient Greek use of hupomnematas, and the narrative of care of the self constructed through Pro Ana and Mia websites. The discursive qualities of blogging as a vehicle for the eating-disordered subject needs to be addressed.

Hupomnemata, Blogging, and Self Reflection through Pro Ana and Mia:
The goals of the bloggers and the self-reflexive design of blogs can be classed among what Foucault calls acts of care of the self, and the medium of blogging can be seen as a form of hupomnematas and self meditating to begin to care for the self.
Foucault writes about the Ancient Greeks' use of hupomnematas in various works such as The Hermeneutics of the Subject and "Self Writing" and explains how the notebooks were used in Antiquity not as diary like acts of confession, but as creating a conversation with one's self to recount the day's activities, summarize various literature one was reading, record random thoughts of the day, and as a way to self reflect, meditate, and better the self by overcoming weakness and problems ( Foucault explicates the use of the hupomnemata in "Self Writing:" Hupomnemata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections of reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent reading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace) (209-210).
Through the notebooks one could work through various problems such as grief, anger, gossip, and other issues. The notebooks reflected the daily experience and readings of the writer. Through these notes the writer could understand their daily experience and begin to care for the self. Although one can also self reflect by talking to others or reflecting on the self without writing, the hupomnematas differ because they provide a place for one to reread one's daily activities and have a permanent recollection of one's thoughts. Even if one forgets one's feelings regarding a difficult moment or an inspirational poem, these memoires can be revisited through the record of the journal.
Despite the meditative use of the hupomnematas the notebook should not be confused with a diary and the act of confession. In "Self Writing" Foucault addresses the difference between hupomnemata and the later Christian diaries of confession.
However personal they may be, these hupomnemata ought not to be understood as intimate journals or as those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, downfalls, and victories) that will be found in later Christian literature… They do not have the aim of bringing to the light of day the acrana conscientiae, the oral or written confession of which has a purificatory value. The movement they seek to bring about is the reverse of that: the intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than shaping of the self" (210-211).
Instead of recording an internal truth, the notebooks were used to record one's daily experience and readings to then meditate on the day's activities to shape a self and to better the self.
The medium of blogs and their use in the Pro Ana and Mia community resembles the use of the hupomnematas in Ancient Greece and blogs have often been compared to journal like writing. According to Bell one of the most common types of blogs is the journal style of blogging that narrativizes one's daily experience (96).
Deborah Silverman Bowen relates blogging to truth telling in her article "e-Criture Feminine" and asserts that the Internet provides a unique space where one can tell a narrative free from patriarchal discourse. According to Silverman Bowen the blogs are free of patriarchal discourse because the bloggers are able to create new language, modes of expressions, and communities outside of patriarchal influence (311-313).
Loveheim also praises blogs for their self-reflective qualities and the medium's ability to create an ethical space to evaluate social norms and discourse. Through the immediacy of the blogs, the sites can be both self reflective for the writer as well as the reader who can be enticed to also self reflect and negotiate cultural meanings and norms by reading and responding to the blogs (338-350).
In  (PoisonedShadow,"Shit"). In the next post on July 9 th , she again writes about food but in this post she has regained control and is purging, rather than binging, and writes that she has "recovered from self-loathing slightly" (PosionedShadow,"Calm After Storm"). Her control and its soothing effect is reflected in the title of the post "Calm After Storm". For PoisonedShadow food is the only condition that she can control and therefore disordered eating is the only habit that makes her feel in control and capable of stabilizing her emotions and helping her overcome her self hatred.
Through disordered eating and writing about disordered eating she is developing the codes of conduct to get over her problems by writing about her emotional state, and as I will explore later, reflect on her writing about her emotional state.
I'llgettheresomeday's ThinIntentions also functions to help her overcome difficult situations and self reflect. Like PoisonedShadow she uses disordered eating to gain control over her body and blogging as a self reflective and soothing space.
Instead of working through her depression I'llgettheresomeday is working through the trauma of being raped, becoming impregnated by her rapist, and giving up her child for adoption. Her desire to gain control of her body through disordered eating after her traumatic experience is indicated in her first post. "This blog is going to be used for me to escape my life and talk about it. It will also be my food log and diary.
Last May, I was seeing a therapist for anxiety and EDNOS. However, we couldn't afford the sessions anymore and I wasn't ready to recover from EDNOS" (I'llgettheresomeday, "First Post!"). Because I'llgettheresomeday lacks control of her life, disordered eating is her way to regain control of her body after being raped and becoming pregnant. The earlier post about dieting with her Grandma was not just about finding a way to gain a slender body, but it was about finding a way to gain control of her body and thereby, hopefully gain control of her emotional response to her trauma. The first post also conveys I'llgettheresomeday's need for an outlet to express her feelings and to have a place to write about her disordered eating after no longer being able to afford a therapist. Her writing is not just a means of escape but it is also a means to self reflect and understand her emotions, similar to how she previously used a therapist to work through the emotions behind her disordered eating.
Although disordered eating is what helps PoisonedShadow feel in control and capable of managing her feelings, like I'llgettheresomeday, blogging is the outlet to reflect on disordered eating and her need for control. The self-reflective power of blogging and its ability to record her thoughts and daily activities to then use for selfexamination is conveyed through various posts. In the post that occurs the next day after her "Calm after the Storm" post PoisonedShadow rereads her previous writing and comments on her mental state. "Sorry about the random post last night, I re-read it this morning and realized that it didn't really make a lot of sense. I'm going to try to make my next post(s) more consistent and.. well.. sane. They tend to be pretty detached at the moment as that is the way my brain seems to process my thoughts and feelings; like an abstract painting" (PosionedShadow "Maybe Not."). Through the hupomnemata like medium of the blog, PoisonedShadow is able to not only record her thoughts but to reread her posts and better understand her mental state. Her claim that she desires her writing to be more consistent and sane suggests that her use of the word abstract means disorder, confusion, without logic, and difficult to understand.
By rereading the post she theorizes that the erratic writing matches her erratic, or insane as she writes, mental state. Through reflecting on her past posts PoisonedShadow also explains how she will attempt to better grasp her emotional state by creating more consistent posts. By changing and controlling her writing, she hopes she can change and control her real life chaotic thoughts and feelings that cause her distress and hopefully find peace or calm after the storm. Because the blogs are reflective of her thoughts and feelings, sane and clear writing will come when she no longer is having troubled thoughts. Once she understands why she is thinking and writing so erratically, she can attempt to address the cause of that thinking in real life.
The self writing and hupomnemata like style of the blog then is helping her not only in reflecting on her need to have control over her body but also to help her understand her mental states during the time of her blogging and to manage her self stated madness in real life.
