I starve, therefore I am not: Disembodiment in Anorexic Representations

It is often too easy to take well-intentioned popular media and public health initiatives and the images they transmit for granted. In the case of anorexia nervosa (A.N.), it is without question that accessibility to information and treatment is essential for those at risk and for those currently suffering from the disease, and that both popular media and public health campaigns are crucial in increasing awareness.

I can’t help but notice that popular representations of anorexics often focus too much on the visual “spectacle” of the body’s victimization by the brain and that this can potentially discourage anorexics from seeking the help promoted by such initiatives in that they misrepresent the sufferer’s complex experience of the disease.

To elucidate this idea, take a common representation of A.N. in the media and public health campaigns: a near-naked anorexic is photographed in high contrast to exaggerate the jutting bones and hollow valleys of the body. The head is often cut off from the composition for anonymity, but this stylistic decision has the unintended consequence of rendering the image as an autopsy rather than a portrait; a live body emptied of personhood.

In 2007, anorexic French model Isabelle Caro famously posed for an anti-anorexia billboard for a shock awareness campaign of the dangers of eating disorders

Megan Warin, an anthropologist who researches media reports of A.N., observes that these bodies are often deliberately depicted disproportionately small against an exaggeratedly vast, blank wall, to emphasize their helplessness and estrangement from their environment. Warin argues that this common representation of the beheaded, naked, and withered anorexic produces a “spectacle of thinness” as opposed to granting a true voice to the anorexic and the inner turmoil that induces the behaviours associated with the illness.

Despite being a psychological disease, A.N. in many popular representations becomes a visual spectacle rooted in the “grotesqueness” of appearance. Warin calls this phenomenon the “coloniser’s gaze” of the “carnivalesque” anorexic, who is estranged from the experience of their own illness. Where an anorexic becomes merely a depersonalized body separated from experience is thepotential to alienat those who are skeptical about therapy in that they feel their subjective illness experience is not being recognized.

While sensationalized images such as the one explored above may have beennecessary to mobilize awareness in the earlier public health and media coverage of A.N., contemporary coverage should instead focus on the psychological nature of the illness. Sometimes it is sufficient for a passive remark about a person’s appearance to trigger the development of an eating disorder. To accurately capture the anorexic’s everyday experience, representations should not overemphasize, as Warin explains, the fixed bodily shape of extreme thinness (only one of many phases of A.N.), and instead focus on the complex feelings and beliefs that lead to starvation in the first place.

When I was an adolescent with A.N., sensationalized images such as the one explored above could even have the opposite effect: in fact, they could sometimes promote an ideal model to strive towards, and would function in the same way that pro-anorexia depictions of extremely gaunt bodies do. What I needed in order to persuade me to seek help was not a demonstration of the spectatorial horror induced by the de-humanized anorexic body, but an invitation to engage in meaningful therapy in order to help reconcile body and mind.