1. Introduction
[1.1] In July 2016, young adult novelist Laurie Halse Anderson received a message on Tumblr asking if she "ever feel[s] guilty" about writing "the pro ana [anorexia] bible." The user claimed that Anderson's 2009 novel Wintergirls was "99% tips and tricks on how to starve yourself deceitfully" and demanded to know if Anderson had considered that her book would "trigger suffering young people" (Anderson 2016). Calling Wintergirls the "pro-ana bible" references its place as a central text within an online subculture that prizes, rather than pathologizes, self-starvation. While Anderson (2016) claimed that she "limited the behaviors represented in the book to those that popped up first in a Google search," others have credited Wintergirlsas their entry point into that dark online world (Ricks 2019). To this day, numerous pro-ana users cite the book as one of their favorites, merging their sincere love of Wintergirls with their public performances of their illnesses—and creating a funhouse mirror to online fandom culture.
[1.2] Dark and stylistically daring, Wintergirls initially garnered acclaim for its graphic journey into the heart of anorexia, with the Chicago Tribune declaring it one of the top ten most influential books of the 2000s ("Oprah's Book Club Dominates the Decade - Chicago Tribune," https://web.archive.org/web/20150114195013/http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-12-26/news/0912240401_1_book-club-jonathan-franzen-book-s-sales). Over a decade later, Wintergirls remains popular with young readers: On Goodreads, Wintergirls has an aggregated score of 3.96/5 stars from 118,476 ratings at time of writing (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5152478-wintergirls), with the user-curated list "YA Eating Disorder Fiction" ranking Wintergirls first out of 163 titles. Wintergirls concerns the mental degradation of eighteen-year-old Lia Overbrook in the aftermath of her childhood friend's death, detailing Lia's spiral into self-starvation and self-harm. By the novel's close, however, Lia finally commits to inpatient treatment, asserting that she is "thawing" from the snowstorm in which her illness has left her (Anderson 2009, 278).
[1.3] Despite this hopeful ending, pro-ana communities—loose digital clusters of mostly young women who encourage each other to starve, overexercise, and hide their dangerous habits—have embraced the book, seemingly ignoring how it ends with the narrator's recovery. Anderson's novel is not the first to receive this treatment: While Marya Hornbacher's 1998 memoir Wasted was snuck into treatment facilities (Seaber 2016), pro-anas on the outside, as survivor Mandie Williams (2014) notes, would plaster their forums in "Fiona Apple lyrics and skulls." Indeed, in many ways, the pro-ana movement could be flippantly described as the anorexia fandom, with media on eating disorders transformed from cautionary tales into community signifiers and sources of inspiration.
[1.4] Scholars typically define pro-ana as any online space that treats restrictive eating disorders as lifestyle choices rather than mental health conditions (Hilton 2018), with users further defying conventional anorexic behavior by seeking community rather than keeping their disorders a secret (Dias 2003). Although pro-ana users have a more complex relationship with their disorders than this definition belies (Gerrard 2018), lifestyle is the operative word, as even those who profess awareness about their pathology still transform it into the organizing principle of their digital lives. Pro-ana users become ana coaches or ana buddies for each other, eat similar foods, reshare aestheticized pictures of self-harm scars or skeletal bodies, and create lists of ana music, movies, and books to help inspire each other. Underneath the Instagram filters, however, anorexia boasts a mortality rate 5.86 times higher than the general population (Deloitte Access Economics, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/striped/report-economic-costs-of-eating-disorders/), with one in every five of those deaths being from suicide (Arcelus et al. 2011).
[1.5] I explore how pro-ana fans read Wintergirls and reproduce their mental illnesses through it using the framework of fan studies and Michel de Certeau's idea of reading as poaching to shed light on how communal reading practices shape individual encounters with a text. In doing so, I reject the analytical deficiency often ascribed to mentally ill readers, showcasing how pro-ana readers do not passively misconstrue texts but instead actively fragment, subvert, and transform them, turning pro-recovery projects like Wintergirls into both a source and a signifier of pro-ana subjectivity.