Writing's ability to help PoisonedShadow is apparent in other posts as well, and does not just serve as a medium to express one's emotions but as a means of selfreflecting. In the next post from July 12 th the author blogs I know that I said my next posts would be more coherent etc however, I don't think this one will be. I've had a really bad night tonight and writing appears to be my only outlet right now. I self harmed approximately one hour ago and it's the first time that I have done this in a long time… The thing is, watching the blood trickle down my arms gives me the most warped sense of satisfaction that nothing else does. Cutting and weighing a little less are my only vices ("I Know What I Said.").
The grim and haunting post represents PoisonedShadow's need for control, as indicated through her practice of cutting which functions similarly to her use of disordered eating as a means to control her body when she is feeling depressed or empty. By writing about her painful experience she is also taking control of that experience by writing and recording it. She is controlling the narrative of her life like she is controlling her physical pain. The connection between disordered eating and cutting is apparent when she writes that weighing less and cutting are her only vices.
Her use of the word vice is noteworthy because the meaning of vice implies immoral and wicked behavior, but according to the post, although cutting and disordered eating are physically harmful they are the only actions that allow PoisonedShadow to feel in control. The blog post is self reflective because it shows that PoisonedShadow informs the audience, and herself, that she is aware of the self destructive aspects of cutting and disordered eating and that they are the only tools she feels she has to feel better about herself or assert control. It is writing on the blog and not just the act of cutting or disordered eating that helps PoisonedShadow to express her emotions.
Through blogging and disordered eating, and here cutting, PoisonedShadow is able to self reflect by examining her actions through writing to understand her emotions while cutting and to have an outlet that helps her manage her emotional issues.
Disordered eating and writing about that disordered eating helps PoisonedShadow feel in control of her body, and writing and rereading the blog helps her understand why she feels the need to control her body and emotions. Like the hupomnemata the blog helps her to grapple with difficult situations. She is learning to self govern and care for the self through disordered eating and blogging. Regardless if PoisonedShadow follows her own advice and does attempt to better her life in real life, the blog is a space of control that creates a representation of caring for the self.
Besides PoisonedShadow other bloggers have also written that disordered eating helps them attend to the self by controlling their food intake, which then helps the blogger feel better or overcome other issues. This is stated on beauty's Beauty From Pain's "My Story" page. On the page she explains that she developed disordered eating at age 12 in response to her parents breaking up and despite disordered eating's negative effect on her school work, it made her happy and feel better about her life. Disordered eating also made her feel alive (beauty). Anaisbeauty from the blog with the same name also self reflects through her blog and traces her disordered eating to being bullied as a child ( The thinspiration images are also about recording and control. Polak defines thinspiration pages as visual text that is represented through posted pictures of models and other celebrity icons walking down the runway or posing on the red carpet. There is a canon of respected women among pro-ana followers; model Kate Moss is popular, with the recent eating disorder admission [recent at the time of this article] by Mary-Kate Olsen moving her to the top of the list, as the body that represents a personal goal for many that identify within the pro-ana movement. There are two divisions of thinspiration photos: those that display posed photos of well known celebrity icons, and 'bone pictures,' photos that depict female bodies in various forms of emaciation (86-87).
As Polak explains, the photographs serve to inspire the blogger and the blogs' visitors to attempt to use disordered eating to recreate the subject of the photograph's body.
The images inspire control and inform the reader how the blogger wants her body to look. This is expressed on SkinnyLove. Kat not Jas often posts images of thinspiration in blog entries where she is writing about when she overeats and worries that she has lost control. This is expressed in the posts ("7/2/13") and ("bleh") and the inclusion of thinspiration images suggests that she want to look like the fictional anorexic character of Cassie from Skins and model Gemma Ward. Through the inspiration of the images she will reinvigorate her self-control and therefore better the self because she feels better and happier if she is skinny and in control of her appetite. In one post she includes thinspiration images and comments "WE CAN DO THIS!" ("105.2") indicating that she relates to and is inspired by the photographs to control her own body. In an earlier post Kat not Jas connection to the bodies depicted in the thinspiration images is directly expressed. After including a picture of Mary-Kate Olsen she comments "I love MK. She's small like me, so her look may be actually attainable…" ("105").
Kat not Jas and the other bloggers mostly construct their sense of self and how to better the self through their physical bodies. This sense of self is why many feminist and sociologists writers argue that the blogs are not progressive and are examples of how society instructs women to place their value on their appearances.
Their sense of selves are also conveyed through their representation of other life experiences and interests, but these other experiences and interests are represented on the blog which is about the use of disordered eating so disordered eating frames all the other experiences and interests the blogger chronicles. The bloggers show little concern in how they look to others and instead the visual appeal of their bodies is for their own pleasure. Because the control of their bodies and emotions through anorexia is often an attempt to gain control over their bodies after being raped or otherwise violated, the desires to control their bodies through starvation are also acts of resistance against the patriarchy. By controlling their bodies physically not only can the bloggers strive to manage their traumatic feelings over being violated, but they regain control of their bodies and the narratives of their bodies. Although the blogs can be invaded by intrusive forces that can sexualize and objectify the female bloggers this rarely happens and the only aggressors I have found are readers who either state the bloggers are not truly anorexic or comment that the blogs are dangerous. Besides these criticisms the blogs are safe spaces. Despite that the bloggers are striving to recreate traditional standards of beauty, it appears that for the bloggers obtaining a slender body is not about being desirable to others but is about controlling one's narrative and body in a world where others constantly attempt to and succeed in controlling or violating their body. The bloggers also live in a world where others tell the bloggers they do not possess the correct type of body and narrative of that body.
In blogging they can defy the assumption that there is a correct body or way to be anorexic and thus a way to be a person. The blogs also defy the assumption that there is a correct way to take care of the body. The bloggers may take care of their bodies in ways that are physically harmful but it is the bloggers' choice to take care of their bodies through "unhealthy" practices. Ballerinas, athletes, and other individuals also heavily monitor their bodies, but their actions are usually not considered taboo or pathologized. How are art and sport practitioners justified in encouraging emaciation and obsessive focuses on the body where the bloggers are not? The blogger's bodies may not be associated with art but are associated with narrative creation complicating the idea that the bloggers are wrong for using disordered eating. In the creation of the blogs and presentation that they use disordered eating in real life, the bloggers assert their agency and rebel against the idea that parents, medical professionals, search engines, and blogging platforms are who and what decide how they should treat their bodies. The bloggers are who and what decides how they should treat their bodies.
The act of blogging is not just a mechanism to self reflect and record one's attempts to control the body through not eating, but blogging is also an act of control.
