Pro-Ana/Mia Performance Ethnography: Remaking Responses to Psychiatric Relations to “Eating Disorders”

Summary: This dissertation focuses on cultural representations of “pro-ana/mia” as well as people’s responses to these representations. Pro-ana/mia has multiple meanings and can refer to individuals and communities online, self-described as “pro-anorexia”, “pro-bulimia” or “pro-eating disorder”, who communicate about eating, movement and bodies in ways that medical and mental health professionals disapprove, censor, deny or obliterate. Intervening against psychiatry’s assumed authority, Nicole’s dissertation understands pro-ana/mia as representing a complicated diversity of voices and experiences that we should listen to and learn from. Through the transformation of their pro-ana/mia research, a play titled Pro-Ana/Mia Embedded was staged. The play was performed for two audiences: those who identified with dis/ordered eating, and professionals who worked with people identifying with dis/ordered eating. Focus groups were held with these participants forming the basis for much of the research encountered here, where they extended their theorizing of responses to pro-ana/mia and “eating disorders” to reveal ableist myths of normalcy and sanist violence.

With an interpretivist ontology and attention to the politics of emotion (e.g., Ahmed, 2014; Boler, 2015), Nicole’s dissertation co-produces knowledge with participants who reify and rupture hegemonic understandings of, and responses to, pro-ana/mia and eating disorders. Participants contributed to the post-performance conversations in ways that de-center the normalcy of the psychiatric and bio-medical model’s tyranny on “mental illness” knowledge production and intervention, narrating the ineffectiveness and harms caused by ED treatment and approaches to recovery. Remarkably, through multiplex stories of dis/order, struggle and recovery, participants themselves do disability studies through creating new meanings of pro-ana/mia as teacher (Titchkosky, 2003a) to learn from, and understand with, disrupting the authoritative monopoly of being explained by “experts” and acted upon by psychiatry.  This dissertation embraces the non-violent lessons and possibilities that doing disability studies, with emotion and collaboration, offers for fostering new relations with pro-ana/mia and eating disorder theory and praxis[AT1] .

Research Team: Nicole Schott (PhD Dissertation) and Tanya Titchkosky (Supervisor)

Status: Completed 2022

[AT1]@nschott@mun.ca

Can I include a link to the dissertation?