[1.6] Ideally, recognizing pro-ana discursive practices as belonging to a much older literary tradition will help destigmatize said practices and illustrate the potential to turn them into healthier outlets. More realistically, it provides creators and scholars of eating disorder media a clearer sense of what interpretive strategies their audiences employ. Due to its longevity and infamy, Wintergirls provides the perfect entry point into pro-ana reading practices, revealing how texts are used to perform disordered eating behaviors, as well as how communities extend the reading experience outside the initial encounter with a text.
2. Pro-ana and the written word
[2.1] Public panic over pro-ana groups has existed since the early 2000s due to the shocking nature of both their content (Boero and Pascoe 2012) and their user demographics, which run overwhelmingly female (Tong et al. 2013) and overwhelmingly young (Fox et al. 2005). Although the majority of pro-ana users are in their late teens to early twenties (Fox et al. 2005), one can easily find girls as young as fourteen asking for dieting tips and sharing body check selfies. Thus, the effects of pro-ana content have been widely studied: Rachel F. Rodgers et al. (2016), for instance, found that pro-ana content significantly increased body dissatisfaction, dieting behaviors, and negative affect. Similarly, Scarlett Jett et al.'s (2010) study of college students reveals that brief exposure to pro-ana content resulted in reduced caloric intake for up to three weeks. Despite concerns about the contagious nature of anorexia, however, there is little evidence that pro-ana content can spontaneously cause eating disorders in people without a prior disposition toward them. Many modern pro-anas even disclaim their content with "not pro anything" or "pro only for myself" (Gerrard 2018), subverting assumptions that pro-ana groups aim to recruit new members and revealing greater levels of ambivalence toward their illnesses. Additionally, on X (formerly Twitter) and Tumblr, these communities often refer to themselves as "edtwt" and "edtumblr," implying that their focus is on the more general experience of dealing with an eating disorder. Nevertheless, I refer to these spaces and these users as pro-ana to remain aligned with other scholars. For the purposes of this research, I define pro-ana spaces as any eating disorder–centric spaces that do not primarily focus on recovery.
[2.2] As Emma Seaber (2016) describes, restrictive eating disorders are largely conceived of as "a kind of mimicry," where the vapid, self-centered sufferer "has seen thinness" in a media landscape obsessed with it "and attempted to reflect those images corporeally" (486). However, the potential of written material to encourage eating disorders has also received substantial attention. Emily T. Troscianko (2018), for instance, found that a large percentage of her nearly 900 survey respondents cited eating disorder–centric fiction as negatively impacting their mood and body image. Despite this, some respondents knowingly sought out texts that would worsen their symptoms. Elsewhere, Debbie Ging and Sarah Garvey's (2018) analysis of pro-ana content on Instagram reveals that 26 percent was text-based, surprisingly outnumbering the visual "thinspiration" (thin inspiration) content that the pro-ana movement is infamous for. Even nonfiction created by eating disorder survivors and clinicians is not safe from pro-ana appropriation (Seaber 2016). While discussing the dangers of eating disorder representation, Barbara Feinberg's (2009) New York Times review of Wintergirls notes that "for some, the mere mention of symptoms is problematic. 'It's about competition,' an anorexia sufferer once explained to me. 'Sometimes all it takes to get triggered is to read about someone who weighs less than you do.'" Indeed, the National Eating Disorders Association's (2017) tip sheet for responsible media coverage advises journalists to abstain from graphically depicting the bodies or behaviors involved, as even negative representations "can provoke a 'race to the bottom' among other sufferers."
[2.3] Anderson admits she was warned of pro-ana appropriation before her book's publication ("Wintergirls Q&A," https://madwomanintheforest.com/wintergirls-qa/). Both eating disorder specialists and survivors consulted on early drafts of Wintergirls stated that while the book would be triggering, "the whole world is a trigger to [eating disorder] sufferers" (Anderson 2016). Further, they maintained that proper eating disorder representation was missing in young adult literature. Indeed, young adult literature about eating disorders seemingly did not come into being until The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron was published in 1979, and scholarly surveys of said literature would not appear until near the end of the next decade. Wintergirls seemingly bears many resemblances to older eating disorder fiction, which Kathleen Restifo (1988) argues focused largely on food as a multivariate symbol of the narrator's self-image and familial issues.