Silverman Bowen argues about the realm of control created through blogging and explains that blogging allows an endless opportunity for a person to carve out an existence.
She can sprawl herself over and around, an amorphous, fluidity, sectioning off space with words and images, linking pages together as she deems appropriate. The entire enterprise is subject to her whim; she can choose to add or remove content at will, she can choose to rearrange documents, she can choose to pull the whole thing down and start afresh. Most importantly, she dictates all of the content the site contains (314).

Although Silverman Bowen is writing about the creation of an ethos through blogging
she is also arguing about the allure of control through blogging. The bloggers dictate the aesthetics of the blogs, the posts on the blogs, the images, and whether or not to delete the blogs or posts. The post and other sections of the blog are not just about self reflecting and documenting how one controls her disordered eating but is about practicing the ability to control by controlling the blog and the blog becomes an analog for the body and self. The practice of control of one's body is not only a part of the narrative of disordered eating constructed online, but has been studied in various disciplines that explore the mechanics and origins of disordered eating. The next section will outline writing on control that already exists on disordered eating in psychology, sociology, and gender studies and explains how the control of one's body was a common practice in Antiquity to care for the self. The final section also examines the idea of who is allowed to control one's body and the complications that arise when one tries to control one's body through anorexia and bulimia.

Antiquity:
The desire to feel control is a common narrative on the In A Hunger So Wide and So Deep by Becky W. Thompson the author claims that disordered eating is common in people who were sexually abused, and that dieting is a means to regain control that was lost during abuse (46-48). In the beginning of the book she asserts how disordered eating can emerge "as survival strategies-as sensible acts of self-preservation-in response to myriad injustices including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse" (1-2). Due to elements beyond someone's control such as abuse, stress, racism, or intense emotions, disordered eating often develops because food intake is something the person can control. Gender studies authors such as Susan Bordo and Maree Burns also write about disordered eating and control. Bordo suggests that bodily control through dieting is intoxicating (134) and in Burns' article "Bodies as (im)material? Bulimia and Body Image Discourse" the she comments that bulimia is often associated with the desire for control (128-129).
In the last post on the blog called "Weight," PoisonedShadow addresses psychological literature and other scholars who write about the role of control in disordered eating.
A lot of people say that we control our eating because we have lost control over some other aspect of our lives. However, why food and weight? Why would we not choose to control our academic career or simply creating a precise wake up routine for the morning?... Yes we may be slightly more perfectionist than most but at the end of the day it is a lifestyle choice. Because it is how we want to live our lives as we are not happy with how we are at this moment. So why the hell shouldn't we be able to change ourselves in any way we please? If we should have any right, it should be the right to our own bodies. There is not a lot left in life that is truly ours, apart from our own mind, our body and our choices (PoisonedShadow).
For PoisonedShadow control of her body is one of the only ways she can feel in control, and as she explains, this desire for control and ownership of her body and choices is a common experience of disordered eating. This commonality is stressed through her use of the word "our". The post is also self reflective in that PoisonedShadow attempts to understand and justify why she and others turn to food as something to control rather than school or some other aspect of her life. Again, the blogs are an online location of self-reflection and as explained earlier, the ability to control the space of the blog contributes to the self-betterment of the blogger by creating another more helpful outlet of control.
Control of one's body to care for the self was present in Ancient Greece. In her book McLaren summarizes Foucault's writing on care of the self and explains how care of the self was not only linked to writing but also management of one's body.
Care of the self included self-knowledge, but was also concerned with bodily practices. In his studies of Antiquity, Foucault points out that the practices of the self concern the body. Dietetics involves close attention to what one eats, when one eats, and how it affects one's body… Almost all of these regiments concerning diet, health, sexual activity, and household management required a careful record of activity. In order for these practices of the self concerning the body to become an art of existence, they should include some reflection on oneself set down in writing (148).
Blogging on Pro Ana and Mia websites are a form of this process of gaining selfknowledge through bodily management and writing about that bodily management.
Through control of her eating habits and writing about those eating habits PoisonedShadow reflects on her emotional state and comes to understandings regarding her bipolar behavior. Through records of her weight in various posts, as well as the section called "The Goals" that tracks her various weights and posts that recount what she eats that day, she is using the record of the blog to write about her need to control her body, and therefore self reflects and gains self knowledge to care for the self. She knows her body to know her self, to then care for the self.
In "The Ethics of a Concern for Self and as a Practice of Freedom" Foucault expresses how caring for the self is not only about self knowledge but it is also about controlling one's self and body to gain self mastery. He explains that to know one's self is to "surpass oneself, to master the appetites that threaten to overwhelm one" (285). For the bloggers they master their appetites literally in order to care for the self. PoisonedShadow masters her appetites and writes about mastering her appetites in order gain control to feel better about herself and to gain an understanding of her bipolar emotions. Through disordered eating she is able to help prevent her depression from overwhelming her. This is seen in two recent posts on her blog. In a post from June 21 st , 2012 titled "Realisation" she summarizes her depressed state and writes that she fears she will never find happiness, love, or be able to accept herself.
In the next post from August 27 th , 2012 called "Better.." she explains that she now feels better, has a happy love life, is doing well in school, and that "eating one small meal a day and exercising every other day seems to be doing the trick… I did four hours of tennis yesterday and feel great today" (PoisonedShadow). Through disordered eating she is able to master her physical appetite to master the other appetites that threaten to overwhelm her, her self-hatred and depression. Throughout her blog PoisonedShadow repeatedly goes back and forth between her self hatred and feeling like she has no control due to her bipolar thoughts, and to controlling her weight and therefore feeling better about herself and writing that her emotions have stabilized. This back and forth between feeling in control and capable of bettering her self and feeling like she is overwhelmed by her emotions is part of the care of the self process. Foucault explains that care of the self is a lifelong practice ("Hermeneutic of the Subject" 94), so even though PoisonedShadow goes back and forth between feeling like she is bettering the self and mastering her appetites and feeling out of control, it is part of the process because one must constantly master the self in the lifelong practice of caring for the self.
Other writers have also argued that disordered eating and its power of control are related to care of the self. The role of disordered eating to aid one in management of their problems is the basis of the Thompson'

s book A Hunger so Wide and So
Deep although she is not connecting her findings to the works of Foucault or the blogs. In the opening of the book she writes, "eating problems begin as survival strategies-as sensible acts of self-preservation-in response to myriad injustices including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse" (1-2). The use of disordered eating for selfpreservation resembles the process of caring for the self and how PoisonedShadow uses blogging and disordered eating to control her appetites, self reflect, and better the self.
