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Writing out my routine to identify my votives 

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Writing out my routine to identify my votives 

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It starts with my bowl, just a basic white bowl from Tesco’s but if it ever broke i would be devastated. Mainly because i know that the exact shape has been discontinued, I've looked before in the crockery aisle just if the worst would happen and they've rounded the edges more. Hate that, I like the circumstance of the bowl to be consistent all the way through. But it's fine, i just vow to keep mine safe. I have to hide it, because I don’t want anyone seeing I'm bringing a bowl into my room, wouldn't want anyone to think I'm a secret eater, which is exactly what i am. So i hide it under my cardigan, and i glide from one room to the next.
Back then to the boiled kettle, filling up my hot water bottle and thermos. I have to have to warm my legs now under my blanket because the flat is so cold and i eat a freezing cold meal each night. Also being trouser-less means I'm more vulnerable to spiteful exposures to the cold air if theres a breach in my blanket tuck.
Once i get her into my room the real anarchy begins, everything packed into tupper-wear, one by one I pull them out from the back of my wardrobe and lay them out on my desk which has never actually functioned for anything other than preparing a bowl of cereal on.
Beginning with the shreddies which have the most controlled sound in my expert opinion. Because of their square shape they don't clatter as much into the bowl as say a special K flake does, or the tinkering of a cornflake, thats the worst for me!
I run back to the freezer to get my milk that's chilled in there for exactly an hour, i know then it'll be as cold as I like it because of the shitty fridge doesn't do its job. Theres always a huge abrasive roar of the freezer draw but my excitement out weights my shame so it never matters too much to me. The carton gets the same treatment as the bowl, cloaking it under my knitted wing back to my room.
Trousers come off at the door, shoes too but socks stay on. Pouring milk into bowl to just above the surface level of cereal so i can skate over the top layer easily and scoop everything up.
I swing around to my bed, leaning over to place the bowl on my the window sill and always batting away the disastrous visions of slipping on my wooden floors with bowl in hand.
Hop up on the my bed, positioning just the right amount away from the window and the curtain so it doesn't catch my arm every spoonful. But not central in the bed as i don't have easy access to the window if the worse happens and i need to hide my bowl behind the blinds.
My blanket is the perfect stumpy rectangle shape so it wraps around my body with enough room to spare. It's a thick fake fur that drapes over my legs with a warm cushioning. Two pillows behind me, one to fill the gap between the mattress and wall and the over for comfort. One square pillow, one hard small rectangle pillow and a jumper rolled into a ball and tucked into its hood stacked on top of each other is my table.
I position my laptop screen at the perfect angle so I don't feel like I'm slumping to watch my show unconsciously. Press play. Three bars is the perfect level so i can hear the activities but not loud enough that my flatmate can tell I'm watching anything.
What spoon to use. My favourite being an old thin beaten metal one with a rectangular handle with a dotted detailing around the perimeter. The bowl of it being a dip big enough scoop but also shallow enough to mean the spoonfuls aren't so big i finish my bowl too quickly. This one has a built in pacer.

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Acknowledging that there are actions and object that embody aspects of food anxiety will allow me to layer them into my final piece. I also think that using this seemingly dispensable items will represent how considered and calculated eating disorders are.

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From my research, the idea of votives as a vehicle for my symbolism within eating disorder routines appealed to me. I found it very interesting the idea of objects offering certain purposes that can fulfil the subject and to gain favour with super natural forces. The connect between object and person as a way of representing a need or relationship can be channeled into my project.

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https://wellcomecollection.org/works/agm7g7gx

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Inscribed healing votives in ancient Roman Britain / Costas Paraskevaides.

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Inscribed healing votives in ancient Roman Britain / Costas Paraskevaides.

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I'm quickly realising that the piece i create is going to be less focused on the food i eat but rather the process i take to get there. Showing these different stages of routine captivates the essence of an eating disorder for someone experiencing it. Although food is an abundant stress, its rarely the main trigger of anxiety; often it's the preparation and the aftermath. Rather it's the external factors, weaving together to create the constant loop of abuse in eating. I think displaying how these habits function together to create a situation will be proactively significant, representing the daily realities of life with an eating disorder.

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I began to think about my environment i create when i eat, the range of emotions i go through and how these manifest physically. I created a list of everything i can think i do when eating that is part of anxious habits.
.Eat from the same bowl
.eat the same meal
.eat with a range of cutlery when at different stages of meal
.always in private
.always in my bedroom
.make it at my desk
.always the same brand of food
.always same amount
.similar time each night
.secretly eating
.watching the same shows
.always in the same clothes
.same temperature

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In art, food is repeatedly used to represent the context within the image. Although these culturally agreed signifiers have some merit, i don’t feel they would hold as much prominence in a piece about eating issues in this day an age. Within the context of eating disorders in this generation there are objects, events and foods that all come together to intersect on meaning.

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Symbols are constantly whether that be intentional or not, there are unarguably signifying for certain emotions, situations and mental states that are culturally agree in the West to point in a direction. Exploring and identifying these will allow me to build a world that encompasses the layered dynamism od eating disorders.

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How do i create an environment that embodies an eating disorder? 

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How do i create an environment that embodies an eating disorder? 

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Its clear to me now that food anxieties manifest themselves wider than just food and effect many different aspects of the way people eat. The environment created in each cases of the people i interviewed displays the many methods of calming when it comes to anxiety. Showing how these "rules" all interact with each other to soothe food anxiety is the way i want to channel my need to represent eating disorders with the full array of nuances that are experienced.

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Interview 1
Are there any habits around food that you feel you partake in?

I like to eat my meals at a certain time each day, if i don’t i feel as if it throws me off my daily calendar.

Why?

I think each meal is connected so if one is later than usual it will mean the next is affected, i won't be hungry enough or i don't have time in my day to fit it in and ultimately i love food so i don't want to miss out on any of my meals.

Does keeping to certain timings calm you down?

Yes, I like to know what's coming next. I don't like spontaneity in my daily life because I don't think it's realistic for people who actually need to function as a working person.

Interview 2

I've always found the textures and consistencies of some foods disturbing. I don't like certain foods touching each other because one will ruin the other's intended texture.

Can you give me an example?

Baked beans, on a plate with something like chips or chicken nuggets. Always used to creep me out as a kid. I think it was the idea of wet crumbs I didn't like or the edges of things going mushy when they were meant to be a certain texture.

What happens if that does happen?

In pubs as a kid i remember it would always happen, i would just leave the edges of things as cut them off. I hated how the breading would go all spongy and damp. It just wasn't the texture I wanted to eat.

Interview 3 TW

I find choices around food really difficult. I get nervous that if i make the wrong choice in food i’ve ruined my opportunity to eat. When I'm given an array of seemingly similar foods I can tell immediately the differences between them and they quickly become strikingly different. Like ketchup for example, I've stared at labels and tried so many in hopes that I find one that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable. I know micro differences between but that sort of stuff means so much to me.

By wrong choice what do you mean?

I don't feel in control when I'm faced with all the choices. Ultimately it all boils down to the basic issues around food that were taught to care about. The ingredients, the calories and the labels on the front. They literally use red, orange and green to symbolise when a product has more or less of something in it.

Does the packaging of food give you anxiety then?

I suppose it does a little, it's difficult not to look at it. I know it's there for a reason but it very often is used as a weapon against natural instinct. There's nothing more instinctual to me now but to check the labelling on food rather than eat the amount that I would like to eat. I've lost the ability to justify eating something purely on whether I want it or not.

Interview 4 TW

Can't be in uncomfortable clothes while eating. I hate it.

What kind of clothes do you count as uncomfortable?

I guess jeans are a big one, most clothes that are socially acceptable outside are banned in my mind to eat in.

Why do you think this is?

I don't like to have to think of anything else but the food I'm eating so if I feel uncomfortable or like I'm being restricted or if I'm itchy, I become frustrated. I think I don't like the way my body changes during and after I eat. I tend to bloat really badly and I hate the way my clothes feel on my body.

Any certain situations that you hate surrounding food?

As you can imagine, dinner parties, meals out, family gatherings, I hate them all. It's hard to be present in those situations when you're having an existential crisis about your jeans squeezing you temporarily.

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I conducted some interviews to aid me on two levels. To begin, i wanted to gain insight into a range of habits that people take part in surrounding food that can be a result of anxiety. Secondly, i wanted to start the process of visualising these; finding ways to demonstrate these anxieties in image.

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My research into microcosm in art allowed me to start to draw connections between micro realities that are created in the mind of someone experiencing eating issues.

Anxiety of food creates a reality in a persons life that completely absorbs their world. These feelings span further than the food people eat. The environment that someone creates is directly linked to these stresses.These habits manifest into a ritual like process that have a precision to the sensation they provide the person.

Thinking of what these anxieties look like for me but also for others will allow me to build a stronger understanding of these habits at work. I want to represent them sensitively.

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Its been widely discussed how Anderson uses colour in his films meticulously. He uses them as a visual language, integral to his world building. Ultimately, he uses colour in a way that immerses the audience into his world. Accurately selecting colours throughout the films to set the tone of the scene as well as fit the overall palette is done masterfully. To the point where colour alone can carry the audience through the story.

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Wes Anderson creates stories that are completely shapes and carried by the characters. Each is idiosyncratic with even the smallest background characters catching my attention due to his relentless embedding of detail. From script to costume to acting direction, each element is complex to the point that the eccentric characters flow seamlessly together due to the constant consideration of all their personalities.

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Andersons whimsical story telling style plays out in his works to shape his nuanced characters into vehicles of the film. In 'Grand Budapest Hotel' each character is crafted with precision that details them as such unique parts of the story. The audience is taken into a world that feels as if it exists beyond the realms of the film despite the fantastical elements to Andersons work.

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The high decorated director has been a long time inspiration for my work. His use of multiple elements in his films creates stunningly dense and stimulating backdrops to his technicolored characters. I wanted to focus particularly on 'Grand Budapest Hotel' when examining how he creates his worlds.

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Fictional miniature worlds have been a long time obsession of mine, both causally and within my practice. Decided to research further into how some of my favourite artists create their micro worlds in both written and physical form.

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As a way of engaging with my current project a bit more i decided to take notes and document my thoughts during the process of the day. With my experimentations in scripture and performance art, i was trying to use these theatrical techniques i'd been adopting in the observations i was making.

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Virtual drawing tour- Nasa space station 

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Virtual drawing tour- Nasa space station 

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I took part in the drawing tour workshop in uni as a way to strengthen my skills at picking one environment and focusing on the details. Although not focused around food, i found the workshop allowed me to reflect on my practice, examining how i view the world and what i chose to capture. I found them within the outside world, i tend to focus on interactions between people and their space. This theme makes sense to me, i can see it present in my work when i draw from an initial idea. However it was grounding to do on sign drawings as they force you to remove certain comforts of your practice that can sometimes stunt your growth.

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Rand’s concept of art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments” (Rand [1969] 1975, 19). after researching further i'm finding that my artwork centres around the reconstruction of my own reality in oder to make sense of it. theres a therapeutic aspect to this in that i can sculpt a reality that aids me in some way. With this in mind, now conscious of this theme in my work i want to look more in detail to these small moments that shape my relationship with food and break them down.

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https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.201.3093&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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I have stared to look into where microcosm is present in art as a reference to the themes and approaches. In " Life a users manual" by Georges Perec, the story focuses around an apartment block in Paris. The book weaves together the interconnected lives on the inhabits of the building. The analysis of how each of the elements of this one space come together to create one subject fascinates me.

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http://fractiousfiction.com/life_a_users_manual.html

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I really liked this idea that within my images i focus in on one aspect of my life and dissect the significance of those events for my own self reflection but also in hopes other people see themselves in my art.

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After my tutorial, the resources that had been provided to me and themes in my work that had been pointed out I decided to begin researching "Microcosm" in Art.

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From these experimentations i thought it would be interesting and self reflective to draw a self portrait of how i view myself now. I had two purposes for this experiment, firstly i wanted to establish stylistically how i viewed myself, features i brought out and details i added. And secondly, with no judgement see how i perceived myself.

I find humour in the realism that comes from the absurdity of human being in general. Theres an intimacy that comes from these small details of a human being that make them, its these details that i want to explore in my final piece. Details of my eating disorder and details of how my character engages in life.

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After this piece, quite organically i was able to identify some key figures within this characterisation theme that were dominant in my consideration and examination of my eating disorder. I saw the most powerful of my characters as guilt. Its the earliest and most painful emotion i have within my eating disorder so i felt the role of muppet master was fitting. I wanted to play with scale and surrealism as i feel its a common theme in my work thats often used as a tool to channel these harder issues through.

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Next I took these characters and began think about how these would interact with each other they were real people. I wanted to use a lot of visual metaphors as i also do, in their clothing details to create a thematic harmony.

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I wanted to initially from a theme or a setting, i wanted a starting off point to build these characters from. I drew from my earliest memories; wanting to represent again how highly specific and nuanced eating disorders are. Each character within the image is me interacting with the space and the situation. The scene depicts being in a restaurant where i ate a considerable amount of fried chicken then went home to the feeling of unnerving discomfort in my body and mind. Its the earliest and the rooted memory i have in the beginning of my eating disorder.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2016.1181539

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Abstract
In 2014-2015, there were several news reports about a rise in the diagnoses of eating disorders (EDs), as attributed to the use of image-driven social media. Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern in which those diagnosed with an ED are constructed as 'especially vulnerable' to the power of media images - a subjectivity which is pathologised and devalued precisely through its association with femininity. The most incisive objections to EDs being presented as a response to the 'weight' of media representation have come from Abigail Bray (2005) in her work on how anorexia is constructed as a reading as well as an eating disorder. In exploring the results of 17 semi-structured interviews with people who have experience of an ED discussing their encounters with media representations of EDs (material that is often co-opted into debates about the 'toxic' nature of media culture in this regard), this article uses empirical evidence to intervene in how 'ED' media subjectivities are often defined. In particular, it aims to explore the qualitative responses in the context of more 'every day' understandings of media engagement, thus working against the gendered pathologising which has persistently occurred.

In 2014-2015, there were several news reports about a sharp rise in the diagnoses and treatment of eating disorders, as squarely attributed to the 'rise of social media that has helped develop an obsession with image' (Parry, ). Some of these reports focused on the general use of image-driven social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, in which the mediated circulation of youthful bodies is central. Others focused on how pro-eating disorder communities were finding new ways to incite competition and to 'recruit' members via social media, 'exposing those susceptible to eating disorders to a new level of psychological pressure' (Bingham, ).

Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern which pivots on a perceived confluence between eating disorders (EDs), mediated images and highly 'susceptible' female audiences. To be sure, there is now a substantial body of empirical research which investigates the relationship between media influence and body image. But whilst some scholars suggest that clear and causal links have been established, others position the results as more uncertain and contradictory, suggesting that a consistent relation has not been established (see summary in Tiggemann, ). Either way, although it is problematic to entirely ignore the ubiquitous nature of media images and their potential implication within body/ eating distress, existing research does not substantiate the characterisation of the media reading practices of 'eating disordered' (ED) 'subjects' - especially those diagnosed with anorexia. In medical and popular discourse, the latter are routinely defined as occupying a 'heightened state' of susceptibility in relation to media culture (Thomsen, McCoy, & Williams, ), and as being 'suggestively vulnerable' (Levitt, ) to its influence. As this somewhat simplistic characterisation suggests, none of this work has emerged from Media and Cultural Studies' approaches to audiences which challenged the hegemony of the media 'effects' model some time ago (see Barker & Petley, ). This shifted attention to how media audiences actively engage in the process of meaning making within broader operations of social power (Gillespie, ).

The most incisive objections to EDs being presented as a 'fall out from experiencing too much representation' (Probyn, , p. 208) have come from Bray () in her work on how anorexia is constructed as a reading as well as an eating disorder. Bray explains how a 'dominant paradox has been mapped onto the anorexic subject' which insists that 'food refusal [is] ... the direct result of the consumption of media representations .... An excessive media consumption is perceived to activate a pathological fear of corporeal consumption: over-reading produces under-eating' (, p. 116). Bray examines how anorexia has become a 'synecdoche for all [female] ... pathological vulnerability' to media forms - imagined reading practices which construct girls and women as infantilised and irrational and which have a long history (Ibid., p. 123). In doing so, Bray implicitly indicates how the construction of the ED 'subject', a position historically defined as feminine, is a matter of importance for feminist approaches to media audiences. Indeed, there is a whole history of empirical work in Feminist Media Studies (Ang, ; Radway, ; Ralph, ; Stacey, ), and more recently Girlhood Studies (Coleman, ; Holmes, ; Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, ), which has challenged the pernicious construction of female subjectivity as 'excessively' invested in, and effected by, mass mediated forms. Yet the discursive construction of 'anorexic' reading practices (which have in turn become the most visible representation of the relations between ED sufferers and 'media' consumption), arguably offer the most hyperbolic image of this devalued, feminine subjectivity. It is thus notable that such claims have not been subject to a similar empirical re-evaluation - an omission which this article seeks to address.