[2.4] Scholarship on Wintergirls typically dissects how the book reifies existing power structures, with Jeremy Johnston (2019) claiming that Anderson's reliance on therapeutic interventions "expose[s] implicit assumptions about normative mental health states that conceal and reinforce the social ideologies that shape illness in the first place" (311). Although Hsin-Chun Tsai (2014) believes that Wintergirls encourages young readers to interrogate the cultural glamorization of thinness, this encouragement is negated, as Rocío Riestra-Camacho (2022) argues, by the fact that a "vulnerable reader" is far too likely to read the book as validation for her disorder. Unlike her non-disordered peers, who can read Wintergirls from a more detached position, this imagined vulnerable reader either has or is on the cusp of developing an eating disorder and thus is predisposed toward misreading any ambiguities in an eating disorder–centric text.
[2.5] Riestra-Camacho's (2022) claims emerge directly from Seaber's (2016) attempt to explain the phenomenon of rampant pro-ana misinterpretation as a "reading disorder." Regardless of the author's intentions, Seaber (2016) contends, there is an "interpretive gulf" between disordered and non-disordered readers, wherein "readers privilege their interpretation of certain textual events over any number of others that may contradict it…Presented with a text, the (reading) disordered reader's analysis will, thus, reflect only their reading of themselves" (490).
[2.6] With a reading disorder, even texts written by clinicians—such as "The Thin Commandments," developed by therapist Carolyn Costin in 1997 to help parents understand their child's disordered thoughts—can be taken up by pro-ana websites and rebranded as gospel (Seaber 2016). Visual warnings are also rendered useless by a mere turn of phrase due to the disordered reader's "maladaptive analytical process" (503). For example, in the case of an online anti-eating disorder image depicting an anorexic and bulimic woman slumped dead over a toilet, the photo's caption, which states that the woman died "after her stomach ripped after eating 5.6 liters…of food" (quoted in Seaber 2016, 502), would not remind the intended pro-ana viewer of the dangers of starvation, but rather the dangers of eating. Elsewhere, Riestra-Camacho (2022) scrutinizes Anderson's rhetorical moves for ways a disordered/vulnerable reader might misread them, such as interpreting Lia's sarcastic comment about (over)exercising to sleep better as literal.
[2.7] Seaber (2016) juxtaposes her theory against a dominant discourse that renders the eating disorder sufferer as both "solely to blame for having become ill" and "an apparently inevitable product of visual culture" (486). Rather than "a condition of extreme impressionability" (490), anorexia now becomes "a condition for which interpretation, rather than perception…is a more important factor" (488). Although this theory has merit, Seaber casts this propensity toward misinterpretation as an innate quality that even those in recovery cannot fully escape, which presents its own troubling implications. As Stephanie R. Larson (2021) argues, people with mental illnesses or "deficiencies" are often already perceived as "demi-rhetoricians…never fully capable of producing rational meaning" (396). In her analysis of famed psychologist Hilde Bruch's The Golden Cage (1978), Larson (2021) probes how Bruch denies her anorexic patients' rhetoricity by describing them as untrustworthy, childish, and "incapable of speaking of their body" (398). Likewise, Jenell Johnson (2010) finds that mental illness and disability "permanently arrest one's rhetorical ethos at the moment of imprint" (463, emphasis in original), replacing it not with a void but an ever-present and active anti-ethos. The cumulative effect of these attacks is that the eating disorder sufferer is "never to be trusted on their words alone" (Larson 2021, 398).
