Recovery on Instagram: How Medical and Embodied Knowledges Interact in Networked Discourses about Orthorexia Nervosa

• In Event: Health, Interrupted: Infrastructures and Tinkering in Telecare

Abstract

First proposed as a novel eating disorder 20 years ago, orthorexia nervosa refers to a pathological obsession with healthy eating. While orthorexia has not been formally accepted by the medical institution, the concept has been adopted by a growing number of Instagram users around the world, who have collectively produced more than 130,000 posts carrying the orthorexia hashtag, many from accounts dedicated primarily to eating disorder recovery. Based on interviews with 34 Instagram users and over 350 hours of field work on the social media platform, I examine some of the shifts and continuities in the configuration of medical knowledges that are enabled through this networked media platform. Following a description of the most common categories of users who regularly engage in the conversation about orthorexia nervosa (sufferers, recovered individuals, coaches and healthcare providers), I explore how they use medical and embodied knowledges in different ways to collectively construct discourses about orthorexia as a real and legitimate diagnosis, without requiring external validation from the medical establishment. I also analyze how the formation of this online collective has enabled new configurations of knowledge production that promotes a medicalization process entirely outside of the medical institution, reinforcing medical concepts and understandings, while also resisting mainstream medical authority in some important ways. These findings are discussed in light of literatures about expertise, medicalization and diagnosis.

Author

• Amy A. Ross Arguedas, Northwestern University