In Abigail Bray's "The anorexic body: Reading Disorders" she relates disordered eating to the practice of caring for the self. "Without denying the historical differences between ancient 'pagan' practice and our own time, one might also recognize that contemporary weight-loss regimes deploy related techniques in the name of an ethics of self-care, involving a similar transformation of the self through process of measurement" (425). Although Bray only connects Foucault's examination of care of the self to disordered eating on this one page of her article, the quote indicates that disordered eating can be related to care of the self. Control of the body is part of the care of the self process for anorexic and bulimic people, and is a process that is facilitated by the hupomnemata medium of blogging.
It is important to note that authors such as Megan Warin (1-3) and  have argued that women with disordered eating habits are often labeled as victims because the disordered eating practices emerge when the women lack control in their everyday lives. As victims women are thought to be more susceptible to bodily pressures of being skinny and therefore being a victim is a so-called natural state of being a woman . By writing about the bloggers' need for control and their emotional traumas, I am not placing the women into the position of victims or attempting to define their online identities by the various traumas they have endured.
I am also not arguing that tales of disordered eating must always be associated with tragedy. For example, the bloggers also write about other mundane events such as dating, college life, doctor appointments, watching films, and growing up. These narratives are still structured around disordered eating and the need to control what one eats, but they are not all narratives of tragedy and sadness. On SkinnyLove, Kat not Jas focuses on losing weight and her need to control her emotions, but she also writes about her romantic life ("Too much"), drinking alcohol on her roof ("Too much"), college life ("106.2"), and interacting with her friends ("happy"). Ell's blog A Journey to Bones is similar in that it is also about her first years of college and dating experiences while chronicling her use of disordered eating ("Saturday, 20 June 2015"). Despite the many haunting posts of PoisonedShadow's blog she also writes about movies that have inspired her ("A Little Late I Know") and cites literary quotes that speak to her ("So Beautifully True.").
Instead I am arguing that the bloggers value control, and that their use of control over their bodies and emotions is part of the process of care of the self, a process that is guided by the hupomnemata style of the blog. Control is just part of the narrative of disordered eating and how one cares for the self through blogging and management of one's body, and how the bloggers have chosen to tell their journeys of attending to the self. Furthermore, by writing about the bloggers narratives of disordered eating, as well as narratives of sadness and the mundane, I am attempt to let the bloggers tell their own narratives by examining and directly citing their individual writings to lend their voices to scholarly writing on Pro Ana and Mia theory that has often overlooked the individual voices and narratives of the bloggers.
As PoisonedShadow writes, "There is not a lot left in life that is truly ours, apart from our own mind, our body and our choices ("Weight.") therefore the bloggers' choices, even if they tell stereotypical stories of disordered eating as a response to tragedy and abuse, must be explored.

Conclusion:
This chapter has attempted to explain how through the Pro Ana and Mia websites the bloggers record their day-to-day activities and their random thoughts in order to reflect in a hupomnemata-like medium to gain self-knowledge. That self knowledge is used to better understand the self and one's emotions and through that self understanding the bloggers can attempt to overcome, or momentarily overcome, difficult weakness and circumstances by caring for the self. As seen by the blog posts and various psychological, sociological, and gender studies authors, disordered eating and the control over one's body is an act of care of the self because it helps the bloggers to feel in control of their bodies and emotions after traumatic experiences and depression, or just after failing to make friends in college.
This chapter also attempts to explain that the narratives of disordered eating told through blogging are more than just a creation of an impersonal ideology of self creation, resistance, and community, as suggested by the majority of academic writing on Pro Ana and Mia blogs. Instead the blogs tell individual narratives that explain how one uses disordered eating and blogging to cope with a trauma, to understand one's chaotic emotions, to no longer feel lost, to understand one's relationships with others, and to better the self through the self training like practice of disordered eating. The individual narratives of the blogs must be explored in order to understand the blogger's personal journeys in caring for the self and the blogger's individual needs for control. Without examining the individual narratives and only studying the blogs as mass narratives rather than personal and individual narratives, as this chapter has hopefully done, writing on Pro Ana and Mia blogs further silence the bloggers, even when the scholarly writers' aim is to point out how censorship of the websites is part of a patriarchal tradition of censoring women's voices.

Narrative of Truth and Ethos Through the Representation of Disordered Eating and Recovery in The Body Tourist
On Dana Shavin's website she overviews the goal of her 2014 memoir The Body Tourist. On her "my book page" she writes While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery-whether from addictions, illness, or even the death of a loved one or divorce-there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in our bones. This is the territory of The Body Tourist (Shavin).
As Shavin points out, the territory of her memoir is atypical in the genre of eating "Recovery" is a tricky term and I use quotations to make the problematics of the term evident. Being "recovered" suggests that there is a natural state to return to, a state of existence that one must restore and redeem. Above I place the term in quotations to point out the predicament in using the word due to the ideology it originates from. Henceforth I will remove the quotations to avoid them becoming a hindrance to the reader but I still question the connotations of the word. The term implies the act of salvation. One's "true" self is returned after one lost one's way due to drugs, disordered eating, depression, or some other curable state that altered one's core of existence. The assumption that people have a natural and preordained self is in opposition to the findings of Foucault and his analysis of subjection and power relations. For Foucault there is no natural state of being and the idea of an essentialist selfhood has been implanted in our culture by various systems of power that make one subject. The idea of an essentialist self is evident in the identical YouTube videos that present disordered eating as uniform experiences and make the uploaders subjects of the social media platform and branding.
My concern with the essentialist concept of recovery is not to suggest that movement away from addiction is impossible or to undermine all the work of therapists and the medical community. There are many forms of treatment for people who wish to end their relationship with anorexia and bulimia that do not subject them Dana the writing of The Body Tourist informs the reader that Shavin did not suddenly become a truth speaker. Alternatively we witness, or read, her journey to parrhēsia. In Wasted, like the act recovery, the journey to becoming a truth teller is not portrayed to the reader. In the blogs we do witness the writers' engagement with truths of the self and the world around them, but their truth telling is not risky, a condition of parrhēsia, because their identities are often veiled through the anonymity granted through the Internet. Shavin's truth telling in contrast is risky because she has no alter ego to hide behind and tells truth about her family, boyfriends, and psychology that could hurt her loved ones and damage her reputation as a former therapist. Like recovery, the narrative of how one becomes a parrhēsiast is often not depicted and is left off the pages or computer screens. In the following sections I will refresh the reader on the meaning of parrhēsia and then overview critical theory on the memoir genre's connection to the concept of truth telling.
As explained in the introduction of the dissertation, parrhēsia is the act of truth telling. In Fearless Speech Foucault historicizes that the word parrhēsia first appeared around 484-407 B.C.E in the Greek literary text Euripides and continued in ancient Greek writing into the Fifth Century (11). The epistemology of the world means to speak everything. A parrhēsiast is "someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse" (12).