[2.8] Consequently, while the anorexic may view self-starvation as a meaningful and even desirable manifestation of inner pain (as Larson [2021, 400–401] illustrates through Bruch's interviews), her body becomes all the proof others need to dismiss her thoughts as insane. This denial of rhetoricity shores up the ideological boundaries between proper and improper minds and bodies—between people whose thoughts deserve to be taken seriously and those whose thoughts do not. Like Bruch's characterization of the person with anorexia as inherently untrustworthy, Seaber's (2016) reading disorder hypothesis casts them as rhetorically compromised, going so far as to assert that these misreading practices are a "precondition" (489) to certain expressions of anorexia.
[2.9] This theory, for obvious reasons, also privileges authors' pro-recovery intentions, casting disordered reading more as a perversion of a text rather than a sincere engagement with it. In a similar vein, poaching, as Michel de Certeau (1984) describes, is where the reader rejects this hierarchy of meaning-makers and "invents in texts something different from what they intended" (169). Henry Jenkins (2014) builds from this—adding, however, that fans choose media based on its "special potential" (30) to express their preexisting interests or values. Thus, "some degree of affinity will exist between the meanings fans produce and those which might be located through a critical analysis of the original story" (30). Seaber (2016) acknowledges this affinity in her analysis of Hornbacher's Wasted and how descriptions of disordered eating, prefaced with "Try this at home, kids, it's great fun" (quoted in Seaber, 497), leave space for the pro-ana poacher to line up their scissors. As I demonstrate, although pro-anas literally poach texts from their original contexts, many also attempt to negotiate between Anderson's original intent and their preexisting emotional investments, acknowledging the primacy of authors' anti-anorexia intentions even as they use the materials for pro-ana ends.
3. Methodology
[3.1] My data is drawn from Tumblr and X due to the longevity of their pro-ana communities and their overlap in userbases. Dawn B. Branley and Judith Covey (2017), for instance, note that Tumblr and X's prominent pro-ana communities have been the subject of mainstream news coverage since 2012. Likewise, Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg cited pro-ana as an example of a free speech "difficulty" on the platform as recently as 2022 (The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk). Further, the two websites have a dialogic relationship, with many pro-ana X users openly citing Tumblr as a prior online home.
[3.2] Due to the public nature of many of these accounts, I did not seek informed consent, although I have tried to avoid referencing posts from accounts that are now private. Additionally, because the focus of this research is on community norms rather than individual fans, I have subtracted account names from my examples. However, I have not edited any of the posts' contents outside of adding clarifications.
[3.3] I selected most posts through keyword searches, which index both hashtagged and non-hashtagged content. The most used keywords were "pro ana," "3dtwt," "edtwt," and "wintergirls." Posts that were not gathered through keyword searches were instead directly recommended to me by algorithms: As Ysabel Gerrard (2018) also discovered, pro-ana hashtags may still be followed on Tumblr, with other platforms like X recommending pro-ana content if one merely looks at said content for too long. Although I followed one pro-ana account on X with a blank account, I did not interact with any of this content beyond bookmarking posts to return to.
[3.4] I collected 252 posts throughout the course of this research, most of which were made between January 2022 and December 2023 and were unrelated to Wintergirls. Most pro-ana posts were about personal diet progress, struggles with or jokes about the disorder, harm reduction tips, intra-community issues, or requests for ana buddies. Fannish content constitutes only a small part of pro-ana behavior; even a post tagged with "Wintergirls" may simply use that tag to avoid censorship and signal a pro-ana sensibility. However, posts directly related to Wintergirls were overwhelmingly pro-ana, often calling the book a "trigger," tagging the post with pro-ana hashtags, or including some pro-ana keyword within the post itself. For my examples, I include both posts that directly deal with the material of Anderson's book as well as those that merely signal a pro-ana sensibility.