In exploring the results of 17 semi-structured interviews with people who have experience of an ED discussing their encounters with media representations of EDs (including anorexia, bulimia or EDNOS), this article seeks to intervene in how their imagined media consumption practices are often defined. Rather than deliberately framing an interest in the interviewees' experiences of media in terms of a negative and contaminating relationship between the textual and the material body (Bray, , p. 118), the study invited participants to occupy a potentially more active position from which they could reflect on, evaluate and critique media representations. In order to do this, the article draws on feminist approaches to EDs, as well as feminist approaches to media audiences, using them to interrogate how alternative perspectives on ED experiences and media representations might be explored. This approach can be situated in relation to audience research which has offered a space for marginalised groups to respond to how they are represented in the mass media (e.g. Means, ). But it can also be placed in the context of critical feminist work on EDs which has drawn attention to the ways in which people diagnosed with an ED are often 'insulted' and 'alienated' by medical and popular discourses on their condition (Eckermann, ; Saukko, ), including those that invoke the media as the key source of blame (Boughtwood, ). In seeking to complicate the pathologising ways in which ED 'audiences' are often imagined to interact with media forms, my interest is in examining how ED representations are understood and evaluated via the subjective experience of the participants.

'Suggestively vulnerable'? media bodies/material bodies

In critiquing the dominance of medical and psychiatric models of EDs which prioritise biological and individual factors (and which define EDs as a mental illness), critical feminist perspectives are concerned with culture - namely the relationship between EDs and the construction of gender and sexual difference (Bordo, ; Orbach, ; Warin, ). In resisting a pathologising division between those who have/ do not have EDs, feminist work in the field has often sought to position eating/ body distress on a continuum with the discourses and practices associated with normative femininities (Malson, ). The earlier feminist work on EDs often foregrounded the role played by media discourses in this regard (Bordo, ; Orbach, ), but later feminist interventions have been more critical of the ways in which EDs are reduced to a problem of 'body image', a simplification which neglects the broader range of cultural forces which contribute to gender inequities and are expressed through eating and body distress (Malson, , p. 136). It is thus somewhat contradictory that the feminist models have been critiqued for failing to explain why not all women develop EDs by reference to the role of the media - why so many 'individuals do not develop the [problem] ... even though they have been exposed to the same cultural environment' (Brumberg, , p. 38). Yet it is from this perspective that the idea of ED sufferers having a 'vulnerability' in relation to media content sneaks in and gains legitimacy, especially in work emerging from medicine and the social sciences.

In their brief overview of research on 'Eating Disorders and the Role of the Media' in the Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Wendy Spettigue and Katherine A. Henderson outline how:

... females who have already internalized the thin beauty ideal and/or who already have high levels of body dissatisfaction are the most vulnerable [to an ED] ... [Further], women with anorexia engage in heavy media use and describe their consumption of fashion magazines as an 'addiction', with many saying that the greatest media dependency occurred after their eating disorders had taken control of their lives. (, pp. 3, 4)

The language here is pathologising and draws on a discourse of substance abuse. The quotation also directs us back to Bray's suggestion that such representations pathologise female subjectivity more widely. After all, the reference to girls/ women who have 'internalized the thin beauty ideal' or who experience 'high levels of body dissatisfaction' could be seen as approximating the subjectivities of normative femininity (Bordo, ; Orbach, ). Furthermore, such characterisations are either presumptive, or they are yoked to a limited number of early studies which set out to explicitly 'measure' the relationship between media effects and EDs in highly reductive ways (e.g. Murray, Touyz, & Beumont, ). To be sure, work on body image has increasingly recognised how a range of differential factors within the category of 'woman' may moderate or inflect how images of the body are negotiated (including age, ethnicity and existing eating habits) (e.g. Kilpela, Becker, Wesley, & Stewart, ). In addition, feminist work on the body - including that focused on girls - has sought to theorise the body beyond a binary of representation/ materiality (Budgeon, ; Coleman, ; Frost, ). Rather than perceiving the female body as a passive slate awaiting the inscription of oppressive media discourses, it asks us to consider how bodies 'are experienced through ... images [my emphasis]' (Coleman, , p. 70), and to understand the female body as a process (or event) which unfolds with images (Ibid., p. 1; Budgeon, ). But while related, such work has not directly addressed the imagined media subjectivities of the 'ED subject', whose relations with media culture remain marooned within a sea of problematic assumptions.

There is clearly a distinction between examining the role of the media in the aetiology of EDs and thinking about responses to media representations of EDs. But such representations are in fact often co-opted into debates about the 'toxic' role of the media in the production of EDs. The American psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch () popularised the idea that media representations of EDs act 'pedagogically in so far as [they] ... instruct women on how to reproduce the symptoms' of such problems (Bray, , p. 120), and this perspective has permeated subsequent work in the field (Levitt, ; Thomsen et al., ). Steven R. Thomsen et al. for example describe how ED stories may 'back-fire when directed toward at risk women' (, p. 61), and how once an ED has developed, readers may ' twist these warning messages to suit their needs and purposes [my emphasis]' (Ibid.). This term 'twist' - which I have also used in the title of this article - is revealing in suggesting the highly problematic ways in which the relations between ED sufferers and media culture are imagined. Not only does this term imply a type of warped or deviant reading of media 'messages', but it also places the source (and responsibility for) the 'pathology' onto the individual themselves. After all, with regard to media representations of anorexia at least, a number of scholars have noted how such portrayals are deeply contradictory in their bid to both pathologise and glamourise self-starvation (Holmes, ; Warin, ; Way, ; Whitehead & Kurz, ) - a contradiction that is indicative of the ways in which the very thin (or even emaciated) female body is on a continuum with desirable ideals of normative femininity. To acknowledge such instabilities, and thus to 'untwist' the claims to a distorted view, is to reveal the extent to which it might be cultural constructions of femininity that are 'warped', rather than the minds of the ED sufferer themselves.

Explorations of how the mass media might influence the development of an ED have far outnumbered studies of how EDs are portrayed in the media (Shepherd & Seale, , p. 487), and existing work has included news stories (Ibid., Strother, Lemberg, Chariese Stanford, & Turberville, ), radio phone-ins (Brooks, ), women's magazines (Whitehead & Kurz, ) and celebrity coverage (Holmes, ; Saukko, ). Research on the online construction of EDs has burgeoned in the last 15 years, largely with respect to 'pro-ana' or 'pro-mia' discourse, which is now increasingly articulated via social media networks (e.g. Boero & Pascoe, ; Yeshua-Katz & Martins, ). With its focus on both user and professionally-generated content, there is a debate about whether social media should be conceptualised as part of 'the mass media' (van Dijck, ), and in the context of this research, I left it up to the participants to decide what constituted 'media representations' of EDs. Particularly interesting here has been the anxiety generated by the figure of the ED subject as a media prod user (rather than 'excessive' media consumer), involved in the production, manipulation and circulation of 'thinspirational' images online, as well as the broader meanings of what 'EDs' are (see Ferreday, ). But the media coverage of such cultures has done little to challenge the wider association between young femininity, EDs and media susceptibility. Not only have they helped to make visible a series of heightened anxieties about girls' 'unsupervised use of digital technologies' (Martinez, ), but the relationship between the mediated and the material body is still frequently framed in terms of 'risk'.

In wider terms, the research on mass media representations of EDs reflects a long-standing concern about the adequacy of media reporting, and the implications this has for public understandings of EDs (Shepherd & Seale, ). Such concern is suggested by the ways in which organisations such as Beat (in the UK) and Mindframe (in Australia) have developed guidelines for media reporting on EDs, and Beat also act in a consultative capacity to advise on such representations. I do not, however, provide a fuller summary of such interventions here, nor attend to the debates about how media constructions of EDs might have developed, changed or 'improved' (see Shepherd & Seale, ). As acknowledged in the introduction, my interest is in examining how representations were understood and evaluated via the experiences and words of the participants.

Method

The national eating disorder charity Beat offer a service which helps to recruit participants for research studies (Beat, ). Participants were primarily recruited via an advert on Beat's research page, as well as the circulation of the study via their social media profiles. In addition to being 18 or over, the criteria for participating in the study was simply that respondents had experience of anorexia, bulimia or EDNOS, and considered that talking about media representations of EDs would not cause significant distress. Whilst girls and women still constitute the majority of ED sufferers (albeit it in a context in which male EDs are seen to be on the rise) (Strother et al., ), I did not limit the recruitment criteria along gender lines. This was because the aim was to explore - and potentially critique - the construction of a pervasively pathologised and feminised subject position, rather than simply 'answer' such claims with empirical responses from female participants. Ultimately, the study recruited 16 females and one male: eight of these had experience of anorexia and one of a-typical anorexia; six had experience of bulimia, and two had experience of EDNOS. The ages of the participants ranged from 19 to 45, with the majority (13) bunching between the ages of 22-32. Twelve defined their ethnicity as white British, one as white British Jewish, one as white Welsh, one as white Scottish, one as white European and one as German/Pakistani. The fact that the study predominantly recruited white respondents unfortunately reflects the ways in which media constructions of EDs still tend to carry a white bias - a partiality discussed by participants within the study itself. The sample also replicates the prevalence of white voices in qualitative research into EDs (Cortney, Gleaves, Cepeda-Benito, Carmen Fernandez, & Rodriguez-Ruiz, ), a bias that continues despite growing evidence that EDs are not confined to Caucasian groups. . In this regard, although this article is justified in referring to the participant voices as silenced when it comes to negotiations with media culture, it remains important to recognise that some voices are always more silenced than others.

In seeking to disrupt the discourses through which the relationship between media texts and EDs are often defined, a decision was also made not to limit the recruitment of participants to those with experience of anorexia. Anorexia is constructed as the most hyperbolic condensation of the 'contaminating relationship' (Bray, , p. 117) between media/ material bodies. But such discourses are also used to encompass other types of eating disorder such as bulimia and EDNOS, both of which - however problematically - have been associated with a 'desire for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and fear of weight gain' (Burns, , p. 269). To focus exclusively on the voices of those who have been diagnosed with anorexia would also replicate and reinforce the ways in which anorexia represents the more 'spectacular' and visible ED, and the ways in which people with different eating problems are subject to various forms of marginalisation within medical, scholarly and popular discourse (Burns, ; Squire, ).

Some participants considered themselves to be recovered whilst others did not, and the criteria for participation was deliberately inclusive in this respect. The voices of those with an ED are often considered to be 'outside of the true' (Saukko, , p. 61) - as complexly bound up with highly gendered discourses of pathology, deceit and a 'warped' view of reality. As this flatters the notion of a 'skewed' or 'twisted' relationship with media culture, I felt it important to include the voices of those who are still perceived to be 'in' their ED. It is also within this same spirit that I do not indicate the status of each participant (in terms of a present or past relationship with an ED), treating them all as simply people with experience of eating/ body distress whose responses to media representations are worth respecting and listening to.

Participants took part in a one-to-one interview that lasted on average about one hour. The interviewer provided a brief description of the study at the start, and disclosed that she herself had experience of anorexia, which lasted for 20 years. The decision to self-disclose was taken for various reasons. First, it was prompted by what felt congruent and authentic to me as a researcher: I could not have comfortably undertaken the interviews pretending that I had no first-hand experience of an ED, and thus experience of what it was like to be positioned by media representations of EDs. Second, my decision to self-disclose was prompted by the long-running debate on the dynamics of the interviewer-interviewee relationship and the power dynamics in which the interview takes place, a debate that has been central to feminist work with women across disciplines (Tang, ). In critiquing a positivist epistemology, feminist qualitative research has invested in models which seeks to reduce the gap between 'expert' and participant (Oakley, ), and has thus often included discussions of personal experience and reflexivity (Tang, ). But the possibility of a 'non-hierarchical' relationship (Oakley, ), as based on gender congruence and perceptions of shared experience, has long been subject to critique. As such, feminist work has explored the range of social attributes - such as class, race, age and educational capital - that can shape the balance of power within the interview encounter (Tang, ).

Although the disclosure of my experience cannot be seen as circumventing any potential differentials of power, it was nevertheless offered as a form of reciprocity (see Ribbens, , p. 594), and I indicated my willingness to answer any questions about my own ED history. In this regard, I was keen that participants did not feel like a 'goldfish in a bowl', interesting because of their (so-called) 'aberrant' or 'exotic' media reading practices. Indeed, whilst it would be problematic to characterise the interviews as simply 'friendly free-flowing discussion[s]' (Tracy, , p. 56) - and I fully recognise that this article is also a chance for me to speak back to how 'I' was represented - they emerged, at times, as focused conversations (Spitzack, , p. 55) in which we shared experiences of eating/body distress. Although I acknowledge that my personal disclosure could have had various implications that were not openly articulated by the respondents, and that interview data is always produced within situated and complex relations of power, my admission was repeatedly received in positive terms, as expressed during the interview itself, or via subsequent email contact.

Whilst I did not know in advance how participants would respond, I wanted to ask questions which did not pivot on nor assume a harmful relationship between the textual and the material body (Bray, , p. 118). In so doing, I sought to create a space in which participants could evaluate media representations of EDs, whilst I also wanted to introduce alternative themes to those which dominate medical/popular discourse in this field. As such, the interview schedule covered key five areas: (1) how conscious participants were of media representations of EDs; (2) to what extent they evaluated them; (3) whether they recollected the first time they came into contact with a media story about EDs; (4) whether they felt that there was anything not represented in media representations of EDs and (5) how they would represent their experience of having an ED. At the same time, the emphasis on seeking to provide a forum for alternative perspectives needs to acknowledge that there is no 'outside' space from which to speak back to media representations of EDs. Just as the framing of this article has had to enter into dialogue with existing medical, psychiatric and popular constructions of the relations between ED sufferers and the media, so do the responses of the participants: such discourses constitute part of the reality of what 'EDs' are and how they come to mean. As such, this process of negotiation or discursive exchange is evident in the participant responses themselves.

The interviews were recorded on a digital voice recorder and transcribed, and the participant data was anonymised at the point of writing. Informed by wider feminist qualitative research on EDs (e.g. Boughtwood & Halse, ; Burns, ), I then conducted a thematic discourse analysis of the transcripts which involved three different stages. Upon a first read through the transcripts I deduced that the responses clustered around three broad themes. These were (1) the extent to which participants saw themselves as being 'triggered' by media representations of EDs; (2) their most striking memories of media representations of EDs (3) and their evaluations of their perceived 'authenticity'. I then conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of these themes (Smith, Harre, & Van Langenhare, ), looking for recurring patterns and commonalities. Lastly, I critically reflected on how the respondents positioned themselves in relation to normative discourses on the relationship between media and EDs, and the extent to which this conformed to, subverted, or negotiated with, the gendered discourses which conflate 'eating' and 'reading' disorders.

But as this process suggests, it is also important to acknowledge that qualitative research into EDs (or indeed any kind of qualitative research) does not unproblematically give the participants 'voice' in speaking back to dominant discourses (Malson, Finn, Treasure, Clarke, & Anderson, ; Saukko, ). As Saukko observes in her qualitative ED research, there is a potential tension between the desire to 'listen carefully and faithfully' to the women's experiences of eating and body distress, and the impetus to critically assess the discourses ... from which their voices are made ...' (, p. 77). In this regard, questions of 'voice' are pressing not only in the solicitation and construction of the data (in which regard I have reflected on my own positionality), but also with respect to its analysis and interpretation.

In terms of approaching a conceptual framework for the data, I knew that I wanted to take from Media and Cultural Studies' work on audiences a rejection of a media 'effects' theory paradigm. I thus approached the data with an understanding of audience-text relations as always negotiated within complex, contingent and contextually specific ways (e.g. Gillespie, ). But I did not begin the research with a preconceived idea about which aspects of the work on media audiences would be relevant - a focus which ultimately became multi-faceted as it responded to the range of themes within the interview data itself. As such, this article uses a range of different conceptual lenses informed by feminism (moving across issues of trigger warnings, emotion and affect, to negotiations of the 'real'), in a bid to provide alternative perspectives which may push at the parameters of the debate, and begin to disturb the ways in which ED 'reading practices' are often defined.

Trigger warning: this media could seriously damage your health

The fact that those diagnosed with an ED are encouraged to understand their problem as in part a response to media culture, is suggested by the ways in which this was frequently the first topic to come up, despite the absence of questions or prompts on this theme. Some participants expressed critical and sometimes angry views on the prevalence of 'media blaming discourses' about EDs (Boughtwood, ). Acknowledging the extent to which constructions of young femininity are inextricably linked to the idea of the 'anorexic' as a 'vulnerable' media reader, the male participant in the study was quick to criticise the 'very mono-causal coverage of anorexia ... which plays into the idea of anorexics as just bony girls who read too many copies of Cosmo ' (P12). Some participants explained how their decision to take part in the study was prompted by a desire to prove that they were not 'in fact media sponges' (P11), whilst others rejected the causal narrative of media effects with such assertions as 'I find it incredibly insulting and patronising that such a ... [perspective] is out there' (P9).

But that is very far from saying that this causal relationship, specifically with regard to media images of EDs, was not endorsed at other points in the interviews. This theme primarily emerged in relation to the idea of media content as an ED trigger - a term introduced and used by the participants themselves. Originating in the domain of psychiatry and in relation to a focus on trauma, the concept of a 'trigger' is understood as something that initiates and/or aggravates a form of behaviour or response (Smith, ). As an adjunct to this, the term 'trigger warning' has a long history in relation to media culture, as used to alert viewers to the potentially upsetting or offensive nature of media content. But the term is now also frequently used in online discussions of sensitive issues and topics. This can include problems associated with addiction (drug and alcohol abuse, EDs or self-harm) as well as discussions/ representations of sexual abuse or suicide, or hate speech directed at marginalised groups (Kyrola, ). Within this context, trigger warning discourse has prompted heated debate (particularly in the US) about the politics of such interventions within academic, social media and/ or activist spaces (Smith, ), with proponents seeing them as a form of ethical 'protection for vulnerable groups', and detractors attacking them as extensions of a 'neoliberal culture of overprotection, excessive self-involvement, and celebration of victimhood ...' (Kyrola, , p. 131).