The practice is not just about speaking truths but further involves speaking to others and the continuous act of truth telling. To practice parrhēsia one must have an interlocutor to speak truths to. Truth speaking is also a risk because the spoken truth may cause bodily or emotional harm to the parrhēsiast. Parrhēsia is a lifelong practice and if one is a parrhēsiast they will always speak the truth. Foucault's use of truth in his explanation of parrhēsia is not to be confused with the ideas of universal truths that are produced through religion and other systems of power. Truth for parrhēsiasts is not manipulation or rhetoric (Foucault,. Truth, or alēthēs, refers to "that which exists and remains beyond any change, which remains in its identity, immutability, and incorruptibility" (219). Truth in parrhēsia is different than truths produced by systems of power, because as Foucault often explains, power and subjectivity is always shifting so there can never be a truth produced by religion or another regime of power that is beyond change, even if those relations of power insist that the truth produced is eternal.
It is important to address the issue of gender and truth telling in Antiquity.
Historically women were denied the role of parrhēsiast because in Ancient Greek society women, along with slaves, children, and immigrants, were oppressed and deprived many rights, including parrhēsia (12). In his writings Foucault makes sure to explain that his interest in caring of the self in Ancient Greece is not to suggest a return or exact recreation of ethics in Antiquity. When asked in an interview if he finds the style of existence in Antiquity to be admirable he responds with a simple Hornbacher speaks in the present tense and uses writing to reflect on her current activities such as obsessively working out at the gym and feeling a sense of pride then immediate guilt when she learns she lost weight, and her panic attacks (288-289). In earlier moments she questions if she will ever be able to stop having anorexic thoughts and will relapse (143-144), narrating and reflecting on her feelings.
Hornbacher also includes footnotes that comment on her representation of Marya and directly writes in her present voice through the use of parentheses (22). These devices call attention to the act of memoir writing by bringing attention to the authorial voice of the memoir and suggest that the act of writing provides Hornbacher with a tool of self-understanding.
In the blogs writing to understand the self is more evident because the writers can easily return to their writing to understand their feelings when they wrote and uploaded the post. As read in the previous chapter, PoisonedShadow repeatedly rereads her posts and explains how the act of writing and rereading grants her new knowledge of the self ("Maybe Not").
Because caring for the self is a lifelong process it would be contradictory to suggest that Shavin, or the authorial version of Shavin, stopped the act of understanding the self when she finished writing her memoir. Instead I am arguing that Shavin uses the experience of writing to understand the self, but that experience of understanding the self through writing does not become a narrative of the book the way understanding the self through writing is a narrative of Wasted and the blogs. In The Body Tourist as readers we cannot witness her research methods, her gathering of facts of her past, and her writing process of collecting and creating her narrative of her self. In the blogs we can witness more closely the day-to-day of the bloggers' understanding of their selves and disordered eating habits, and in Wasted Hornbacher often comments on the process of gathering the medical records she includes in the book (3). The narratives of Wasted and the blogs are about understanding the self and creating a personhood for self-betterment rather than being narratives of truth telling.
What is notable about The Body Tourist is that we may not witness Shavin's act of writing truthfully we do bear witness to her authorial truth telling and Dana's concealment and confessing of the truth. The memoir is a narrative of truth telling and Dana's eventual transformation into the truth speaker Shavin.

Truth Telling Through Memoirs:
Memoir writing and other styles of self-writing have often been equated with truth telling. Because the genre of memoir writing is considered to be non-fiction and an account of one's life it is often assumed that memoir is truthful writing. Michael Steinberg addresses the assumption that memoir writing is always truthful writing in Memoir writing shares with fiction writing the obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. It differs from fiction writing in the way it approaches the task, the chief difference being that a fictional 'I' can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, the nonfictional 'I' can never be. In memoir, the reader must be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth (5).
Gornick's use of the phrase nonfictional 'I' is important because it clarifies that she is Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is required… The narrator in a memoir is an instrument of illumination, but it's the writing its self that provides revelation (5).
Truth in memoir is not to be confused with truth under the law or journalism where an exact and precise narrative of the truth is expected and required. In memoir writing, as Steinberg argues, truth telling is achieved in the art of memoir writing and creating a truthful account of the experience and the author's emotional understanding of that experience. Truths in memoirs are based in a truthful representation of an event or time in one's life rather than an exact retelling of the event.
In The Body Tourist I am not arguing that Dana or even the "real" life Shavin is the parrhēsiast. Instead I am arguing that through the narrative of the memoir and the act of representing her past the author version or nonfictional I of Shavin is engaging in truth telling to her interlocutor reader.

The Body Tourist and the Narrative of Truth Telling:
Early in The Body Tourist after Dana has been released from an eating disorder clinic and declared cured she is interviewed for a job as a therapist at a halfway house. In the interview she is asked to explain what relapse means to her. For Dana relapse occurs when people lose touch with their feelings and needs and get too overwhelmed to continue with their therapeutic program (21). The interviewer and her future boss Mr. Jenkins then asks "Spoken from experience?" before Dana quickly responds "I-myself-have-never-had-an-alcohol-or-drug-related problem" (21). After her response the author immediately includes a description of her emaciated body and the pain she feels as she sits on a hard chair without any extra padding on her body to protect her from the hard surface. In other moments Dana is directly asked if she practices bulimia or "aacking" as her co-worker Linda calls it, and timidly states " no" (43-44). This question, then, is framed by Shavin's explanation that anorexic people are often proud of their abilities to self starve rather than binge and purge, and that Dana has always chosen anorexia over bulimia (44). In these passages Dana is not lying. She has never had a drug or alcohol addiction and has never been bulimic. By pairing these moments with descriptions of her emaciated body and favoritism of anorexia over bulimia she is equating her use of anorexia with a still ongoing problem like addiction and therefore implying that Dana is concealing the truth. Through the writing of the memoir the truth of her past way of life is told to the reader despite that Dana hides the truth from Mr. Jenkins and her co-worker.
Shavin's comparison of disordered eating to an addiction could be problematic for its appearance in a memoir that otherwise questions discursive labels of psychology. But for Shavin, as I argue later, her issues are with the concept of binding labels of diagnoses that ignore one's personal story and the idea that with the proper diagnosis and treatment one cab be cured and restored to one's former self.
The idea of restoration and the perfect life through recovery is prevented in these moments because despite the eating disorder clinic declaring her to be cured, through her description of her overly slender body, it is apparent that she still practices disordered eating even if she no longer views herself as anorexic. The author compares her use of disorder eating to an addiction suggesting that her disordered eating can be resolved the way an alcohol addiction can be resolved, it is just not resolved through a sudden or almost magic act or singular cure. psychotherapist, and ran a sanctuary for homeless animals" (61). As she comments on her self her clients question her eating habits, appearance, and the exact type of weight problem she is suffering from. These questions lead to Dana's recanting of her apparent spoken truth and her protestation that she did and does not have an eating problem and instead has a medical condition that prevents her from gaining weight.
Like her reasoning that she never had a drug or alcohol problem, her explanation of having a medical condition that prevents her from gaining weight is not untrue and yet it conceals the truth simultaneously. For insurance, anorexia is considered a preexisting medical condition and it does prevent a person from gaining weight. She is also not lying when she tells her clients that she overcame her weight problem. To Dana she has overcome her problem even if Shavin makes sure to discredit this idea by continuously describing her anorexic eating habits and obsession over her weight.
There is again a disconnect between the always truthful Shavin and Dana, who does not lie but twists and alters the truth. Although Dana is unaware of the reasoning behind her life of denial, Shavin uses metaphors of her anorexia to explain her past life of denial. Several times throughout the memoir Shavin repeats a saying of her mother that professes "A halfsandwich is the hallmark of a whole woman" (10). Shavin first includes this saying while she describes how she was fired from her pizza job for not weighing enough (10) and later when she proudly tells her father that she is saving all her money and does not need to splurge on any fun purchases (242). Shavin refers to this lifestyle as a mantra of desire without gratification, a mantra that she learned from her mother who also regularly monitored her food (243). In earlier moments from the memoir Shavin explains how she learned to diet through her mother, obsess over calories, and refuse to eat anything considered fatting ( and issues in gratifying her needs, even when she attempts to conceal this behavior.
Dana may not be a truth teller, but her body, houses, lifestyle, and relationships do tell the truth to the reader and those in Dana's life.

Baring Truths of Recovery and Psychology:
Besides her use of the memoir to profess truths of the reality of her past anorexic eating habits, Shavin uses writing as a means of truth telling regarding therapy, psychology, and recovery. It is important to not assume that Shavin is against therapy or psychology. She is critical of the idea that through therapy and psychology one can be easily saved or cured and that recovery is a uniform, fast, or sudden event.
Shavin uses references to superhero narratives to express these truths concerning the field of psychology.
Her allusions to superhero stories begin on the first page of the memoir. After the copyright information and her dedication Shavin includes quotes from Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium by Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs. "Each super-hero chooses in the beginning of his career a disguise and a battle name…He dons a mask and in doing so reaches back to the age-old custom of exercising demons and evil spirits by frightening them with a terrifying disguise" (qtd. in Shavin i).
Shavin continues her metaphor of the superhero in an early chapter of her memoir, conveniently titled "Superhero", and by calling herself a superhero. In describing the town she will live in when she works at the halfway house she writes "It is here, in a town rich with folly and illness, that my superhero dreams spring to life" (4).
Shavin's allusions to the mythical figure of the superhero connects the superhero to her actions as a therapist. As a therapist, like a superhero, she will help those who are ill and will function as a savior. Her description of a superhero is rooted in pastoral language of salvation. Through therapy people can be saved and restored, the way one's soul is restored or absolved in Christianity. The idea of the therapist as superhero and savior is also evident through her quote. "He dons a mask and in doing so reaches back to the age-old custom of exercising demons and evil spirits" (qtd. in Shavin i). The phrase "exorcising demons and evil spirits" has often been used to describe the act of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis one confesses one's past and emotional problems in hopes that these issues will be exorcised so one can then be cured or move on. The idea that one can trace the origin of one's illness to a specific moment is furthered by Shavin Jenkins' comments but also is in contrast to Dana's earlier comments on her own recovery and being suddenly released from the rehab clinic. Recovery is a long process and one cannot simply be cured, especially when the system used to cure does not even work and is for convenience.
Shavin's parrhēsiastic writing concerning therapy, psychoanalytic labels and diagnoses, and recovery are acts of courage. By telling the truths to the interlocutor of the reader Shavin is risking exposing her previous unethical behavior as a therapist but also risks being shunned from communities who disagree with her ideas regarding therapy, psychoanalysis, and recovery. She is not risking her life like other parrhēsiasts may do when they use the truth to challenge the government or dangerous individuals but she is risking her past reputation as a therapist as well as her relationships with her friends, ex boyfriends, family, and former clients.
In her metaphor of the therapist as a superhero her inclusion of Dana's thoughts and actions are in opposition to the idea of recovery and her use of the word cure undermines the concept that one can easily be saved/cured of addiction, depression, and other emotional problems through the salvation/cure of the superhero's/therapist's diagnosis and plan of treatment. The idea that one is saved or cured through diagnosis is a common medical narrative in western culture where once diagnosed and treated for a disorder one will have the perfect life and become the old self that was lost through the disorder. This is seen in commercials for pharmaceutical drugs where the person suffering from some aliment achieves salvation and a return to normalcy once the person starts taking the advertised drug. The story of salvation is also supported by and evident in YouTube videos where once diagnosed as anorexic, by a doctor or by themselves, and once the YouTuber declares they have been self cured or healed, they express that they now have a happy life and have regained their lost self.
Shavin's inclusion of Mr. Jenkins' comments and the use of M&Ms as a cure is not to discredit the entire field of therapy and psychology or to suggest that people can never move away from addictions or eating disorders and improve themselves. In actuality many doctors, therapists, and psychologists agree with her criticisms and their findings corroborate Shavin's representation of a very long recovery process. In a 2015 study overviewed in the article "Inpatient treatment has no impact on the core thoughts and perceptions in adolescents with anorexia nervosa" psychologists Silvana Fennig, Anat Brunstein Klomek, Ben Shahar, Zohar Sarel-Michnik, and Arie Hadas conclude that people released from eating disorder clinics often still suffer from body dissatisfaction and the drive to be thin. The authors argue that change to treatment methods need to occur in order to provide more effective treatment plans during and after release to better help people who have eating disorders. The current treatment and weight restoration plans used in hospitals and clinics are effective in short term by helping the clients to gain weight but are not effective in promoting lifelong recovery which leads to high relapse rates (200)(201). This assertion aligns with Shavin's representation of the period of her life after she was quickly released from an eating disorder clinic after gaining weight but on release she was still plagued by anorexic thoughts.