As has been discussed within both popular and scholarly arenas, there are often gendered dimensions to such debates. This is not only in terms of feminism's role in helping to originate trigger warnings (in relation to making the personal 'political' and challenging the relegation of pain to the private sphere (Carter, ; Smith, )), but also with regard to how the 'triggered' subject position is constructed as 'feminised' in highly negative ways. Indeed, it is this latter perspective which is expressed by the participants above: such discourses are described as 'insulting' and 'patronising', whilst the comments also allude to the gendered nature of such constructions (as in 'just bony girls who read too many copies of Cosmo ').

The concept of the 'trigger' now pervades both popular and medical constructions of EDs. As such, given that the ED sufferer is already positioned as vulnerable in relation to media encounters, the feminised subject position implicit within the trigger warning debates is doubly invoked here. The participants in the study did sometimes talk about media representations of EDs as triggering, although only one participant in the sample, a 45 year old woman who began to suffer from bulimia in the 1980s, saw such material as playing a definitive role in the development of her eating problems. In describing her encounters with the fictional novel and TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World (1981) which tells the story of 17 year old Casey Powell's descent into anorexia and bulimia, she recounts her experience thus:

At the time I got all my ideas [on vomiting] from this book ... and movie and I'd take notes ... I would keep in my closet every article [about the movie] I could find in any magazine or newspaper. It was my secret box, my ammunition, my toolbox. (P2)

The participant talked openly about witnessing her mother's struggle with bulimia as well as her father's binge eating, both of which she understood as contextual risk factors in her development of an ED, but clearly felt that the media representations were the most definitive cause. Yet it is notable that even in this passage her media encounter is articulated in ways which problematise associations of passivity or vulnerability. The word 'ammunition' (which, as with 'trigger', draws on a discourse of weaponry) indicates an active preparation for combat or battle. In fact, she imagines here a kind of firing out and not simply a 'taking in' (as the 'sponge' metaphor would have us believe).

In comparison, other participants made more fleeting references to what they saw as triggering media encounters, or described practices which were implicitly framed as protective measures in this regard. So one commented how 'I have a filter on my YouTube that means nothing [like that] will show up' (P9), whilst another explained: 'If I see a really thin woman I consciously scroll away from it' (P4). What was more striking was how assumptions about the interpretative frameworks of the participants were also used by others - from medical professionals to well-meaning peers - to effectively prescribe or censor access to media content. So one respondent recalled how 'I was told by like a doctor or someone from very early on [in treatment for anorexia] like "don't read any of that stuff"' (P9), whilst another explained:

One of my friends emailed me and said 'so I've seen this really great film called God Help the Girl [2014] which I think you'd love, but I'm not sure I should let you see it until you've recovered' [my emphasis]. (P12)

Pervasive assumptions about 'suggestible' subjectivities clearly led people to issue ED sufferers with their own trigger warnings which, rather than offering the choice that supporters of trigger warnings espouse, sail close to the argument that they 'pathologi[ze] ... the reading practices of already marginalized groups, and ignor[e] their capacity to read and view critically' (Kyrola, , p. 140).

Indeed, whilst feminism has been central to the origination of trigger warnings, feminists have also raised concerns about their potential 'mis-use', as well as the ways in which they are themselves imbricated within the production (and not simply the description) of audiences' 'triggering' relations with texts (Kyrola, ). Whilst triggers are often articulated in highly personal ways, we can also consider how they become collectively 'seen, recognized and experienced' as triggering through 'their circulation and repetitive framing' (Ibid., p. 137). In this regard, it was clear from the interviews that a persistent 'voice' in this framing was medical discourse. This was most starkly articulated by a 19 year old participant with experience of anorexia, and two admissions as an in-patient:

Treatment always tells you to avoid triggers ... so I felt for a long time that all these [media] things should be triggering me because I was part of this illness that got triggered by things ... I don't think that that is necessarily the case for everyone, but once you are told that those things set you off ... well, I mean, do they? [emphasis in original]. (P11)

That is absolutely not to suggest that what the participants' describe as triggering experiences are not genuine and intensely felt (Ibid.). But it is to bring into focus how discursive constructions of EDs, including those offered by the media and medical discourse, are also constitutive of people's realities, experiences and self-constructions (Malson et al., ), reinforcing a critique of EDs as an 'innate' and individualised pathology. Recognition of this dialogue is entirely absent in previous accounts of how the testimonies of ED 'subjects' 'prove' the causal and 'toxic' power of media culture (Murray et al., ; Thomsen et al., ) - an omission which abstracts such responses from broader relations of social power.

'Too close to home': affect and memory

The most negative discourse on media effects has often pertained to behavioural effects (Barker & Petley, ), such as those that I have sought to challenge in the framing of this article. But we can also clearly talk about media texts as having emotional effects, including, for example, shock, sorrow, excitement or disgust (Ibid., p. 34). What is now termed 'affect' has arguably been central to feminist theorising (Kyrola, , p. 16), including feminist work on audiences (Bird, ; Stacey, ), for many years. Furthermore, the increasing turn to affect in feminist research on the body has often been positioned as a corrective to the apparently deterministic prioritisation of representation (Burns, , Kyrola, , pp. 15, 16). Work on EDs has focused on questions of affect and the 'body-as-experienced' (Burns, , p. 126, Ferreday, ; Malson, ; Warin, ), in part as a counter to the over-emphasis on the cultural imagery of the body which is prioritised in medical, media (and some feminist) constructions of EDs. This is particularly so with regard to bulimia - which is not 'visible' in the same way as anorexia - and some feminist scholars have called for a greater acknowledgement of the bulimic body as a lived experience or process of embodiment which cannot simply be read as a 'text' (Burns, ; Squire, ). I return to these debates, and the specific representation of bulimia, in the next section of the article.

Although the previous discussion of triggering can be seen as intimately linked to questions of affect (Carter, ; Kyrola, ), I focus here on the ways in which participants often spoke about their encounters with media representations in what could be seen as affective and emotional ways, especially when invoking frameworks of memory. All audience research is essentially memory research (Stacey, ), in so far as participants in audience studies are often engaged in recalling media encounters, experiences, reactions and investments. The archive of media memories stretched back considerably further for some participants - such as those whom (like me), developed an ED in the 1980s or 1990s. In conceptualising memory as the active production of meaning (Kuhn, , p. 253), approaches to media and memory within Film, TV, Media and Cultural Studies have occupied a constructivist position in which the 'reality of the [remembered] incident is less significant than the way in which the incident is remembered by the participant from their present-day viewpoint' (Ralph, ). Also important for my purposes here are the ways in which memories have been used to contest wider metanarratives (Radstone & Hodgkin, , p. 10): one of the reasons that I asked participants if they recalled their first encounter with a media representation of an ED was to explore if discourses other than a pernicious behavioural trigger might be revealed.

A female participant who developed eating problems in her early teens and was later diagnosed with atypical anorexia, recounted her memories of reading the American actress Portia de Rossi's memoir Unbearable Lightness, which details her struggle with both anorexia and bulimia. She explained how: 'I tried to read it. But it like related to me so much I thought no, [I'm] not gonna read it ... There was too much identification - it was too emotional' (P4). Similarly, the storyline in which the character of Hannah Ashworth (Emma Rigby) developed anorexia/ bulimia in the British teenage soap Hollyoaks in 2007 was recollected by no less than five respondents in such terms as:

I found it really upsetting and like I wanted to cry whenever I was watching ... not being able to watch it when other people were in the room because it was like too close to home .... (P8)

Or:

It wasn't nice to watch someone go through the same sort of symptoms ... The vomiting and the not taking care of herself. When [Hannah's friend] Melissa died of anorexia I remember being really upset and telling my mum about it. (P14)

Concern has been raised about the conceptually imprecise nature of the term audience 'identification' (Barker, ), and as Martin Barker observes, it has also been co-opted by effects discourse, in so far as it might be seen to imply an immersion in which 'audiences los[e] ... self-awareness' and thus become more malleable and 'suggestible' (Ibid., p. 357). The fact that female audiences, at a discursive level at least, have often been constructed as lacking an 'appropriate' distance from the screen or text (or as over-identifying with what they see in terms of an 'excessive' emotional involvement) (Doane,; Modleski, ) is thus no coincidence here - further consolidating discourses on female audiences as uncritical and 'passive'.

But the responses from the participants intervene in complex ways in such constructions. On one level, what comes through in each of the responses above is indeed the suggestion of an unbearable closeness with the character or narrative in the text - in which it was painful or shocking to see aspects of their own experience externalised. In the second response, this is related specifically to the context of viewing - the familial home - at a time when the participant's bulimia was undisclosed. But all three responses also articulated their memories as less encounters in which they 'lost' themselves in the text (or as experiences which produced or perpetuated destructive behaviours), than as a kind of 'reality check' in relation to how they gauged and acknowledged their own distress at the time. This is explicitly suggested in the third response which hints that the storyline led to an expression of grief by the participant in which the dangers of anorexia were both confronted and articulated. This highlights how the idea that media representations of EDs might have positive pedagogical implications has been entirely ignored in the deterministic emphasis on their harmful and triggering effects. Furthermore, what is striking here is that opposed to the divisive discourse on media images of EDs making female 'ill', these accounts foreground recognition, connection and empathy between women: from reader to book, or viewer to screen. This is less in terms of the medical or psychiatric emphasis on girls/ women lacking an 'appropriate' distance from the representation (or wanting to narcissistically 'become' it), than it is in audiences finding momentary glimpses of recognition in a media landscape that has so often pathologised or rejected them.

'Really authentic and raw': judging representations of EDs

Even whilst describing affective investments in particular representations, participants would simultaneously talk reflexively about their construction: so the Hannah story in Hollyoaks was also seen by one of the same respondents above as unrealistic (and wanting) because 'it was very like, "oh we're finished with this storyline now - let's do something else ..."' (P8). This was especially so in terms of what were seen as the potentially constraining influence of generic conventions, or the status of the text as a commercial product. Such knowledge and reflexivity seems far from surprising in the context of Media and Cultural Studies work on audiences (Ang, ; Barker & Brooks, ), and it only gains significance in relation to the medical and popular discourses which position ED sufferers as media 'dupes' - a construction which the evaluative nature of the participant responses functions to critique.

For example, this emphasis on reflexivity and the status of the ED story as a media product often emerged in relation to my question about what, if anything, was absent or marginalised within media representations of EDs. In this regard, nine participants foregrounded the more mundane (but difficult) experience of the recovery process which 'just doesn't have popular appeal in the same way' (P9), isn't 'shocking enough to sell papers' (P10), or 'just doesn't make a great media narrative' (P3). But in the formation and articulation of these judgements, there were clear differences between the participants: those who did not fit the category of ('typical') female anorexia felt that they had a less expansive array of media constructions to judge and appraise - a fact that cautions against the homogenisation of both media representations of EDs, as well as the participant responses in this study. Such respondents talked openly about what they saw as the continued predominance of anorexia in the media (especially coverage that featured images of the emaciated female body) and the impact of this on their own self-conceptions. This was particularly so for the participants with experience of bulimia.

As discussed, bulimia is seen as being less clearly etched on the contours of the body - a factor that has encouraged its neglect within media, medical and feminist discourses, each of which have tended to read EDs through the inscribed, visible surface of the body (Burns, ; Malson, ; Squire, ). The participants with experience of bulimia shifted between insisting that their problem was indeed harder to represent or visualise ('there is no symbolic image, aside from perhaps a toilet') (P5), to a concern that to do so would be more irresponsible, thus acknowledging the possibility of the trigger discourse. Relating back to the status of the ED representation as an economic product, others felt that bulimia didn't have the right kind of commercial shock value, and as one explained:

[Bulimia] is seen as being more visceral, the vomit and the excrement - the ways in which people shed their calories. It's shocking to see an anorexic body, whereas people would just be disgusted to see the contents of someone's stomach. (P3)

Bulimia is constructed here as almost too 'transgressive' to be represented - a theme that has been taken up in the limited amount of feminist work in the field (Burns, ; Squire, ). In drawing on work on abjection (Kristeva, ) and 'pollution' (Douglas, ) for example, Sarah Squire discusses how bulimia is seen to threaten the 'tightly controlled boundaries' of both bodily and social orders. Not only is it signified by the 'movement of bodily matter ... threatening the established boundaries of body and self' (, p. 21), but the cultural disgust surrounding bulimia - and its relative invisibility - is inextricably imbricated within wider cultural norms of femininity (Burns, ; Squire, , p. 21). Indeed, several participants, but especially those with experience of bulimia, explicitly discussed the 'binarized hierarchy' (Burns, , p. 272) within which anorexia and bulimia are often caught. Within this dualism, anorexia is often constructed as signifying self-control, persistence, obedience, transcendence and purity, as opposed to bulimia's association with chaos, moral weakness, sexual promiscuity and 'mess' (Burns, ). Feminist work on both medical and media constructions of EDs has explored how, even whilst anorexia is itself pathologised, such an opposition functions to prefer and reject particular ideas about desirable and normative femininities based on restraint, fragility and purity (Burns, ; Squire, ; Whitehead & Kurz, ). As one participant with experience of bulimia commented: 'It's like I'm less of a woman you know? I feel like I should be able to restrict and deny, but I can't [my emphasis]' (P17). This suggests the power of such constructions to mark out acceptable female norms - even whilst the 'binarized hierarchy' between anorexia and bulimia was recognised and evaluated. But such an apparent transgression of dominant cultural discourses on femininity could also be positively embraced by others: in answer to my question about how she would represent bulimia, one participant (who was undertaking a PhD in performance art) excitedly explained how it would be deliberately confrontational and include 'big vats of fake vomit' (P2).

The discussion of soap opera in the previous section offered responses which might be read in terms of Ien Ang's concept of 'emotional realism' - an investment in the portrayal of recognisable subjective experiences. Although the participants critiqued aspects of the narratives as unrealistic (and over-determined by generic or commercial concerns), they still found truth of feeling in the Hollyoaks narrative (Ang, ). With regard to a wider appraisal of the extent to which media representations of EDs were thought to be 'realistic' or 'authentic', most participants, as the discussion above implies, also drew more widely on their own experience of an ED, even whilst they also looked outside of this to comment on types of omission or bias. The ways in which media audiences judge the reality - or in relation to fiction, verisimilitude - of media texts has been discussed within Communication Studies (see Busselle & Greenberg, ), as well as work on media audiences (Ang, ; Barker, ). Although the emphasis on personal real life experience has been considered within such frameworks (Busselle & Greenberg, ), work on the construction of reality/ realism has more often argued that claims and judgements in this regard are made in relation to other media texts. Richard Armstrong refers to this as a 'a sort of sliding scale' in which judgements of realism and reality are 'defined more or less by the [texts] ... which came before it and went after it' (Armstrong, , p. x).

Both of these perspectives were evident in the interviews. For example, blogs were often foregrounded as more real in direct comparison to women's/girl's magazines (discussed below). In fact, what is interesting here is how texts or genres which have historically been labelled as women's/girl's culture - such as teen and women's magazines and celebrity coverage - were recurrently positioned at the 'bad' end of the continuum where the truth value of media representations were concerned. The equation between mass culture and the feminine clearly has a long history, as the framing of this article has explored. But what is crucial here is that the metaphor of consumption, and thus the analogy between eating and reading/ viewing in which the subject ingests 'trash', 'junk' or 'rubbish' (Radway, ), is central to such gendered constructions, including the allegorical constructions of EDs as 'reading disorders' (Bray, , p. 117). As a result, and in something of a double ideological manoeuvre, largely female bodies are seen to be 'eaten away' (Ibid.), not simply by media culture, but by those popular forms most associated with girls and women.

In reflecting this pervasive devaluation, many of the participants implicitly distanced themselves from this fare, variously positioning such representations as being both irresponsible and 'unreal'. In contrast, the representations valued as more realistic (and useable) were personal blogs about EDs, which appeared in eight of the respondent accounts. Often defined by the participants as 'self-published media' and considerably 'better' than the media forms that preceded them, one respondent talked about the posts by Clare Greaves on the Huffington Post, which detail her experience of having an ED, as well as her experience of self-harm:

[They offer] a really authentic and raw kind of brutal experience .... Her articles vary from week to week. Sometimes she is doing really well, and other weeks really struggling. She talks about the thoughts she's having ... A few weeks ago she ended up just taking herself to an eating disorder unit as she was worried that she would just do something. All of these things I think are quite subversive, and quite dangerous, but it's the first time I've really come across someone being able to speak like that .... (P11)

This response, among others, offers a complex insight into why such media forms might be claimed as realistic, welcome or significant. In sanctioned or dominant media narratives of anorexia, particularly those aimed at the female audience, it has historically been the voices of those who have recovered, or at least semi-recovered, who are encouraged to contribute to cultural and media discourse on anorexia as a 'problem'. Within this framework, subjects should exhibit a certain level of physical and temporal distance from their 'anorexic' self, and certainly renounce its destructive implications. This in turn exemplifies the ways in which the anorexic voice is positioned 'outside of the true' (Saukko, , p. 6). Yet it is perhaps precisely the ambiguity of Greave's status in this respect that the respondent finds 'subversive and dangerous', or 'the first time' she has 'really come across someone being able to speak like that ...'.

Whilst self-published media might well be positioned here as a valuable chance to 'speak back' to more traditional media representations of EDs, it did not consistently emerge as such across the interviews. In articulating perspectives not radically dissimilar to the press discourse on the topic (e.g. Bingham, ), seven participants expressed concern about the relationship between EDs and social media in which young girls were imagined as both the key produsers and recipients of such interactions. But unlike the press discourse, which tends to foreground people being 'indoctrinated' by pro ED material, the participant talk focused on what was presented as pro-recovery material in all its forms. So one respondent described the genre of 'My eating disorder journey' on YouTube, which often focuses on experiences of anorexia:

I think that the very sleek production of some of these videos is misleading. [They tend to follow a structure which goes] .... 'my life was great! How wonderful was my life!' and then 'How terrible was my life! [with an ED]!' and then 'How wonderful is my life again!' Then it's 'here's a picture of porridge, and salad, and oh, I really don't look like I'm better at all'. Those kind of videos cement in so many ways the shame of people whose ED doesn't fit this very neat, frail 'protect-me' type thing. (P9)

Unlike the discussions of the blogs above, the participant frames the videos as (re)narrowing and standardising a 'polished' representational framework for anorexia that is elsewhere associated with the mass media. It also worth noting here that these stories, which conform to the medical narrative on EDs, are often produced by white Western girls from predominantly affluent backgrounds - further foregrounding their partiality, and links to 'old' media representations of EDs (Holmes, ).

In other interviews, it was the phenomenon of pro-recovery material on the image-based social network site Instagram that was a topic of significance, attracting such comments as 'I can't tell you how many people have an Instagram account based around their recovery. That really worries me' (P11); 'users almost value their recovery by how many followers they have' (P16); 'I would see it as people colluding ... posting pictures of how they are struggling' (P7) or 'teenage girls are like ... addicted to it, posting all day' (P17). These constructions in turn enable respondents to occupy a flattering position of power - a stance so regularly denied them in constructions of their own media subjectivities - in which they can comment on (and see through) what they see as the 'faux' nature of such recovery cultures and identities. Such a knowledgeable position is always occupied, in symbolic terms, at the expense of someone else, and it is again the devalued subjectivity of the female adolescent that is at stake here. This not only returns us to where this article began, but it also offers a clear reminder of the complex and pervasive ways in which popular discourse on EDs helps to constitute people's perceptions or experience of eating/body distress, even whilst such constructions may be evaluated, rejected or critiqued.

Conclusion: (un)twisted

The central aim of this article has been to give space to the participants' complex negotiations with media discourses on EDs in ways which challenge the simplistic perception that experiences of eating/body distress are a reaction to the 'weight' of media images. In doing so, the article has aimed to widen the discursive repertoire of how such relationships are commonly conceived, including what are in many ways quite routine and predictable ways of engaging with media forms (at least from the perspective of Audience Studies). This can be perceived as a strategy of 'ordinarisation' in so far as the media responses offered by the participants encourage us to situate them within more everyday understandings of media engagement that are very far from 'twisted', 'aberrant' or extraordinary.

But although this may be indicative of the ways in which 'local processes of knowledge production' have the potential to critique and challenge 'more widespread and institutionalised discourses' (Day & Keys, , p. 4), this does not necessarily equate to a transfer of social and cultural power, or a clear material disruption of the discourses at stake. As this article has explored, the bid to give 'voice' in this regard cannot unfold in a discursive space untainted by dominant conceptions and assumptions. Despite the shift to seeing eating problems as multifactorial in origin, constructions of EDs as media induced retain a pervasive currency. As the interview responses make clear, such constructions have significant implications for the participants' identities and self-conceptions on a number of different levels, even whilst they are negotiated and evaluated. Furthermore, in terms of the wider political implications of this topic, the potential ideological work performed by such discourses may span far beyond the construction of a 'vulnerable' or 'suggestible' media subject positon. Indeed, the construction of EDs as a form of 'reading disorder' (Bray, ) is a pathologising label and as such, it should be placed on a continuum with the wider pathologisation of women's eating and body distress, and the attendant connotations of both perceptual or mental 'distortion'. Pathologising labels can be 'used to strip people of their civil liberties' (Day & Keys, , p. 8) - a fact worth remembering in the context of ED treatment which is frequently involuntary and punitive, and in which the majority patient demographic remains teenage girls (see Gremillion, ; HCSIC, ).

But this article also has implications for feminist work beyond the specific terrain of EDs. The imagined media reading practices which this article has contested form part of a larger cultural history in which female audiences have been positioned as 'infantilised', and in which media culture has been assumed as 'detrimental to their minds and bodies' (Bray, , p. 120). The construction of the feminised ED 'subject' has endured as one of the most hyperbolic representations of this subjectivity and as such, it should be a focus of concern for media work on audiences, especially that originating from a feminist point of view.

Although I have written this article at time when, in the context of the web 2.0 landscape, the very use value of the term 'audience' is under attack from a number of media scholars (Nightingale, , p. 2), it attests to the ways in which public and popular discourses on 'audiencing' continue to matter. As Virginia Nightingale suggests, 'being an audience is essential to cultural participation, the ways in which it effects how we understand ourselves (our identity) and our power to control the world around us ...' (, p. 1). The right to 'participate' in this regard, without gendered forms of pathologisation, marginalisation or juvenilisation, is very much worth fighting for.

Notes on contributor

Su Holmes is Reader in Television at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s (Intellect, 2005), Entertaining TV: The BBC and Popular Programme Culture in the 1950s (MUP, 2008) and The Quiz Show (EUP, 2008). She is also the co-editor of Understanding Reality TV (Routledge, 2004), Framing Celebrity (Routledge, 2006), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage, 2007), and In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (Continuum, 2011). She has recently been working on feminist approaches to eating disorders and has articles published on this topic in Participations, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Feminist Media Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the 17 participants: it was a great privilege to listen to your stories and opinions. With thanks to beat for assisting with the recruitment process.

1. Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Those diagnosed with EDNOS may display many of the symptoms of anorexia and/or bulimia, but are seen as not fitting the full criteria for either. It is estimated that 40-60% of people who seek treatment for an ED fall into this category ( http://nedc.com.au/ednos).

2. https://www.b-eat.co.uk/assets/000/000/072/BeatMediaGuidelines_original.pdf.

http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-suicide/Downloads/?a = 5140.

3. EDs linked to obesity were not considered as they are often associated with different cultural representations and assumptions.

4. In medical terms, someone diagnosed with atypical anorexia fits much of the criteria for anorexia, aside from the very low BMI.

5. I have replaced names with a participant number (i.e. P1) which reflects the order in which the interviews were transcribed.

6. For example, the predominance of white females in representations of EDs was noted by most of the participants.

7. This probably reflects that fact that many - but not all - of the participants had been through some process of recovery, and had engaged with or searched for recovery material online.

References

Beat. (2015). Research. Retrieved , from http://www.b-eat.co.uk/research

(2015, February 3). Selfie culture fueling rise in dangerous eating disorders. The Telegraph. Retrieved , from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11384553/Selfie-culture-fuelling-rise-in-dangerous-eating-disorders-Alex-Yellowlees.html

Boughtwood, D. (2005). View to be thin: Interrogating Media's relationship to eating disorders through audience research. Participations, 1(3). Retrieved from http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_boughtwood_article.htm

(2015). Teaching with trauma: Trigger warnings, feminism, and disability pedagogy. Disability Studies Quarterly, 35 (2). Retrieved , from http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/4652/3935

HCSIC. 2014. Eating disorders: Hospital admissions up by 8 per cent in a year. Retrieved , from http://www.hscic.gov.uk/article/3880/Eating-disorders-Hospital-admissions-up-by-8-per-cent-in-a-year

(2016, March 3). 'My anorexia story': Girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube. Cultural Studies. doi:10.1080/09502386.2016.1138978

(2015). Toward a contextual pedagogy of pain: Trigger warnings and the value of sometimes feeling really. Really Bad, Lambda Nordica, 1, 126-144.

(1997). A semiotic understanding of eating disorders: The impact of media portrayal. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, 5, 169-183.

, , , , & (2004). Constructing 'the eating disordered patient': A discourse analysis of accounts of treatment experiences. Journal of Community and Applied Psychology, 14, 471-489.

, , & (1996). Awareness and perceived influence of body ideals in the media: A comparison of eating disorder patients and the general community. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, 4, 33-46.

(2014). Social media encourages an obsession with Image. Retrieved , from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549253/Social-media-encourages-obsession-image-Charitys-concerns-increasing-numbers-children-admitted-hospital-treated-eating-disorder.html

(2014). Beyond the pros and cons of trigger warnings: Collectivizing healing, July 13. Retrieved , from https://andrea366.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/beyond-the-pros-and-cons-of-trigger-warnings-collectivizing-healing/

, , Chariese Stanford, S. , & Turberville, D. (2014). Eating Disorders in men: Underdiagnosed, undertreated, and misunderstood. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention, 20, 346-355.

, , & (2001). Internalizing the impossible: Anorexic outpatients' experiences with women's beauty and fashion magazines. Eating Disorders, 9, 49-64.10.1080/106402601300187731

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(Un)twisted: talking back to media representations of eating disorders

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Abstract In 2014-2015, there were several news reports about a rise in the diagnoses of eating disorders (EDs), as attributed to the use of image-driven social media. Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern in which those diagnosed with an ED are constructed as 'especially vulnerable' to the power of media images - a subjectivity which is pathologised and devalued precisely through its association with femininity.

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https://centerfordiscovery.com/blog/feed-new-films-media-hurting-eating-disorders/

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Earlier this year, Netflix released a controversial film about suicide and mental illness titled, 13 Reasons Why which sparked controversy among mental health professionals. Netflix followed up with another hair pulling feature, , on eating disorders that was recently released but the newest film on eating disorders, Feed, was actually directed by an actress who suffered with anorexia nervosa, the most lethal diseases out of all mental health disorders. Troian Bellisario, a young actress known for her star role in Pretty Little Liars, suffered from anorexia nervosa and directed the new film, , in order to raise awareness about the reality of living with an eating disorder. In this newly released film, twin siblings entering their last year of high school endure a tragic loss that leaves one of them resorting to unhealthy behaviors resulting in anorexia nervosa. The film follows her journey through the depths and despairs of the realistic life of someone diagnosed with an eating disorder. Bellisario believes that this film is more than just a movie but rather a true-life depiction of what it means to live with an eating disorder. Troian has spoken previously about Feed's story, and how it relates to her own experiences. The actress turned director has been open about her own personal experience with anorexia nervosa explaining the movie by saying: "I sat down and I wrote a version of my own story. It's not the exact events, but what I wanted to do with the film was get the audience to understand what it sounds like and what it feels like to be struggling with that illness."

How the media portrays eating disorders

The media often falsely portrays anorexia nervosa as a disorder associated with starvation and weight loss that affects young thin Caucasian females who are from an upper middle class background who strive for perfection. Unfortunately this unrealistic stereotype of eating disorders is the common belief among the general population due to the large influence of Hollywood. In reality, eating disorders are serious mental health disorders that result in the need to gain a sense of self-control. Eating disorders are more than an obsession with food and weight loss but are characterized by underlying triggers that are associated with depression, self-harm, trauma, interpersonal conflicts, substance abuse, low self-esteem, and anxiety. Many mental health professionals argue that the media falsely depicts the reality of eating disorders and also glamourizes them to an extent by portraying a thin body image as a sign of beauty. Eating disorders are anything but glamorous. They create a devastating reality and without proper recognition and treatment can result in death. Additionally, eating disorders do not discriminate against gender, ethnicity, age or body type and it is important for the general population to understand that men as well as non-Caucasian individuals are also affected by eating disorders.

Is the media a trigger for eating disorders?

Many professionals believe that controversial films about eating disorders can be a trigger for individuals to engage in binging and purging behaviors. Many individuals who are battling with eating disorders or who are in the beginning of their recovery can be triggered by provocative images associated with binging and purging and therefore watching a film or engaging in social media posts can result in their eating disorder relapse. Although the media is working to shed light on such a controversial issue, they are also creating potential triggers for harmful behaviors.

Center for Discovery

Living with an eating disorder can drive you into many difficult struggles and therefore obtaining professional help is the only proven way to overcome your struggle. Center for Discovery is a nationwide treatment center family that focuses on eating disorders with over 30 years of treatment experience. They work to establish a relationship with each individual client while also providing the most up to date cutting edge care in a compassionate setting.

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How The Media is Portraying Eating Disorders - Center For Discovery

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The media often falsely portrays anorexia nervosa as a disorder associated with starvation and weight loss that affects young thin Caucasian females who are from an upper middle class background who strive for perfection. Unfortunately this unrealistic stereotype of eating disorders is the common belief among the general population due to the large influence of Hollywood.

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From my short film and script writing experiments I really enjoyed the self referential theme i've been focused on manifesting itself in differing characters interacting with each other.

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I want to play with this idea of character and open discussion as a method to depict eating disorders. I want to create some images that explore my relationship with some of these characters to collect my thoughts and views of each of these.

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Within my own recovery, this method of therapy has greatly impacted how I view my present, past and future self. I have been able to divide up the thoughts in my inner narrative into characters and having open discussions with them has formed my understanding of my true self. These characters within me each have had a role to play in my life and sculpting who i am, it is important for me to state that although some of these are not needed anymore in my recovery, they at some point in my life had a meaningful purpose and kept me safe in many ways.

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This method of therapy has helped me greatly with identifying different elements of myself that impact me the strongest and conversing with them. This narrative builds to reveal the rawest forms of your inner narrative and leads you to build from these.

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A very common technique in eating disorder recovery is Narrative therapy. Developed in the 1980s by New Zealand-based therapists Michael White and David Epston, narrative therapy seeks to have an empowering effect and offer counseling that is non-blaming and non-pathological in nature.

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Watching how others interacted with my work was very revealing. Explaining what my project was about then represent this through image for others to blindly react to showed me flaws and holes in the way that i had created the base if project.
I want to show the nuances of eating disorders through my own experiences. I am aware that speaking from one experiences risked creating a polarised look into this issue. However, within this workshop i found that people connected strongly with viewing others issues through their own lenses to build their perceptions about the problems raised.
I also found that i need to come up with strong and meaningful depictions of my experiences to avoid any generic narratives about eating disorders filtering into my work. Although these themes come from experience themselves they've become too rewritten and sensationalised in modern media that they feel isolating and disconnected from the reality for most people.

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https://artslondon.padlet.org/jsarkar5/interactive

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Within this workshop we undertook a number as task to build our understand on how we present our work versus how other perceive it. These task ranged from creating zines that we passed around and each added to to comment on others work. to creating plots for posters as a way of working together in building a perception. I have linked the Padlet below with all our work.

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Thats gross

Piss off

What are you doing?

Im not really in the mood for you, right now i just need a squeeze and some satisfaction

I cant be asked

Sign

What

You buy all this shit and watch all those pointless videos, sit there complaining about your skin and your the one that makes in like that in the first place. You know you wouldt have a problem right if

If i stopped picking yeah yeah yeahhhh i know, dont touch your face, drink 15 litres of water a day, tone moisturise peel cleanse rahhh rah rah… i dont care, right now i want to watch yesterdays grim that sat on my face and shuttled into my pores coil out of my skin so leave me be ok.

Apparently its an unhealthy coping mechanism for stress and anxiety, very common for people suffering with the following, depression anixety, ocd

I already knew that. Knowing that doesnt make me want to stop

You wanna talking about it,

Signnnn why dont we try… reading a book or how about a walk, ive heard there brillant for people like you, fresh air, people watching

People like me?! What do you mean

Look i just think, i think you could do with some self care right now, some self maintenance maybe, i know you havent changed your sheets in while and dont get me started on that bullshit about saving water and being an eco godess

I am self maintaining, im removing all the skum from my skin

Dont call it scum  thats vile!! and you know thats not what your doing. Coming from a place of love just remember how you felt yesterday after you squeezed, didnt feel great did it, remember how blotchy it was, youre just gonna give yourself more spots.

Its a societal construct that skin should be smooth and flawless

Aliiceeeee shut the fuck up. Dont do it, im being serious

…

Mouthed ‘but like look at that

Kinda aggres

At least wash your hands

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"Whats wrong?" is a short film by director Shraddha Singvi. Within, they carry the story of a young woman struggling to get ready for work, to collect herself and get to grips with her environment. I think it elegantly represented depression through a focused task. It allows the viewer to micro-examine how nuanced mental illness can be.

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"Good intentions" focuses around guilt as an all consuming state of mind and how this infiltrates someones life. I felt that this was a theme that i wanted to explore, as in my eating disorders and just general mental state guilt is a burden that weights down on me on a daily basis. Its an emotion that i didn’t realise til recently, that consumes my way of thinking to the point where feeling guilty is very weighted in my life.

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My idea is based around the unconscious and the very conscious action of picking at my skin as one of my habits. To represent these narratives i had the idea of having two of myself interacting with each other, one being the present self and the other being a somewhat "higher self" that is aware of the destructive actions. I would there to be a discussion between these two and from here I can reveal the inner narrative of mental disorders, self awareness and habits.

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rough sketches and ideas for second short film experiment 

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rough sketches and ideas for second short film experiment 

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https://vimeo.com/482311708

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Good Intentions is my Graduation Film from the Royal College of Art.