In another paper from 2017 called "The patient experience of illness, treatment, and change, during intense community treatment for severe anorexia nervosa" the writers argue for "an alternative to traditional treatment pathways for people with severe AN [anorexia]" and that their study "seeks to address some of the difficulties patients with AN have described in traditional models of care" (Hannon,Eunson,and Munro 281). The writers describe traditional treatment as treatment plans focused on weight gain and treatment that ends when the client is released from rehabilitation. The alternative treatment paths the writers describe consist of ongoing therapy after release, community interaction for support, personalized treatment plans, and a focus not solely on weight, but wellbeing. In the study the authors also found that clients who acquired self-understanding through the alternative style of therapy had higher success rates in recovering (280-291).
Lisa Dawson, Paul Rhodes, and Stephen Touyz explain that despite the idea of recovery having different meanings depending on the institutions, researchers, and doctors who define what it means to be recovered, the definitions and standards of recovery are often too narrow and need to be expanded to better represent the range of individuals in the population. For the writers the concept of recovery needs to be broadened to include clients' perspectives in what in means to be recovered.
Recovery also needs to be thought of as something that is non linear and does not have a specific time frame of completion (166-173). Shavin's criticism of psychology and certain styles of therapy match the criticism of these psychologists' findings.
Recovery should not be thought of as sudden event but is ongoing even after release.
New alternative methods and meanings of recovery need to be determined.
Through her story of recovery as well as her inclusion of her role as a therapist who failed to help others recover from addiction, the text of The Body Tourist can be understood as criticism of certain methods used in treating addiction rather than a criticism of all aspects of psychology. The Body Tourist ends in Dana's recovery indicating that the idea of recovery is possible. Dana's recovery however is not linked to psychology but occurs through her embrace of a life outside of her career as a therapist and her pursuit of a life where she satisfies her needs. The memoir is a narrative of Dana's transformation into the parrhēsiastic authorial version of Shavin.

The Body Tourist and Ethos Through Recovery:
At the end of the book Shavin rejects a career in psychology, becomes an artist, moves to a farm with horses, and finally recovers from her anorexia. Shavin The idea that eating more and therefore weighing more means one is no longer anorexic is controversial. Many psychologists and anorexic people believe doctors and psychologists place too much importance on gaining weight and not enough on the emotional problems that lead to the disordered eating. In "'Eating disorders are not about food, they're about lives': Client perspectives on anorexia nervosa treatment" Nicola Rance, Naomi P. Moller, and Victoria Clarke interviewed numerous former anorexic people who explain that they often feel that they were released from a rehabilitation clinic too early and still had anorexic thoughts and depression after being declared recovered. The people interviewed further declare their desire to have more therapy focused on aspects of their life other than anorexia and bulimia (582-590). By equating aspects of Dana's recovery with her gaining weight I am not suggesting that her eating habits were the only issue in her disordered eating but am including these description because Shavin includes them for a purpose. As she slowly moves away from the practice of therapy and stops forming relationships with problematic men, Shavin purposely includes descriptions of her eating more and more during each meal. Through the narrative of The Body Tourist Shavin addresses the concerns of the people interviewed by Rance, Moller, and Clarke. Her memoir addresses Dana's issues with her food while also treating and representing her as a whole person by divulging how her relationship with her mother lead to her life of denial. Gaining weight is part of Dana's recovery, evident through Shavin's inclusion of these scenes, but is not the basis or only condition of her recovery.
As Dana begins to stop practicing disordered eating she also begins to no longer engage in relationships with unavailable and unsatisfying men and finally moves into a comfortable and safe home. The last relationship that occurs in the memoir is Dana's relationship with David, a nice man who is always available to Dana, is comfortable with sex, and does not cause Dana to deny any of her desires.
Shavin describes him here. "In short, it is all the ways that David's manner and style do not resonate with the chronic self-denial and anorexic emptying-out that has for so long defined me, that attracts me" (319). David unlike Joe, Fisher, and the other men Dana dated is not another example of how she routinely denies herself of her desires.
David is there for her, respects her, and is good to her. Although she breaks up with David at the end of the memoir his inclusion in the book symbolizes Dana's growth towards nourishing her desires.
The last home Dana lives in is also in contrast to the broken and infested homes she lived in throughout the memoir. After learning that a trailer on a horse farm is available for rent Dana quickly visits the property and moves into the trailer.
The trailer is much smaller than the house she was previously living in but is much more comfortable and comes with heat. What really draws Dana to the trailer is not the trailer itself but is the farm it is located on. The farm is important because eventually Dana leaves her job as a therapist to take care of the horses full time.
Dana's love for horses and the joy she receives from them is a prominent theme throughout the memoir but often her thoughts about horses are representative of the desires she constantly denies or does not have access to. Often Dana fantasizes about moving to a farm and taking care of horses (7), describes Joe's interest in her horse jewelry (94), and happily recalls riding horses as a child and being close friends with her riding partner Bobbi (117)(118). In all of these examples the horses represent Dana's unfulfilled desires. She will never be a superhero therapist, her relationship with Joe is nothing but unsatisfied sexual desire, and while explaining the memory of Bobbi, Shavin also explains that after the two enjoyed a day of riding and eating oranges, Bobbi's father had a stroke and she never rode with Dana again (117)(118). In another scene Dana tells Moira that she initially was able to convince her boyfriend to not move in with her, a desire she has been repressing, but in guilt changed her mind and overlooked her own desires to satisfy her boyfriend's desires.
She says to her friend that changing her mind about the move because of guilt "was like leading a horse to water and watching it drink and prying its mouth open and shaking the water back out" (208). The metaphor links horses to the desires and needs Dana's is constantly forsaking. The metaphor also informs the reader that Dana's actions are what are preventing her from having a satisfying life because she controls the reins of herself and the metaphorical horse too tightly.
Another scene from the memoir functions similarly but the symbol of the horse is connected to her mother's needs. Throughout the memoir Shavin explains the unhappy marriage of her mother and father, mostly from her mother's viewpoints.
She describes her mother as being unsatisfied by the marriage because her husband does not listen to or fulfill her needs. Like Dana in most of the memoir her mother is resigned to her life without gratification and tells her daughter that leaving her father would be too difficult and Dana would have to give up her horse because she could not afford the horse as a single parent. The childhood Dana immediately panics at the thought of losing the horse but decides to accept that loss in favor of the happiness of her mother. Her mother will not allow this loss and does not do something about her unhappy life. Instead her mother "pushed the desire to leave underground, where it lay fallow or festering, reappearing every year thereafter like a trusty perennial" (221). The horse represents her mother's inability to satisfy her desires and recalls her idea that a "half-sandwich is the hallmark of a whole woman" (7). Through the horse and food her mother teaches Dana how to deprive herself.