In this small thriller about decision making and guilt, a young woman responsible for a car accident. She escapes the scene but can’t stop thinking, or imagining, what happened to the other driver. And soon strange things starts to happen…

The film premiered at BFI International Film Festival and has since then been shown in over 130 Festivals.

Review from British Film Institute:
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/lff-62-short-films

Awards:
Best Animated Film, Sehsüchte Festival, 2019
Jury Award, London International Animation Festival, 2019
Best Student Film, Anifilm, 2019
Best Hellenic Creator Award, Animasyros International Animation Festival, 2019
Storytelling Award, Thessaloniki Animation Festival, 2019
Bahega Hafez Award for Best Director, Aswan International Women Film Festival, 2019
Silver Brick, Animax Skopje Fest, 2019
Special Distinction Award, Cine court animé, 2019
Special Mention, Indie Street Film Festival, 2019
Honorable Mention, Florida Animation Festival, 2019

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Anna Mantzaris is a stop motion animator and director. "But milk is important" collects the experiences of social anxiety into a story focused around a man struggling to leave the house and talk to people to go buy milk. The simplicity of the storyline reveals the complexities of mental disorders in the small ways they present themselves in someone life and how these challenge people.

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depression, cant get to grips with her surroundings

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But Milk is Important by Eirik Grønmo Bjørnsen and Anna Mantzaris
https://vimeo.com/50600924

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A man with social phobia gets followed by a naive and clumsy creature..

An animated short by Anna Mantzaris and Eirik Grønmo Bjørnsen

Music by Phil Brookes
Sound by André Parklind

www.butmilkisimportant.blogspot.com
www.philbrookes.com

Awards:

AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST SHORT FILM - Ottawa International Animation Festival 2013 
WALT DISNEY AWARD FOR BEST GRADUATION FILM - Ottawa International Animation Festival 2013 
AUDIENCE AWARD IN THE INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM: INSIDE THE MIND - London International Animation Festival 2014
BEST FILM FROM EMERGING ARTIST - Giraf - Festival of independent animation 2014
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM (+18 category) - Giffoni International Film Festival 2013 
BEST STUDENT FILM - Se-Ma-For Film Festival 2013
AUDIENCE AWARD - Sweaty Eyeballs 2013
PEOPLE'S CHOISE AWARD - Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2013 
AUDIENCE AWARD - Frame by Frame 2013 
BEST STUDENT FILM - Athens Animfest - 2013 
POST GRADUATE STUDENT JURY: BEST STUDENT FILM - Athens Animfest 2013 
GOLD WINNER - Moving Image Student Category - Visuelt 2013
BEST STUDENT FILM - Animated Dreams 2013 
FUTURE GLANCE - Kort på KinoKino 2013
BEST SHORT FILM - Cardiff Independent Film Festival 2014
AUDIENCE AWARD - In Short Film Festival - 2014
SPECIAL MENTION - Anibar - 2014
STUDENT SPECIAL AWARD - Anifest 2013
BEST NORDIC BALTIC STUDENT FILM - Fredrikstad Animation Festival 2012
SPECIAL MENTION - Sommets du cinéma d'animation 2013
SPECIAL MENTION BY JURY MEMBER CHRIS ROBINSON - Animateka 2013

Selected in 100+ festivals and screenings including:
Annecy International Animation Festival
Hiroshima International Animation Festival
Zagreb international animation festival

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https://shorted.in/short-films/whats-wrong/

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What’s Wrong? | Short Film of the Day | Shorted

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Is it difficult to talk about? Is it just a phase? ‘What’s Wrong?’ is a deeply moving short film about a woman who is dealing with depression. It’s a serious mental health condition and Shraddha Singhvi does justice in capturing the nuances of it.

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I decided to focus on the idea of critique and self referencing to comment on my relationship with myself. I used a conversational format to begin with constructing the script and a rough idea of visuals to get my ideas out on top paper so i could refine.

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i want to produce something more revealing and provocative after my first experimentation into performing. My idea stems from the "Do not enter dairies" series created by Emily Cohn. She focuses on the activities of teenage girls in their bedroom by documenting these private moments. Although the entries feel light theres an element of intimacy that feels engaging and revealing. I want to use this as a reference as my next experimentation into building character from my own actions.

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From the video i made i found that i was able to explore and develop the idea of character in a far more fluent way than I've been able to before. Writing a script and acting out the directions i wanted to depict had an ease to it that i feel will be pivotal in my practice from now on.

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I used 'The Girl chewing gum' by John Smith asa reference to the way i approached narrating my actions. The concept of providing a narration to my own movements and emotions allows for a paradoxical relationship to form between organic events taking place but the feeling of them somehow being artificial. The use of the voiceover plays into this self surveillance theme that i like emerging from documenting myself.

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/smith-the-girl-chewing-gum-t13237

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The Girl Chewing Gum 1976 is a 16 mm black and white film with sound by the British artist John Smith. The film consists of two camera shots. The first occupies the major portion of the film and is located at an intersection near a cinema in Hackney, London. People walk through this scene and cars drive past while a voiceover of the artist appears to provide directions for the movements of people, as well as those of pigeons and a clock's hands. The second, much shorter shot shows a piece of open ground, Letchmore Heath, marked by overhead electrical pylons. At this point the voiceover track reveals that the artist is actually located there, some fifteen miles away from the street scene, and is thus, like the viewer, unable to see what is being directed first hand. The film neither glorifies nor dramatises the street scene; instead it records the everyday actions objectively, from a camera mounted on a tripod.

The Girl Chewing Gum is related to a sequence in the 1973 film La Nuit Américaine ( Day for Night) by the French director Francois Truffaut. Truffaut's film is concerned with the process of making a film, so that in one sequence, shot in fake snow, Truffaut is shown directing the movements of every extra in a crowded street scene. Smith borrowed the conceit of exposing the work of the director as the subject of the film, but instead of showing himself in control of a large set and group of actors, he narrates the comings and goings of the public, first appearing to instruct them, then describing their movements. The film's title captures this process, by memorialising an 'extra' - the girl chewing gum - who only appears on screen for the briefest of moments.

The conjunction of word and image in Smith's voiceover transforms everyday documentation into something created and artificial. Even when the tone changes and the viewer realises that Smith is retrospectively voicing-over a real-life scene, the narrative drive of the film encourages the viewer to go along with the conceit - even when Smith starts to direct pigeons or the hour hand of a clock. Film critic Nicky Hamlyn has observed how:

There is ... a fascination with language here, in the way that description of a scene can be changed into a series of commands to the things in that scene by adding certain words to a descriptive sentence. The temporal shift that is required is also achieved by literally moving the words in time, slipping them back so that they occur before, rather than after, the events on the image track they describe. For much of the time the actions being directed are obviously spontaneous, and the commands obviously not commands, but every now and then a person moves into frame and appears to respond in a deliberate manner to directions. At these points the viewer slips involuntarily into credulous mode.
(Nicky Hamlyn in John Smith Film and Video Works 1972-2002, Bristol 2002, p.46.)

The film is laden with feelings of doubt and improbability, showing up the failure of words alone to represent the activity recorded by the camera in the street and the field. As film historian A.L. Rees has indicated: 'Language is shown to contain a lack (or a "lag") in time and, ultimately the visual world escapes full coverage by the abstract word.' (A.L. Rees in John Smith Film and Video Works 1972-2002, Bristol 2002, p.17.) With this film Smith questions the authority of image and word both as objective document and as recorded narrative.

Smith studied at the Royal College of Art in London with the filmmaker Peter Gidal. Gidal was a founder member of the London Filmmaker's Cooperative (LFMC), an important meeting point for a range of people interested in experimenting with film. The work of those associated with the LFMC departed from the conventions of narrative cinema and instead explored the materiality of film and alternative ways of storytelling. This self-reflexive and often artisanal way of working was described by members of the LFMC as structuralist or materialist (see Peter Gidal, Structuralist Film Anthology, London 1976). The Girl Chewing Gum was made shortly before Smith left the Royal College of Art and though it demonstrates a structuralist approach by making the continuity shot and the voiceover the subjects of his film, the artist injects parody, humour and narrative, characteristics often missing from the work of his peers.

Further reading
Mark Cosgrove and Josephine Lanyon (eds.), John Smith Film and Video Works 1972-2002 exhibition catalogue, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol 2002.
Martin Herbert, 'John Smith', Frieze, no.132, June-August 2010, http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/john_smith/, accessed 25 February 2016.
Erika Balsom (ed.), In Focus: 'The Girl Chewing Gum' 1976 by John Smith, Tate Research Publication, 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/john-smith-the-girl-chewing-gum/the-girl-chewing-gum-1976-by-john-smith-r1175957, accessed 25 February 2016.

Andrew Wilson
January 2010
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'The Girl Chewing Gum', John Smith, 1976 | Tate

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'The Girl Chewing Gum', John Smith, 1976

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i wanted to take on an alter ego when approaching this experiment. I just wanted to focus on experimentation in these early stages of video and performance art so i didn't have a set idea about what i wanted to achieve or a particular concept. I started by just filming certain habits in my life that shape my day significantly.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zWv6NdgJNKbMayCGWbsiVv-03G9ndqBBuL8x2VQI_vI/edit

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQYSnBHnzM

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Using comedy and video to experiment with performance art and characterisations.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33827728/

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doi: 10.1017/S0033291721000659. Online ahead of print.

Affiliations

1 Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.

2 South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.

3 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.

4 Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.

5 Department of Health Service and Population Research, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.

doi: 10.1017/S0033291721000659. Online ahead of print.

Affiliations

1 Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.

2 South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.

3 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.

4 Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.

5 Department of Health Service and Population Research, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.

Abstract

Background: Voices are commonly experienced as communication with a personified 'other' with ascribed attitudes, intentionality and personality (their own 'character'). Phenomenological work exploring voice characterisation informs a new wave of relational therapies. To date, no study has investigated the role of characterisation in behavioural engagement with voices or within psychological therapy for distressing voices.

Methods: Baseline characterisation (the degree to which the voice is an identifiable and characterful entity) of the dominant voice was rated (high, medium or low) using a newly developed coding framework, for n = 60 people prior to starting AVATAR therapy. Associations between degree of characterisation and (i) everyday behavioural engagement with voices (The Beliefs about Voices Questionnaire-Revised; n = 60); and (ii) interaction within avatar dialogue [Session 4 Time in Conversation (participant-avatar); n = 45 therapy completers] were explored.

Results: Thirty-three per cent reported high voice characterisation, 42% medium and 25% low. There was a significant association between characterisation and behavioural engagement [H(2) = 7.65, p = 0.022, ɛ2 = 0.130] and duration of participant-avatar conversation [F(2,42) = 6.483, p = 0.004, η2 = 0.236]. High characterisation was associated with increased behavioural engagement compared with medium (p = 0.004, r = 0.34; moderate effect) and low (p = 0.027, r = 0.25; small-moderate effect) with a similar pattern observed for the avatar dialogue [high v. medium: p = 0.008, Hedges' g = 1.02 (large effect); high v. low: p = 0.023, Hedges' g = 1.03 (large effect)]. No differences were observed between medium and low characterisation.

Discussion: Complex voice characterisation is associated with how individuals interact with their voice(s) in and out of therapy. Clinical implications and future directions for AVATAR therapy and other relational therapies are discussed.

Keywords: Auditory hallucinations; digital health; personification; relational therapy; voices.

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national center for biotechnology information

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The role of characterisation in everyday voice engagement and AVATAR therapy dialogue - PubMed

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doi: 10.1017/S0033291721000659. Online ahead of print. 1 Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK. 2 South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK. 3 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.

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https://psychwriter.com.au/2018/05/06/narrative-therapy-and-your-character-the-story-within-the-story/

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Narrative therapy is not the dominant therapeutic framework I utilise in my clinical work, but like most eclectic practitioners, I have enough of an understanding of it to 'borrow' some of its theoretical underpinnings and strategies when they seem to be beneficial to a particular client. It was as I was reflecting that we write stories, and that narrative therapy is all about the stories we create about ourselves, that I wondered how this framework could help writers. So I did some reading-a wonderful refresher for both my practice and my character development!-and thought I'd share how this understanding of the human psyche can benefit fellow authors.

Narrative therapy states that we all have many stories about our lives and relationships-our abilities, our struggles, our competencies, our failures. The way we have developed these stories is determined by how we link certain events together and the meaning we attribute to them. For example, I could have a story about myself as a 'good cook.' This means I would string together a sequence of events; whipping up an omelette, never flopping a soufflé, or making my own butter for my homemade pastry, that reflect this story's theme. Notice that to form this story about being a good cook, I am selecting out certain events as important, as evidence, for this particular plot.

As more and more events are selected and gathered into the dominant plot, the story gains richness and thickness (don't you love the parallels to our own creative writing process?!?). As it gains thickness, other events of my exemplary cooking are easily remembered and added to the story. Events that do not fit with this plot; an overcooked steak or undercooked pasta, are seen as insignificant or a fluke. What's more, our stories are constructed within a social context. If my family members have described me as a good cook, if cooking competence is valued in my wider community, then this would make a significant difference to the plot's development.

Essentially, narrative therapy outlines that as we tell ourselves our stories, there are always events that are given prominence, and other that are not selected.

What does this mean for your character? I'm wondering if you can already see how it relates to the meaning your character makes of themselves and their world, how their past has moulded their belief and value system, and what it could mean for their future (and character arc). Let's look at it in a little more depth.

There's different types of stories

A character may have a story about themselves as being successful and competent, like my 'good cook' story. Alternatively, your character may have a story about themselves as being 'a failure at relationships', 'a coward', or as 'lacking determination.' Families can have stories about themselves as 'close' or 'dysfunctional'. Communities can have stories about themselves as 'strong' or 'isolated.' Events, as they occur, will be interpreted in light of the plot that is dominant at the time.
Ask yourself-does your character have any dominant stories about themselves? How has it been socially constructed by the events in their life, their family, and their wider community?
Stories will impact our future

Your character's dominant story affects their present but also has implications for future choices and actions. For example, if I'm asked to cook for my son's bake sale, my decision and plans (do I make multi-layered cupcakes or a vague commitment without any intention of following through?) will be influenced by the dominant story I have about my cooking competency. If your female character's dominant story is that women are weak, then what do you think is going to happen when a rival tribe attacks and her people need all hands on deck to defend themselves?
Ask yourself-how will your character's dominant story impact the choices they make as you build the plot around them?
Thin descriptions

Thin description is what narrative therapy labels the meanings reached in the face of adversity. Thin descriptions allow little space for the complexities and contradictions of life. I frame this concept as the narrow story theme your character has made as they make meaning from a challenging situation. For example, what if someone developed a nasty case of food poising after eating my chicken cacciatore? What if my husband started pointing out that I use too much salt, not enough veggies, can't get eggs sunny side up right? A thin description may arise where I define myself as a 'bad cook', and these thin descriptions have many negative effects.
Thin descriptions allow little space for the complexities and contradictions of life. What's more, they obscure many other possible meanings. If your character has decided they are 'not good enough', 'hopeless', or a 'troublemaker', any times they haven't been any of the above become less visible. These thin conclusions become your character's 'truth', which disempowers them as they define themselves in terms of their weaknesses, disabilities, or inadequacies.

In the end, thin descriptions become their dominant story, which consequently, impacts their choices and actions. If 'bad cook' becomes my dominant narrative, then I'm not likely to contribute to the bake sale. I may buy take-out more and start putting on the kilos. I'll avoid circumstances that may expose my 'weakness' (e.g. having friends over for dinner).
Ask yourself-has your character developed a thin description about themselves following an adverse experience? Or if something challenging is about to happen, what meaning/narrative will they make about it and themselves in the aftermath?
Alternative stories and the character arc

A therapist using the narrative therapy framework seeks out alternative stories with a client in the aim to identify stories by which they would like to live. They seek to 'co-author' rich and thick descriptions; articulating in fine detail these alternative stories where they are freed from the influence of problematic stories.

Is anyone else seeing a character arc here? If something occurs in your story world that has your character stepping back from their thinly described story about themselves, you've just given them space to see themselves and their world differently. It's what I aimed to do in my soon-to-be released YA contemporary romance. My hero, Erik, created a narrative about his world that concluded we all strive to hide our innate dark side, including himself (following a traumatic childhood). It's meeting Christine and the challenge of her own narrative-that we are all good at heart-that he's forced to decide; continue with his current course, or re-write his own story.

That change of perspective, and therefore trajectory, is what every psychologist seeks to co-author in their office. I believe it's a powerful human metamorphosis that we can capture in a story, and that many readers love to lose themselves in.
Ask yourself-does your character experience an arc? If so, who is going to co-author it with them? And how will their own narrative about themselves be different afterward?
What do you think? Can you see this applying in your own story building? What about with yourself? What stories have you created about yourself and your writing? How do these narratives impact on your choices?

Oh, and P.S. I do not have a 'good cook' story about myself. I have more of a 'one-pot-wonder' story about my cooking competency 😉

Have you read Grit for Writers? I'd love to hear what you thought of it. If you could take a moment to leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads I'd be grateful. Thank you!

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Narrative Therapy and Your Character: The Story Within The Story

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Narrative therapy is not the dominant therapeutic framework I utilise in my clinical work, but like most eclectic practitioners, I have enough of an understanding of it to 'borrow' some of its theoretical underpinnings and strategies when they seem to be beneficial to a particular client.

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I thought an interesting way to explore my voice within my eating eating disorder is to use a technique that is commonly used in therapy. The technique of using the "other" when speaking about different aspects of yourself allows you to establish and visualise your true self and distinguish the other aspects of yourself. This method of segregation allows you to truly be self reflective. Meeting and engaging with this parts of myself is a method that i have found profoundly helpful in breaking apart my inner narrative to soothe and heal myself.

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From my research into the depictions of eating disorders i discovered the principles that i feel are important to my project in order to create a final piece that explores the scope of these issues in a way that doesn’t sensationalise or tigger.

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Voices are commonly experienced as communication with a personified 'other' with ascribed attitudes, intentionality and personality (their own 'character'). Phenomenological work exploring voice characterisation informs a new wave of relational therapies. To date, no study has investigated the role of characterisation in behavioural engagement with voices or within psychological therapy for distressing voices.

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https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/19/garden/writers-hunger-food-as-metephor.html

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

WHEN I was interviewed by a friend who is a well-known food specialist, it quickly became clear that we operated from different sensibilities while speaking the same language.

''How do you reward yourself for having worked all day at writing?'' I was asked. Sounding rather unconvincing I tried to explain that writing itself seemed to be the reward.

''Do you ever indulge in food fantasies, for instance about childhood foods?'' my friend asked. This baffled me: Why, I wondered, would anyone waste precious time daydreaming about food?

''If you have to ask,'' my friend said sagely, ''you wouldn't understand why.''

Of course I understand that food is symbolic: a kind of poetry. In even moderately affluent societies it seems scarcely to exist in itself, but rather as an expression of metaphor.

For some, food must be symbolic or it is nothing - it must be encapsulated in an ''occasion'' or it is nothing. Eating in the wrong circumstances, or with the wrong people, or under duress, or pressure, or in haste is deeply repugnant if not impossible. (This is not to suppose that genuine hunger would not change our attitude, and fairly swiftly.) ''Food is love,'' I was once told. The occasion was one of tension and the tone was both reproachful and belligerent: The secret meaning - ''If you don't eat the food I've spent hours preparing for you, and lots of it, you don't love me'' - was not really a secret. The beleaguered dinner table has become a staple of American drama - the family ritual-gone-wrong from which participants, usually children, yearn to escape but dare not.

A friend of mine found himself in a bizarre situation, which approached situation comedy: His mother and his wife's mother were so bitterly jealous of each other that he and his family had to eat complete - repeat, complete - dinners at each house on Thanksgiving Day. An added complication was that, to prevent heartbreak, neither mother could be allowed to know about the other's dinner. Each thought she was the Thanksgiving hostess. Thus my friend came to associate Thanksgiving with a unique species of hell.

Nor did he much like, as I recall, the other holidays.

In affluent societies thinking about food in abstract and codified terms can come virtually to replace eating itself as a symbolic activity. Not what one eats but how it is prepared; not what food is but what it means; who has prepared it for you, or for whom you have prepared it.

For really good cooks it is the preparation of meals that arouses excitement and anticipation, the experimentation with new combinations, exoticism of a domestic sort. One well-known cook here in Princeton assembles virtual collages of food. Another prepares not only vegetables grown in his own garden but vegetables grown with exactitude from seedlings he has himself cultivated. Many men bake bread and speak of it in such ecstatic terms that one must believe them - though one is not much tempted to test it out. When the bread symbolism is so immediate, so palpable, what margin remains for the imagination?

In such societies the willful resistance to food - fasting to the point of anorexia nervosa, for instance - is a way of defining the self; the ''will'' as superior to ''appetite.'' When the anorexic instinct is contained within a culturally coherent symbol system -such as religious fasting and self-mortification - it has the value of a transcendent act; to fast 40 days and nights in the desert is a gesture of self-abnegation, not self-enhancement. When the anorexic instinct is unmoored, so to speak, from a social context, it seems merely stubborn, self-destructive, suicidal.

In literature, eating and not eating are always symbolic. Food always ''means'' something other than mere food. Eating scenes, particularly scenes of overconsumption, seem to shade inevitably into comedy, satire - the famous eating episode in Fielding's ''Tom Jones'' (food as sheer sensuality, gluttony, sex-to-be); banquets in Flaubert's ''Madame Bovary'' and in the more sumptuous ''Salammbo''; the claustrophobic holiday dinner in Joyce's ''The Dead''; the ''artificial sensation'' of Huysmans's ''A Rebours'' (''Against the Grain'') - involving as it does, in one passage of inspired silliness, the Decadent hero ''playing internal symphonies to himself [ by ] providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear.'' Like any infant the Decadent wants to put the very world in his mouth - or is the world a mouth?

Many-coursed Victorian dinners of stupefying excess are described in Dickens's ''Our Mutual Friend'' and Mann's ''Buddenbrooks'' by way of poetically commenting on a self-indulgent bourgeoisie. The Buddenbrooks's Sunday dinner is so heavy as to be fatal to one of the gentlemen. In Charlotte Bronte's ''Villette'' the ascetic heroine, Lucy Snowe, registers fierce contempt for a Renoirlike painting of a woman ''extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat'' whose ''hearty health'' is particularly offensive.

One of the most powerful interludes in ''Jane Eyre'' is that of Jane's near-starvation as, in flight from her beloved Rochester, she must beg food from strangers: A crust of bread becomes the symbol of her humbled pride. Christina Rossetti's ''Goblin Market'' is a virtual fruitcake of a poem, studded with delicacies of startling suggestiveness. (The goblins offer their wares to innocent young women in ''sugar-baited'' voices: ''Plump unpecked cherries,'' ''bloom-down-cheeked peaches,'' ''wild free-born cranberries,'' ''Currants and gooseberries,/Bright-fire-like barberries,/Figs to fill your mouth,/Citrons from the South'') - a feminist cautionary tale of subversive ingenuity.

By contrast, Hemingway's fiction abounds in scenes, often protracted, involving the convivial consumption of food and drink. Lovers, friends, comrades all bond themselves, so to speak, by ritualistic excess; machismo demands a hearty self-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.

When Emily Dickinson writes, ''It would have starved a Gnat/ To live so small as I -/And yet I was a living Child -/With Food's necessity/Upon me - like a Claw -'' and ''I had been hungry, all the Years -/My Noon had Come - to dine -'' she is speaking of spiritual and emotional deprivation, and giving poetic voice to the variegated hunger of women of her place and time.

Kafka's Hunger Artist, whose art is that of fasting for extraordinary periods, is both an embodiment and parody of the artist who deprives himself of normal nourishment in the service of his art - an art of dubious significance, in any case. (It demands the constant attention of an audience even as the Hunger Artist scorns his audience.) Dying, it might be said, to spite the very instinct to live, the Hunger Artist confesses, ''If I had found [ the food I liked ] I would have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.'' The ''Representative Person'' of Emily Dickinson's poetry does not romanticize her predicament; Kafka's protagonist does -and becomes, ironically, both victim and agent of his own fate.

When poets - as diverse as Horace and D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, Theodore Weiss, Maxine Kumin, Diane Wakoski, Robert Haas, Daniel Halpern, Erica Jong, Sandra Gilbert -and numerous others - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane. If food is poetry is not poetry also food? THIS IS JUST TO SAY I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

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WRITERS' HUNGER: FOOD AS METEPHOR (Published 1986)

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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https://thescholarship.ecu.edu/bitstream/handle/10342/3535/Whitt_ecu_0600M_10386.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

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My criticisms with common media depictions of eating disorders 

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My criticisms with common media depictions of eating disorders 

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From absorbing this content its clear theres an ill management in the way eating disorders are portrayed in modern media. Critically analysing these pieces of content under the lens of what they provide the viewers with is deeply troubling. Theres two clear sides i have formed my criticism upon; firstly from the side of someone vulnerable to or suffering from eating issues. The other from the paster-by who views this content unaffected by of these issues.

For example in the song Courage by Superchick, they sing "I know the right words to say. Like I don't feel well . I ate before I came" The song is based on the personal experiences of lead singer Melissa Brock with her eating disorder. The song explores how over coming issues with food is a slow journey but one that you need the support of others for. Despite being far less crude than the other songs i listened to, there was a particular reason i pick this song to critique.

In recent years, the dawn of social media meant that people had platforms to share experiences and speak openly about issues on. However much with anything, these seemingly innocent  exchanges quickly became breeding grounds for people to sensationalise mental disorders. Echo chambers of romantic notions of thinness and struggle meant that large communities were founded with the soul purpose of pity and maintaining the problems to extremely troubling end goals.

More often than not media produced about eating disorders fails to recognise the deep cognitive and external issues that cause these problem. But rather focus on the tragedy of it all. Usually centring around the stories of thin white woman, these are road maps for anyone who is vulnerable to these problems to base their future actions off. Furthermore, as someone who has lived with these issues most of her life i find the narratives around eating disorders greatly isolating and quite frankly embarrassing. Glamourised images and lyrics that romanticise struggle feel very distant from any sort of reality of an eating disorder. Yet the grand idea that greatness is always born from painful endeavours has bled into the depictions of disordered eating.

So, despite Brock's honesty in her lyrics about her experiences, i would argue that there is not need to speak on the methods and aesthetic results of these. My opinion is that narratives need to focus on the Individual, not the eating. They need to centre around the true self being reflective on their reality rather than muddy stories of starvation and thinness. Although parts of a problem, they do not even scratch the surface of the complex narratives people experience. Creating images that focus on these surface level attributes usually feeds into larger systemic problems such as fatphobia, racism and sexism.

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Courage - superchick

Beauty from pain - superchick
skinny skinny - Ashton Erwin
4st 7lb - Manic Street Preachers
90210 - Wale
Me and Mia - Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
Ana's Songs - Sliver chair

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https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/eating-disorders-art-romanticize/619365/

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The Problem With the Stories We Tell About Eating Disorders

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When art about the subject glamorizes it, audiences pay the price.

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https://www.bonappetit.com/story/liana-finck-food-pyramid

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Can Liana Finck read minds? Every time I see the latest cartoon she's illustrated, I'm more convinced. A little sad, a little snarky, and very smart, they hit uncomfortably close to home for me and for the many others who follow her on Instagram, read her in the New Yorker, and buy her books. She puts to paper (and to the world) the sorts of thoughts that us timid folk can't or won't articulate. And no topic, including food, is spared.

These alternative food pyramids, exploring all the idiosyncratic ways that we eat and the stories we tell ourselves about our consumption, are just one example of her incisive wit. They're simultaneously more and less real than the USDA food guide pyramid some of us remember from school-as well as much funnier and, quite frankly, just as useful. Take a look for yourself. -Sarah Jampel

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Cartoonist Liana Finck Has Some Edits for the Food Pyramid

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Can Liana Finck read minds? Every time I see the latest cartoon she's illustrated, I'm more convinced. A little sad, a little snarky, and very smart, they hit uncomfortably close to home for me and for the many others who follow her on Instagram, read her in the New Yorker, and buy her books.

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http://radicalart.info/meta.html

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The big challenge of meta-art is posed by the doctrine of the esthetic viability of everything – suggested by Duchamp's readymades, and formulated literally by Richard of St. Victor, John Scottus Eriugena, Lewis Carroll, Francis Picabia, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Herman de Vries, Piero Manzoni, Ben Vautier, John Cage, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, George Maciunas, and probably many others. To hint at this possibility (as Duchamp did), or to claim it with so many words (as theoreticians and conceptual artists have done), is not too difficult, but to articulate an artistic program which takes it seriously is another matter. Because no one knows what everything is.

. . . le readymade, c'est n'importe quoi. Ou encore: le readymade est absolument quelconque. C'est mon droit démocratique de juger en profane qui m'autorise à dire que, malgré leur qualités - ou leur absence de qualités - plastiques, le sèche-bouteilles, l'urinoir ou la pelle à neige sont des objets quelconques. Mais, direz-vous, rien ne m'autorise à les juger absolument quelconques. En effet, rien ne m'y autorise. Mais tout m'y oblige. Duchamp ayant anticipé l'auteur du readymade dans la position du regardeur profane qui juge que l'art moderne, au moins depuis le dadaïsme, c'est n'importe quoi, oblige en retour ce regardeur, surtout s'il est "expert", à se projeter rétrospectivement dans la position même de cet auteur et à se soumettre à la même loi que lui. C'est la loi de la modernité et elle ne dit qu'une chose: fais n'importe quoi.
La loi ne fait pas qu'interdire, elle oblige. J'appelle donc moderne l'artiste dont le devoir est (était, fut, a été?) de faire n'importe quoi. C'est un devoir et non un droit. C'est un commendement que l'artiste moderne reçoit et non une autorisation qu'il se donne. Comme tel, ce n'est même pas une loi au sens ordinaire ou juridique. La phrase "fais n'importe quoi" n'énonce pas une règle à laquelle des cas peuvent être soumis, elle prescrit au contraire d'agir sans règle.

[De Duve, 1989, pp. 118-119.]

The esthetic interpretation of everything need not be limited to what we happen to encounter in the world as it is; it may include everything imagineable, all possible images. This observation creates an artistic challenge which has a philosophical dimension (how to define "everything"?), and a technical one (how to show it?).

Is it possible to define the set of all possible art objects? Not in a very general way. But once we have specified a particular medium sufficiently explicitly, we have in fact specified a particular set of possible pieces. This is especially clear when we employ a digital medium. In this case, there is a mathematical enumeration of the set of possible outputs. Look, for instance, at a black-and-white screen with a particular resolution, say m x n pixels; the set of all possible images is then defined as the set generated by all combinations of choices of black vs. white for every pixel.

A computer program that in principle generates all these possible images one by one, can be constructed rather easily on the basis of this idea. Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman were the first to actually do this, in 1991. They used a grid of 171 x 171 pixels. For their program to run through all its possible outputs would take longer than the estimated lifetime of the universe; but an ingeneous interface makes it possible to "scroll ahead" very effectively.

The method of chance art can be effectively deployed in this situation: draw random samples from the set of possibilities, rather than enumerating it. In this way one quickly gets an impression of the range of possible outcomes. To sample from the set of black & white pixel grids, for instance, one makes for every pixel a random choice about its colour, independently of all the other pixels. Many artists have constructed random samples of "the m x n grid", for very small values of m and n; this results in the "randomized checkerboards" which were the icons of early chance art. (E.g.: Kelly, Morellet, De Vries, Winiarski.)

Now the thing about these randomized checkerboards is, that to the human observer they all look alike. If we define the set of paintings or screen-images as the set of m x n pixel-grids, then virtually all of these will look the same. If the resolution is high enough, they will look like evenly grey planes. This kind of chance art thus gets very close to the monochrome.

Chance art comes into its own when the artists vary the specification of the set of possibilities which are considered by the sampling procedure. For different series of works they tend to employ different "image grammars", which typically define a small repertoire of shapes with a small number of variable properties. The random choices must then be made within the set of possibilities specified by the image grammar. For instance: a random number of dots with randomly chosen sizes is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, a random number of lines with randomly chosen lengths and directions is placed on randomly chosen positions; or, one line is drawn through a randomly chosen sequence of points. In work like this, the promise of surprise and diversity, which is implicit in the idea of an "arbitrary image", does not pan out. The decisions of the artist (which elements, which variable parameters, what range of variation) largely determine the character of the resulting image; the random choice which is made within the constraints of the image grammar does in fact not make that much of a difference.

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The big challenge of meta-art is posed by the doctrine of the esthetic viability of everything - suggested by Duchamp's readymades, and formulated literally by Richard of St. Victor, John Scottus Eriugena, Lewis Carroll, Francis Picabia, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Herman de Vries, Piero Manzoni, Ben Vautier, John Cage, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, George Maciunas, and probably many others.

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https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-body-issues-artists-maps-human-body-reveal-desire-immortality

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3630236

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In this article, I am concerned with two issues: to understand how power relations are embodied in beliefs, statements, and practices about food preparation, eating, and the body; and to determine how to represent these statements and practices in nonessentialist terms. The article explores how notions of strength/fragility, activity/passivity, and purity/pollution are used to construct, represent, and contest social distinctions in contexts of ritual, sociability, and politics within a stratified, seminomadic rural community of Tuareg in Niger, West Africa. I analyze reflections about food, conversation during eating, and more general food-connected practices as these relate to concepts of body and social origin. Food habits, I argue, are reflected in both traditional and changing social categories, and these social categories are evidenced in food as well as in other contexts which symbolically refer to eating and the body: for example, color and texture tastes, use of material cultural items such as utensils in food preparation, the etiquette of commensuality, and weaponry use in animal sacrifice, meat preparation, and armed conflict.

Journal Information

Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.The Journal of Anthropological Researchis published in the interest of general anthropology. It was founded by Leslie Spier in 1945 as the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. JAR publishes substantive, peer-reviewed research articles and book reviews in all subfields of anthropology, totaling approximately six hundred pages of text annually. It sponsors and publishes the JAR Distinguished Lectures by leading scholars in the discipline. JAR is an independent, non-profit medium for the dissemination of significant, theoretically informed, broadly contextualized research results of interest to the international profession of anthropology. It has over one thousand subscribers worldwide. Institutions may receive JAR electronically for a modest fee in addition to the hard-copy subscription.