However, the horses grow to represent Dana's fulfillment of her needs. As explained before, at the end of the memoir Dana leaves her job and becomes an artist and takes care of the horses full time on the trailer farm. Towards the end of the memoir a wave of illness comes over the horses causing many to die. In her explanation of the dying horses Shavin includes a memory of a dream she had as a child where she joyfully finds a horse in her backyard. In the dream she can smell the horse but as she reaches out to pet her, Dana wakes up (329) Although there are no horses in Shavin's scene of Dana's moment of self understanding, recovery, and the path to a truthful life, because the trailer is on the horse farm the trailer is symbolic of Dana's pursuit of a gratifying life of being an artist while also taking care of horses, a goal she has had throughout the memoir but a goal that was always out of reach. The scene is also directly followed by the epilogue where Shavin explains that shortly after she quit her job she used her savings to buy a small farm with room for horses. By buying the farm she is ending her life of self inflicted poverty and also taking her desires by the rein and finally fulfilling them.
She is choosing the new and unfamiliar road in which she shaped herself by quitting her job and pursuing her wants. She is recovered and has shaped an ethical way of life. At this point Dana knows herself and that she is not being fulfilled as a therapist, understands her needs for adequate shelter, supportive relationships, and filling food, and is living a life that satisfies those needs. Dana has created an ethos and has become the parrhēsiastic Shavin that truthfully narrates the story.

Conclusion:
In The Courage of Truth Foucault states that the artist's life is equated with a life of truth. He proposes that in the beginning of the 19 th century something new appears which is different from what might be found in the Renaissance… This is the, I think, modern idea that the artist's life, in the very form it takes, should constitute some kind of testimony of what art is in its truth. The artist's life must not only be sufficiently singular for him to be able to create his work, but it must in some way be a manifestation of art itself in its truth (187).
One manifests one's life of truth through their actions but also through one's art.
One's life is a "work of art itself" (188). Art bares all by truthfully commenting on "culture, social norms, values, and aesthetic canons" (188). The artist and the artist's work is courageous in its commentary on culture and can also be rebellious through its rejection of established traditions, rules, and conventions of art (188-189).
The Body Tourist is a narrative of Dana's recovery and creation of an ethos, a creation of ethos that emerges from her life of disordered eating. But the memoir is also a piece of art. It is a composed written text that Shavin created, perfected, and released to the world. As a piece of art the memoir expresses truth about herself but also truths about her mother, therapy, psychology, and the concept of recovery. Her truth telling is courageous because she provides the interlocutor reader with truths that could hurt her family and prevent her from returning to a career as a therapist.
The Body Tourist is also a piece of art that narrates how Dana learned to inhabit her body and pursue a life of satisfaction rather than a life where she repeatedly deprives herself of desire and basic needs like food, shelter, and love. In young adult books and films usually the story takes place in the present and follows the main character as she, (it is almost always a she), practices disordered eating. After some sort of cathartic moment the character begins the process of recovery. The eating disordered habits are portrayed as shameful habits that the main character must eventually confess to her self or confess to others. After confessing, the healing process, which always occurs off screen or off page, can then begin.
These conventions are evident in Wintergirls, written by Laurie Halse Anderson, where the main character Lia is able to move away from anorexia after she is hospitalized for a suicide attempt and finally learns how to express her emotions. The plot of Natasha Friend's Perfect is almost identical to Wintergirls' plot and follows Isabelle as she uses anorexia to cope with the death of her father. Once she finally grieves she discontinues her use of bulimia.
In 2009  Frannie stops purging after she makes amends with her domineering mother and grieves the loss of her sister Shelly. Like Wintergirls this recovery process is skipped over. In "'She needs some food' Eating Disorders, Lifetime and the Made-for-TV Movie" Emily L. Newman outlines the standard tropes of the eating disordered film and their effect on audiences. At the beginning of the film the main character's weight is criticized which leads her to seek guidance from a friend in how to purge, manage hunger pains, and hide disordered eating from parents and doctors. As the characters start to lose weight they are repeatedly praised until eventually the eating disorder starts to take a toll on their bodies and they begin to get injured or sick. At this point in the film the disordered eating has caused the protagonist to fail at some sort of goal like getting into college, getting the lead part in a ballet, or becoming a professional gymnast. The films end with the characters deciding to pursue recovery and present the characters as empowered through their rejection of their former disordered eating habits. Although Newman does not address the effects of creating uniform narratives of disordered eating, like critics of Wasted, she suggests that the movies guide rather than deter audiences to the practice of disordered eating (122)(123)(124)(125)(126)(127)(128)(129)(130)(131)(132)(133). Because the films all present the narratives of disordered eating in similar ways this essentialist story of disordered eating is also a concern. The assumption that all people experience disordered eating in the same way is just as problematic as the stories' potential to influence anorexic and bulimic habits because this essentialism silences non-normative narratives of disordered eating.
In the summer of 2017 Netflix released To The Bone, a film about a woman's attempt to recover from anorexia and repair her relationship with her family. Shortly before the release of the film Jezebel published an article called "Why is it so Hard to Make a Movie about Eating Disorders?" In the article Hazel Cills summarizes the lack of diverse narratives of disordered eating and while I disagree with her praise of To The Bone, the article and its' title importantly questions why filmmakers have such a problem in creating unique stories of disordered eating. At the end of the article Cills proposes the answer to her title question "may lie not in a grand unified explainer of eating disorders, but in telling a specific story of a specific person with an eating disorder" (Cills). As readers and scholars we should perhaps then not be focused on the potential danger of being triggered by Wasted but should be interested in why readers, writers, and bloggers respond so much to the representations of disordered eating. Because individual non-uniform narratives of disordered eating are rare as Cills' and Newman's investigations suggest, we should celebrate when alternative experiences of disordered eating are formed.
In my own writing about non-homogenous stories of disordered eating I have only begun to scratch the surface in exploring the complexities of non-fictional narratives and representations of disordered eating. In my movement from confessional stories of shame, pride, and catharsis on YouTube to literary representations of the creation of self, caring for the self, ways of life, truth telling, and self-betterment through anorexia and bulimia I argue that there are other ways to tell stories of disordered eating. By unpacking these narratives I have hoped to chronicle and champion the voices of alternative and controversial methods of selfcare, voices that have often been silenced by the media, medicine, and gender theory.
These narratives are in opposition to the essentialist culture of branding and confession prominent in the medium of YouTube as well as the young adult genre and film. In this conclusion I wonder though if I can do justice to all storytellers who use the taboo and controversial method of self-starvation and purging to cultivate a non-normative ethos, an ethos that resists systems of power that routinely subjugate the writers?
Instead I hope this dissertation serves as a beginning. A beginning to understand, emphasize, hear, and to witness the philosophy of the representations of eating disorders to begin to question that there is a normative, nourishing, and better way of healing and existing.