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Matters of Taste: Food, Eating, and Reflections on "The Body Politic" in Tuareg Society on JSTOR

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In this article, I am concerned with two issues: to understand how power relations are embodied in beliefs, statements, and practices about food preparation, eating, and the body; and to determine how to represent these statements and practices in nonessentialist terms. The article explores how notions of strength/fragility, activity/passivity, and purity/pollution are used to construct, represent, and contest social distinctions in contexts of ritual, sociability, and politics within a stratified, seminomadic rural community of Tuareg in Niger, West Africa.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqZATPYLGho

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The Do Not Enter Diaries: Teenage Bedrooms and the Forbidden Frontier | The New York Times

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https://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/199

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At the end of the episode "Crowd Pleasers," from her television series Nigella Feasts, we see British food writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in her nightgown opening her fridge in the dark. The fridge light reveals the remnant dishes of chili con carne that she prepared earlier on in the programme. She scoops up a dollop of soured cream and chili onto a spoon and shovels it into her mouth, nods approvingly and then picks up the entire chili dish. She eats another mouthful, utters a satisfied "umm" sound, closes the fridge door and walks away, taking the dish of chili with her.

This recurring scenario at the end of Nigella's programmes is paradoxically constructed as a private moment to be witnessed by many viewers. It resembles acts of secret eating, personal food habits and offers a glimpse of the performed self, adding to Nigella's persona. Throughout Nigella's programmes there is a conscious tension between the private and public. This tension is confounded by Nigella's acknowledgement of, and direct address to, the viewers, characterised by the knowing look she gives to the camera when she tastes her food, licks her fingers as she cooks, or reveals her secret chocolate stash in her store cupboard; the overt performance of supposedly surreptitious gestures. Through her look-back at the camera Nigella performs both sin and confession, communicating her guilty-pleasure as she self-consciously reveals this pleasure to the viewers.

At the start of her performance Table Occasions (2000), solo artist Bobby Baker explains that there are strict rules that she must follow, the most important being that she must not walk on the floor. Baker then hosts a dinner party (for imaginary guests), balancing on top of the table and chairs wearing high-heeled shoes. When the 'meal' is finished Baker breaks her rule; she gets down from the table and walks freely across the performance space, giving the audience a knowing look of mock-surprise, as if everyone was seduced into believing in the compulsory nature of her rule ( Table Occasions).

In this performance Baker confesses her anxiety and discomfort in the act of playing the host. By breaking rules of common etiquette as well as her own abstract rules, she performatively constructs her "sins" and her "confessions." Baker's look-back at the audience reveals her self-conscious "confessing self."

As a practitioner-researcher working in the field of autobiography, developing from artists such as Baker, my practice attempts to articulate the impact that popular cultural performances of food may have upon current notions of food, identity and the self. I seek to use food as a vehicle for investigating and revealing multiple versions of self. The "confessing subject" in contemporary performance practice has been discussed extensively by Deirdre Heddon, particularly as a means of "questioning the subject of confession" ( Daily 230). This paper is concerned with acts of disclosure (and confession) that occur through food in popular culture and performance practice. My particular focus will be my durational performance work If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake,commissioned by the Alsager Arts Centre Gallery, as part of the Curating Knowledge Residency Programme initiated by gallery curator Jane Linden. I will explore strategies of performative disclosure through food in both live and mediated contexts, in order to investigate Heddon's distinction between "confessional performance art" and "the gamut of currently available mass-mediated confessional opportunities" ( Daily 232).

My aim is to explore a current cultural relationship between food, confession and autobiography through the lens of performance. My concern lies in the performance of self and the ways in which the self is disclosed through food and I use Nigella's and Baker's performances, as confessional/autobiographical material, to develop my argument. Although operating in different mediums, Baker (as performance artist), and Nigella (as media personality), both use food to perform the self and employ autobiographical strategies to reveal aspects of their personal domestic lives to their audience.

It is necessary to acknowledge that Nigella is first and foremost a commodity and her programmes function as part mediation of her cooking brand, along with her cookbooks and cookware. Intentionality aside, I am interested in the ways in which Nigella engages her viewers, which is culturally indicative of the wider phenomenon of the celebrity chef and strategies of performative disclosure operating through food. My argument rests on the premise that Nigella's strategies are similar to those used by Baker resulting in a slippage in Nigella's position between Heddon's opposing categories. Nigella not only adopts a confessional, intimate and personal mode of address but also uses it to construct her persona, lifestyle and perform a version of her autobiography.

Gabrielle Helms, in analysing reality TV programmes such as Big Brother, observes that

Through the use of direct camera address, the confession creates the sense of immediacy and urgency needed to establish a special 'live' relationship between speaker and audience, one that remains unattainable in written confession (53).

Nigella also establishes a "live" relationship with her audience through her personal and direct camera address. Yet Nigella's programmes are only reflective of her supposed actual domestic life. We witness fragmented images of her pampering in her bedroom, carefully choosing vegetables from a market stall and taking her children to school. The seamless flow of these constructed "life" images perform a mock-autobiography of Nigella's life.

Baker's practice is rooted in the domestic and through her use of food in performance she communicates her 'everyday' experiences as a wife, mother and artist. Baker's work belongs to a field of resistant arts practice through which she discloses her often painful and difficult relationship to femininity and the domestic. Baker has stated "food is like my own language" (Iball 75), and it is a highly visceral, visual language that she uses to communicate her autobiographical material. Lucy Baldwin describes that Baker's "taboos collect around the visceral qualities of food: its proximity to the body and to emotions, and its ability to represent what we would rather forget" (37). Baker often uses foods in ways that invoke the internal body. In Drawing on a Mother's Experience,she narrates personal stories of motherhood whilst marking foodstuffs onto a sheet to map out her memories and experiences. In Baker's final moment she rolls herself up in the sheet,

The foodstuffs begin to bleed through the second skin of the sheet. Gradually, this seepage takes on the appearance of internal organs-a mapping of capillaries and veins, a tacit revelation of interior matters (Baldwyn 51).

The blending of both food and memories marked onto Baker's body discloses a fluid, unstable identity. As Claire MacDonald states Baker "allows the self to operate as a site where the meanings of identity can be contested" (191). By nature, autobiographical performance problematises notions of identity and self and there is always a tension between the real and the fictional. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have stated that:

Autobiographical acts[...]cannot be understood as individualist acts of a sovereign subject, whole and entire unto itself. And the representation produced cannot be taken as a guarantee of a 'true self', authentic, coherent, and fixed (11).

Baker's construction of "self" is multi-faceted, sitting in between the fictional and the "real." Using food, Baker layers together the pieces of "Bobby," past and present, onto her live body and unites her "self" with her other "selves" in an intimate and 'real' shared experience with a live audience; the weaving of a complex, engaging and moving autobiography. My interest is to further explore how food can be used to disclose and contest identity.

Food is inherent in social and public events, in meal times and celebrations, yet food is also kept behind closed doors and inside domestic kitchens constituting the stuff of private lives. Crossing the realms of private and public, food has become a vehicle for spectacle and entertainment in media culture and is used to reveal identities, subjectivities and personal histories. Cooking programmes belong to the hybrid reality TV genre, frequently termed "infotainment." Signe Hansen has usefully observed that "when we watch shows like Big Brother, Survivor or Temptation Island, our position as consumers is exactly that of watching Jamie Oliver [or] Nigella Lawson" (55). Helms has also argued that reality TV shows "focus on auto/biographical performance," and asks, "are the lives represented on these shows, and the ways they are represented, reflections of contemporary understandings of self and identity?" (46). In this vein, I propose that the lives represented in food media such as Nigella's are also constructed through the autobiographical, and Nigella's particular relationship with food furthers a trend of self-disclosure that capitulates into abject voyeurism.

Television chefs each have their own unique, "hypertrophied personality" (Govan and Rebellato 36). Nigella's persona is characterised through her personal and casual address, which bridges the gap between "food expert" (performer) and "novice" (viewer) previously circumscribed by food experts like Delia Smith. Hansen fittingly observes that "the experience of befriending, of coming to 'know,' the person behind the persona is one of the particularities of today's media climate" (55). Nigella allows us to "know" her better by revealing her greed, laziness, messiness and lack of self-control. She reveals her personal relationship to recipes, such as those originating from her grandmother, or cooking utensils that hold sentimental value, like her mother's wooden spoon.

The glimpses of self that Nigella exposes through food are framed as confession and privilege her viewers with "inside knowledge." Although the fictional/real tension prevails, it is the performanc e of autobiography that is significant here. The mock-autobiographical address entices viewers and transforms what is essentially an advertisement into a particular practice of visual engagement, one that is founded upon the pleasures of witnessing and consuming disclosures.

In the case of reality TV an element of guilty pleasure remains on the part of the viewer, who is learning about someone's private life without having to reciprocate[...]By observing others from a position of omniscience, viewers can live vicariously and can engage without having to take responsibility[...]they can move between attraction and revulsion without consequences for themselves (Helms 55).

Both Nigella and Baker embody "attraction and revulsion" to different ends-in Kitchen show (1991), Baker performs thirteen actions that each result in a "mark" being left on her body. Baker's sixth action is opening a fresh tub of margarine, confessing her delight in the "satisfying nipple peak in the centre." Baker then subverts her desire, smearing the margarine onto her face, crossing between "attraction" and "revulsion." Baker's marks "defamiliarize the ordinary and everyday to provoke new [...] disturbing insights" (Blumberg 197).

In contrast to the sanitised aesthetic trope of cooking programmes, in which ingredients are pre-prepared and separated into glass bowls, "the hallucination of hygiene" (Govan and Rebellato 37), Nigella gets her hands dirty and heightens moments when her body comes into contact with food. In her "Comfort Food" episode from Nigella Bites, she aggressively pierces the insides of the lemon declaring, "I quite like this ritual disembowelling of the lemon." Her fingertips often disappear into her mouth as she licks and tastes the food that she "disembowels." Using Kristeva's theory of abjection, Emma Govan and Dan Rebellato acknowledge the precariousness of the boundaries of the body, stating that "the passages into and out of the body are always dangerous sites for the self" (33). Nigella crosses the boundaries of etiquette and hygiene and exposes an open, wanting body that is both "repulsive" and "attractive". Her persona is also characterised through the trope of consumer seduction, in terms of her adopting a flirtatious manner and playful aligning of cooking acts with sexual pleasure. She seductively describes the "wonderful primrose emulsion" colour of the lemon sauce, which matches her own yellow T-shirt, thus presenting her self as food, becoming both desirable and consumable.

However, Nigella's sexualised gluttony borders on the grotesque; risotto made, Nigella confesses that, "in theory, this would be enough supper for two, in practice, I rather feel, one". She eats it immediately, standing in the kitchen eagerly taking in large spoonfuls whilst glancing knowingly at the camera. Bakhtin's notion of the "grotesque body," Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor point out "is frequently associated with food. It is a devouring body, a body in the process of over-indulging, eating, drinking, vomiting and defecating" (43) and Nigella renders her own body grotesque. However, in contrast to Baker, the grotesque in this context functions to seduce a consumer audience and perpetuate the voyeuristic gaze. Nigella is part of a culture in which the abject (improper) body and taboo eating habits are fetishised through media constructions of self.

Elspeth Probyn draws attention to the trend of media food disclosures, "listen carefully to the new generation of television chefs, and one will hear them tiptoeing along a fine line that threatens to collapse into terrifying public intimacy" (20). This rather unnerving concern resonates with Heddon's observation of a current "cultural omnipresence of autobiography" ( Autobiography 161). Heddon suggests that "if we were confessing animals in the 1970s, we have by now surely mutated into monsters" ( Autobiography 160) and questions the implications for performance, asking if "a resistant autobiographical practice is even any longer a possibility?" ( Autobiography 161). Heddon posits Irene Gammel's term "confessional interventions" as a potential self-conscious, subversion strategy that autobiographical performance practice can adopt. For Heddon, Baker "refuses the voyeuristic gaze" by only confessing "the mundane" and never allowing us access to one true version of self,

Baker's 'secrets' are not only moments of refusal, or moments of 'privacy in public', they also perform spaces in which I, in the role of spectator, can bring myself into (the) 'play' as I fill in her gaps with my own stories. Who then is the confessing subject here? ( Autobiography 164).

In my practice I am seeking to use autobiography to "strategically play with the mode of confession" ( Autobiography 163) and pass comment on the ways that food functions in popular culture as a vehicle for disclosure, and perpetuates the voyeuristic gaze. My interventionist strategy then, is to investigate how notions of the self can be represented through performative acts of disclosure, in which versions of the self are manipulated, revisited and retold. All performance is citational and I would argue that a deliberate, self-conscious acknowledgement of that citation is a useful means to problematise the mock confessional, whilst maintaining an autobiographical mode of address. Heddon has also acknowledged that,

In the performance of autobiography, the always already fictional nature of the autobiographical mode is made explicit. Such an acceptance and revelation of the constructed nature of the autobiography is vital in its connection to the constructed nature of 'identity' and the 'self' ( Glory 2).

This strategy is evident in both Nigella's and Baker's performances if we return once again to their knowing look-back at the audience/camera. Their looks re-play their own citational context and communicate a "knowingness" that they are 'playing' themselves, and in doing so they refuse the very possibility of an 'autobiography'.

My performance work investigated how cakes and baking could be used to create and perform a version of my autobiography. The work existed both as a performative durational process and an artwork that communicated through predominantly non-verbal means. Using cake decorating techniques I designed a large cake sculpture consisting of a number of cakes that were representative of significant occasions, relationships and memories throughout my life. The sculpture was baked, decorated and assembled over five days in the gallery and spectators were invited to witness each stage of my process.

The sculpture featured cakes from my past, such as memorable birthday cakes. Other cakes were newly created to represent memories in which there was no cake present to that occasion, such as saying farewell to my family home. All of the cakes were used in new ways to disclose a version of my autobiography. The work simultaneously constituted and represented a number of autobiographical processes. Firstly, prior to the project I underwent cake decorating tuition over a period of ten weeks and the performance acted as documentation of this learning process; secondly, through the act of baking and decorating I engaged in processes of revisiting and remembering personal experiences; and finally the cake sculpture became a living autobiography of my durational time in the gallery and the physical experience of creating the artwork.

As a keen baker my interest in cakes has developed into my artistic practice. Here I want to briefly propose the significance of cakes (in British culture) as mediators and markers of identities and relationships. Cakes are used to signify and commemorate occasions and social rituals. Cakes function as rewards and treats, and they mark the pivotal moment of a meal or end of a celebration. Cakes are shared between friends and they are present in the personal and particular experience of those individuals. A cake is not just a cake; as a symbol a cake can hold associations, memories and feelings and act as mediators for social interaction. Probyn raises an idea introduced by Nigella that "baking equates with the 'ability to be part of life'" (5) and from my own experiences I can recall how cakes somehow enabled me to feel part of life, as a child baking in the kitchen, thinking, doing, creating, making decisions and mistakes, that impacted upon my relationships and connection to time and place.

My performance investigated how cakes could be used to perform versions of self and here, I will unpick the strategies of performative disclosure (as a means of "confessional intervention") that were used to construct multiple representations of the self and explore the dialogic relationship between them. In doing so I will disclose my own intentions, experiences and discoveries in order to problematise my role as both subject and creator of the work.

Programme notes were displayed at the entrance to the gallery and provided a map of the space outlining the function of each room. These notes were written as if addressing the spectators directly and contextualised the work through confessing my deliberate re-appropriation of Nigella's "domestic goddess" persona:

Hello, my name is Jenny and I want to be a Domestic Goddess. Welcome to my world of cakes and baking. Here in the gallery I am attempting to bake my autobiography. I have designed a large cake-sculpture that I will be baking and creating during the week. Every part of my cake has been individually constructed using memories and experiences from my past. Each area of the gallery is devoted to a particular part of my process...

The entrance to the gallery opened up into a small corridor space that I titled "The Domestic Goddess Hall of Fame." Hanging on the wall in chronological order were five portrait photographs of historical British female food personalities including, Mrs Beeton, Fanny Craddock, Delia Smith and Nigella Lawson. The fifth and last photograph was of me. I deliberately wrote "myself" into a visual narrative of significant female cooks, with their own cooking styles. From the outset I attempted to situate my autobiography within a culture of self-referentiality (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. Image: Rory Francis. "The Domestic Goddess Hall of Fame". If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.
The other areas in the gallery included a kitchen where I baked the cakes; a cake cooling room, where the finished cakes cooled, assisted by portable fans; a cake decorating corner where I conducted the sugar craft and exhibited an array of equipment and materials; and a display room, in which the finished cakes were arranged into the final sculpture. The audience were invited to participate in various activities, such as licking the bowl, assisting me with simple baking tasks and receiving a decorating demonstration. On the final day the finished cake sculpture was cut-up and offered to the audience who shared in the communal eating of my-life-in-cake (see fig. 2 and fig.3).
Figure 2. Image: Anonymous Audience Member. Performer: Jenny Lawson. "The Cake Cooling Room and The Sugar Craft Corner". If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.
Figure 3. Image: Anonymous Audience Member. Performer: Jenny Lawson." The Kitchen". If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.

The isolating and displaying of each process revealed the mechanics behind both the artwork and the experiences of cake decorating. Yet the unveiling of these processes in the citational space of a gallery was intended to point up the construction of "personal" domestic space. Although I welcomed the audience into "my kitchen" and lived and breathed the duration of the project, there was no mistaking that this space was a gallery and bore no "real" resemblance to my (domestic) self or my autobiography, in the same way that Nigella's domestic mise-en-scene, constitutes both her kitchen and her studio.

In keeping with Heddon's advocated "confessional intervention" the spectators were not presented with a clear autobiographical narrative. Rather, the cakes were used alongside structuring devices to present a collection of experiences that could be revisited, manipulated and retold; devices I devised in accordance with Daniel Schachter's notion that,

Memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves [...] we construct our autobiographies from fragments of experience that change over time (qtd. in Smith and Watson 9).

The durational nature of the project meant that audience members witnessed my cakes at varying stages of development and on the first morning there were no completed cakes present in the display room. However, three diagrammatic drawings were displayed on the walls depicting different versions of what the final sculpture may look like; technical drawings of top and side projections and a more personal mapping of fragmented stories and memories (see fig. 4).

Figure 4. Image: Rory Francis. Performer: Jenny Lawson. "Side Projection Scale 1:4.5".If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.
Twenty-two nametags were carefully positioned on the display table indicating where the finished cakes would eventually be placed. The names of each cake were indicative of an event or memory such as, "The Big Pink Sofa" or "Failed Mother's Day" and performatively framed each cake within a personal narrative. Each cake had its own song, which the audience could play out loud on an Ipod at any point during the process, whether they were looking at the finished cake or just its nametag and a blank space. The songs were designed to locate my memories within a shared cultural frame of reference that although specific to my memory, would evoke associations personal to the viewers allowing the possibility of other self-narratives to arise from the work.

The audience were also invited to take part in the continual documenting of my process. A plasma TV screen in the corner of the gallery that I titled "Cake Moments," displayed a continual loop of photographs of past cakes from my life. The audience were instructed to take photographs of any interesting "cake moments" they encountered during their stay and at the end of each day these were added to the display. Like the cake sculpture, this collection of photographs built up over the five days. Many visitors chose to photograph themselves interacting in some way with the cakes and baking materials, thus becoming part of my autobiography. The photographs looped in random order and blurred together personal life shots with the constructed shots from the gallery, fictionalising the audience participation and potentially disrupting any singular notion of self (see fig. 5).

These interactive features performatively disclosed fragments of personal memory and served to involve the audience in the self-conscious authoring of my autobiography. Whatever the stage of the process, the audience were encouraged to fill in the gaps with their own self-narratives. To return to Heddon's question, "Who then is the confessing subject here?" (164). I find a possible answer lies inside my cakes.

My memories, like a cake, were beaten and mixed together and like the icing, bled into each other to create a fluid yet fragmented autobiography. The finished cake sculpture combined an array of colours, textures, tastes, shapes and images. Some cakes were inscribed with photographs, personal texts, quirky features (a tower of custard cream biscuits) and disturbing details (a red gash cutting through a cake's surface or a deliberately burnt black "Failed Mother's Day" heart) (see fig. 6)

Figure 5. Image: Anonymous Audience Member. Performer: Jenny Lawson. "Cake Sculpture".If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.
As an artistic tool I found the layered form of a cake enabled me to represent multiple versions of memories and disclose complex feelings (albeit highly subjective) through a visually expressive and creative art form. In keeping with Bakhtinian dialogism, in which the self is only constructed through the interrelationship with the other, I performatively disclosed a version of my autobiography that was not located somewhere inside me, but somewhere in between both mine and the audience's subjectivities. As Michael Holquist has expounded from Bakhtin:

In order to see ourselves, we must appropriate the vision of others[...]the Bakhtinian just-so story of subjectivity is the tale of how I get my self from the other: it is only the other's categories that will let me be an object for my own perception. (28)

This inter-relationship between "self" and "other" was epitomised through the act of communal ingestion and the spirit of event-ness that comes with the territory of food. Once cut up, dismembered and eaten the cakes revealed all, in the same way that my process had exposed in its duration and excess the mess, my exhaustion, the remnants of congealed icing and the smudges and stains on my aprons. Yet in concealing nothing, the work inherently refused to disclose. Once the cakes passed through the mouth of the "other" they gave way to that "other", that "self", revealing only cake and sugar.

The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders that go beyond the division of public and private: the tongue sticks out, draws in food, objects and people. In eating we constantly take in and spit out things, people, selves. (Probyn 21)

In giving my cakes and "myself" to the spectators, I relinquished ownership of both my cakes and the artwork. I looked on as my cakes were eaten and destroyed, redirecting the voyeuristic gaze towards the audience and the private, personal, undisclosable experience of ingestion (see fig. 7)
I started out baking myself, but I ended up baking you, and then together we ate each other.

Figure 6. Image: Anonymous Audience Member. Performer: Jenny Lawson. "Cake and Sugar". If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. 2009.
Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor, eds. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Baldwyn, Lucy. "Blending In: The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker's Culinary Events." The Drama Review 40.4 (1996): 37-55.

Blumberg, Marcia. "Domestic Place as Contestatory Space: The Kitchen as Catalyst and Crucible." New Theatre Quarterly 55.33 (1998): 195-201.

Govan, Emma, and Dan Rebellato. "Foodscares!" Performance Research: On Cooking 4.1 (1999): 31-40.

Hansen, Signe. "Society of the Appetite: Celebrity Chefs Deliver Consumers." Food Culture & Society 11.1 (2008): 50-67.

Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

--- . "Daily Life 5 Box Story." Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life. Ed. Michele Barrett. Oxon: Routledge, 2007.

--- . "Glory Box: Tim Miller's Autobiography of the Future." New Theatre Quarterly 19.3 (2003): 243-256.

Helms, Gabrielle. "Reality TV Has Spoken: Auto/Biography Matters." Tracing the Autobiographical. Eds. Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault and Susanna Egan.Canada: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005.

Holquist, Michael. Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990.

Iball, Helen. "Melting Moments: Bodies Upstaged by the Foodie Gaze." Performance Research: On Cooking 4.1 (1999): 70-81.

Kitchen Show. Dir. Bobby Baker & Paloa Balon Brown. Videocassette, 1991.

MacDonald, Claire. "Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography and Performance Art." The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Nigella Bites. Dir. Dominic Cyriax. DVD. Pabulum and Flashback Television. Channel Four Television Corporation, 2002.

Nigella Feasts. Dir. Dominic Cyriax. DVD. North Pacific Ltd/Pabulum Productions Ltd., 2006.

Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities. London: Routledge, 2000.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. "Introduction: Mapping Women's Self-Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces." Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Table Occasions. Dir. Bobby Baker and Paloa Balon Brown, Videocassette, 2000.

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Food Confessions: Disclosing the Self through the Performance of Food | M/C Journal

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At the end of the episode "Crowd Pleasers," from her television series Nigella Feasts, we see British food writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in her nightgown opening her fridge in the dark. The fridge light reveals the remnant dishes of chili con carne that she prepared earlier on in the programme.

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https://susanaskewdrawing.wordpress.com/researchforexercises/essay-part-one-confessional-art/

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I viewed 'Sad shower in New York' at the Tate Britain Archive and my reaction was immediate. I was overwhelmed with the the intense loneliness and hollow feeling in the picture. It was so tender yet disconcerting; this mix of emotions deeply saddened me because i couldn’t help but be attached to the her in the image.

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'Sad shower in New York' Tracey Emin 1995

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'Sad shower in New York' Tracey Emin 1995

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https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-enduring-connection-between-art-and-mental-health

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Depression, anxiety, angst, grief and loneliness: despite its frequent occurrence in people's lives and attempts to destigmatise mental health, we still find it difficult to discuss psychological distress.

Yet for centuries, the darker and more complex parts of our psyches - from generalised low spirits to diagnosable mental health conditions - have served as an inspiration to artists who have depicted these very human experiences with sensitivity, nuance and empathy.

The mythologising of the 'mad' artist is particularly associated with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) who famously mutilated his own ear following a fight with the artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and sent the remnants to Gabrielle Berlatier, who was working as a maid in a brothel at the time.

Van Gogh's own chronicling of the incident's aftermath in Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) has helped cement the now-legendary incident as a prime example of mental instability and artistic genius. But even the painting itself is a bit of an enigma: the piercing stare and visible injury suggest great pain, but the calmly applied vertical paint strokes and carefully outlined shapes nod to focus, maybe even calmness. It's also difficult to argue that bodily mutilation and self-harm is ever something to celebrate, even when tied to great works of art.

Alongside Van Gogh, one of the most famous artists to portray mental suffering - loss, loneliness and fear included - was Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

The Scream

The Norwegian's artworks consistently and vividly drew on emotional turmoil and trauma. For example, his 1907 painting The Sick Child - a theme he revisited several times - is inspired by the death of his sister Sophie from tuberculosis when Munch was just 14 years old.

The painting's title, and its haunting inclusion of an unidentifiable maternal figure bent over in grief, make the emotions underpinning the scene seem as much universal as autobiographical. This ability to use deeply personal experiences of mental anguish to create an artwork suggestive of collective suffering is seen repeatedly in Munch's work.

Anxiety, an 1894 painting containing several stylistic and thematic overlaps with Munch's iconic The Scream, shows a crowd of dark-costumed people congregated by the Oslo Fjord.

Anxiety

The vacant stares, unhealthy pallor and tense facial expressions of the three characters in the painting's foreground evoke a sense of great agitation, while the sinuous and near-apocalyptic skyline suggests their unease is echoed - and perhaps caused by - the world surrounding them.

The raw emotional truth of Munch's work has been a long-running inspiration to contemporary artist Tracey Emin (b.1963). As the upcoming exhibition ' Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul' demonstrates (due to be on display at the Royal Academy from 15th November 2020 to 28th February 2021, although now postponed due to COVID-19), Munch's influence is detectable in multifarious aspects of Emin's output - for example, the acutely vulnerable nude female figures seen crouched or curved into semi-foetal positions, as in Trying to Find You 1.

Emin also explicitly stated her debt to the Norwegian painter with the painfully emotional short film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children. Recorded in 1998 outside Munch's cottage in Åsgårdstrand, the piece shows Emin literally giving voice to the screech of pain captured in Munch's most famous painting. But the most enduring link between the two artists lies in a shared commitment to revealing unfiltered mental suffering - in Emin's case often linked to depression, grief, sexual assault or deeply traumatic experiences of abortion.

Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children - Tracey Emin
Haftanın Eseri https://t.co/cfI3TOvvTa pic.twitter.com/UxbbSiym6h
- Diken (@DikenComTr) October 26, 2019

Emotional distress is a long-running theme in Emin's art. Her 1998 installation My Bed (first shown at the Tate Gallery in 1999) recreated a brutally personal bedroom scene showing a dishevelled bed surrounded by items such as discarded tights, cigarettes and used condoms.

My Bed captures the material aftermath of four days Emin spent in bed suffering from suicidal depression. The emotional vulnerability of the work is, in many ways, at odds with its initial critical reception as a controversy-seeking artwork reliant on shock value. The legacy of My Bed in Emin's work can be seen both in the recurrent motif of beds in her art and in the continued blend of self-confession and domestic materials, for instance, a cream and soft pink applique blanket incorporating the title words It Always Hurts (2005).

While the links between Munch and Emin become clearer with deliberate study, the connection between Munch and another artist is more overt. Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946) shared Munch's gift for producing images saturated with solitude, introspection and existential angst. For Spilliaert - who saw his paintings exhibited alongside Munch's - psychological pain overlapped with physical discomfort. Plagued by stomach ulcers, the Belgian artist would often rise before dawn with insomnia and walk the dark Ostend seafront, the scene of many of his paintings.

In The Gust of Wind (1904), a lone female figure is pictured against a dusky sky, her mouth open in a penetrating howl. Often imagined as a location of sunshine and joy, for Spilliaert the coast was the site of lonely figures pitted against elemental forces.

The Gust of Wind

Yet while the connection between an artist's work and their mental state might seem immediately apparent, caution is always required. The interlacing of creativity with mental health conditions is both contested - no medical study has ever proven a definitive link - and, moreover, risks glamorising or mythologising suffering. We can also overly simplify an artist's work by suggesting their creative output is only the product of a troubled mind.

For example, in the case of Louis Wain (1860-1939), an artist known for his popular drawings of anthropomorphised cats, his precise mental health condition was never identified, though it is generally believed that Wain had undiagnosed schizophrenia. The artist spent a considerable amount of time as an in-patient and received his generation's version of 'mental health care'.

In the later stages of his career, Wain produced a series of 'psychedelic cats' such as A Cat Standing on Its Hind Legs, Formed by Patterns Supposed to Be in the 'Early Greek' Style.

This switch from the traditional to the vibrantly abstract has been interpreted as both symptom and proof of Wain's suspected schizophrenia, though such interpretations - read through the lens of mental illness - can prevent us from fully exploring Wain's artistic merits. For instance, his move towards abstraction followed his increased interest in avant-garde artistic styles, seen in a series of ceramic cats inspired by Futurism.

Where other artists are concerned, the connection between their own mental health conditions and their creations is more certain. Ask and Get No Reassurance by Charlotte Johnson Wahl (b.1943) chronicles a form of exposure therapy the artist received as an inpatient at the Maudsley Hospital in the early 1970s. The unsettling image reveals that what the artist most desired was simple confirmation that everything would be OK.

Like many artists in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind collection, Johnson Wahl's artworks created while receiving care can be considered a form of art therapy. Yet Johnson Wahl was also a professional artist before and after undergoing treatment, making painting a natural method of self-expression.

Olivia Gillow (b.1972) has also drawn on her experiences of hospitalisation for mental health reasons. However, instead of representing her own condition, Gillow's 2001 painting Cradle Soap 1 is inspired by the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) the artist witnessed other patients experiencing on the same ward. The loving caress of the hands around the soap, and the 'cradle' of the title, inject a disconcerting note of tenderness into a visceral image of compulsion and suffering.

A similar blend of pain and care is also detectable in Protecting the Heart by Elise J. M. Pacquette (b.1968). One of many works by Pacquette exploring the artist's first-hand experience of anorexia nervosa, the image combines knowledge of the physical strain the condition has on the body with the desire to nurture and heal.

Pacquette's art acts as a window into the lived experience of a mental health condition. This lends it the ability to engender empathy from those without similar experiences, solace for those who do and - as with many of the artworks discussed above - a surprising and poignant note of hope.
Rosemary Waugh, art critic and journalist

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The enduring connection between art and mental health | Art UK

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Depression, anxiety, angst, grief and loneliness: despite its frequent occurrence in people's lives and attempts to destigmatise mental health, we still find it difficult to discuss psychological distress. Yet for centuries, the darker and more complex parts of our psyches - from generalised low spirits to diagnosable mental health conditions - have served as an inspiration to artists who have depicted these very human experiences with sensitivity, nuance and empathy.

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Elise Pacquette’s ‘Eating the Heart Out'

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Elise Pacquette’s ‘Eating the Heart Out'

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She a rawness and blunt visual representation of how she feels intensely isolated but attached to her mental illness. Pacquette suffered with anorexia and her work encapsulates the sordid comfort she finds in her eating disorder.

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https://museumofthemind.org.uk/blog/in-the-frame-for-february-2014-elise-pacquettes-eating-the-heart-out

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Bethlem's new Museum of the Mind will provide extended exhibition space for a number of artworks hitherto consigned to storage. Amongst the hidden gems awaiting display, is Eating the Heart Out by Elise Pacquette (née Warriner). This painting may be variously considered as companion piece and counterpoint to The Anger Within and Protecting the Heart, two works more familiar to Museum visitors. All three of these large (100 x 78 cm) oil and pencil canvases were created in 1993 during Pacquette's final year at art school, and together permit vivid and unsettling glimpses into her prior eleven-year struggle with anorexia nervosa.

The paintings convey Pacquette's intense isolation, alongside the illusory, paradoxical, security of an illness that inhibits - indeed prohibits - the sufferer from accepting the very support that their physical debilitation may command. In the current image, the introspection and obsessions characteristic of anorexia are depicted as cannibalising the heart, thereby symbolising feelings and relationships often sacrificed to the disorder. Behind an unyielding facade of calm and autonomy, internalised rage and recrimination offer a substitute, self-destructive fuel; the body gradually becoming a receptacle for that which cannot be otherwise expressed.

Pacquette has previously reflected on the inner turmoil she experienced at the height of her illness, and how her anger served both as 'a tool against other people' and a veil for her 'fear, frustration and loneliness'.[1] The artist has since made a full recovery, and her paintings represent a powerful creative legacy and an important emotional conduit in her personal journey back to mental health.

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In the Frame for February 2014: Elise Pacquette's 'Eating the Heart...

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Bethlem's new Museum of the Mind will provide extended exhibition space for a number of artworks hitherto consigned to storage. Amongst the hidden gems awaiting display, is Eating the Heart Out by Elise Pacquette (née Warriner). This painting may be variously considered as companion piece and counterpoint to The Anger Within and Protecting the Heart, two works more familiar to Museum visitors.

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For a consistent amount of time, eating disorders were documented in literature and media in a highly sensationalised  and glamourise way. Offering what at the time was hoped to be jarring realities of eating disorders often times gives viewers romanised glimpses.

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Food for women has always been portrayed as a paradoxical temptress. The highly sexual nature of food media as well as the post modernist moral labels given to food, navigating these meanings is extremely difficult.
Breaking it down crudely:
Woman should be thin, small, weak and timid, polite and self contained. If not they are punished in society for not being enough desirable to men, which ultimately all our value is derived from.
So when we are told all we should care about is what men want from us we internalise this.
Food for woman has never been represented as something that we need, it's something that we want. A temptation that should be repressed. Society, through persistent's has shaped food to be shameful. Food quickly becomes less about the effects it has on women's bodies and their aesthetics; despite that still be a considerable factor in the oppression, but more about weaponising it in favour of Womans obedience. Food for women has never been portrayed as a vehicle for happiness or well being, but rather a guilt that should be hidden.