4. Reading disorders versus disordered readings
[4.1] While Seaber (2016) contends that pro-ana relies on "peculiar" modes of literary consumption and production (485–86), fan studies would suggest that these modes are not unique to any disorder at all. Evan Hayles Gledhill (2018), for instance, draws parallels between the Romantic tradition of commonplace books and the fannish "bricolage" of Tumblr, wherein the fan combines preexisting materials "with an eye to creating a meaning that is new or different from what is currently available" within dominant culture (¶ 4.1). Likewise, Axel-Nathaniel Rose (2024) compares Tumblr's focus on curation and readers' personal textual experiences to the Ancient Greeks' hupomnemata. Each of these scholars demonstrate that readers fragmenting texts, even privileging their affective responses over the author's intent, is a well-established tradition. Still, Seaber's (2016) idea that pro-ana readers can only produce "readings of themselves" is not unfounded. Peppered throughout my data are disordered turns of phrase, from calling Lia's self-harm "exercise tips" to labeling her repression of her hunger cues "inspiration." In an interview with Bustle's Ellen Ricks (2019), one woman claims that when she read Wintergirls at fourteen, she had thought that "Lia only failed because she got caught"—how could this be, when the novel makes it abundantly clear that Lia only "failed" to kill herself? One could easily attribute this to Seaber's reading disorder, as the interviewee also admits that she had disordered thoughts at the time she read the book and is seemingly basing her analysis off her memory.
[4.2] While some pro-ana readers' analysis of texts like Wintergirls certainly reveal only the "readings of themselves," I want to challenge the idea that pro-ana users unanimously fail to recognize Anderson's intent. For example, as one Tumblr user writes, "i'm sorry for the autor [sic], i know that the book (like most of the movies/series and books about eating disorders) wanted to let know the readers the struggling [sic] of having this disorder and how, if you don't stop, it ends in dead [sic]. But for me [the book] just motivated me to keep going, and maybe one day, after years of suffering, [I'll] be skinny." They further explain that the book took them four years to finish because "when i tried to be normal i stopped reading, and when i wanted to be back on track i started it all over again." While they equate recovery with being "normal," they nonetheless frame relapses as getting "back on track," as though anorexia is a goal to work toward. Here, Seaber's theory seems to play out perfectly, as the text is used to affirm the pro-ana user, their disorder apparent in even the way they describe consuming the book—however, crucially, this reading comes prefaced with an acknowledgment that the user understood its original intent. Rather than misunderstanding Anderson, the pro-ana user negotiates between Anderson's text and their preexisting emotional commitments.
[4.3] Other users place traditional forms of critical engagement alongside pro-ana practices, such as one X user who claims, "i bought the book, ive borrowed it ten times from my elibrary, ive annotated the book, edited my calorie limit to fit hers, and done a project on it for elar [English, Language Arts, Reading]." Although this person admits to practicing their disorder through the text by fitting their calorie limits to Lia's, they also describe a highly engaged style of reading, including producing a report for an English class where, presumably, espousing pro-ana beliefs would elicit a negative reaction. This was not the only example of pro-anas writing reports on Wintergirls for school either. Consequently, the interpretive gulf Seaber describes is seemingly less between the reader's conscious analytical skills and the text before them and more between their emotional attachment to the text and said analysis. After all, as Jenkins (2014) describes with fan production, "the reader's activity is no longer seen simply as the task of recovering the author's meanings but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit them into the context of the lived experience" (51). Additionally, pro-ana readers, like fans, are not isolated from each other. Although de Certeau (1984) conceives of poaching as a silent, solitary activity, Jenkins (2014) counters that fan reading is "a social process through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other readers" (39). Having expanded their experiences of the text far beyond its initial solitary consumption, fans have produced meanings that are both more fully integrated into their lives and are of "a fundamentally different character" (39) than those generated through a casual read. Similarly, pro-ana spaces provide unique opportunities for members to seek support and express emotions that are unpalatable to those in their offline lives. If becoming thinner were truly the only goal, pro-ana spaces would have little reason to exist. After all, as Karen Dias (2003) notes, both clinicians and sufferers know that the information pro-ana users share with each other is already available in textbooks, autobiographies, and mainstream media—with one pro-ana website owner proclaiming that the most triggering website she had ever encountered was made by an anorexia survivor. Pro-ana users will also often rebuke those who merely desire a crash diet as not true members of the community (Hilton 2018). Dias (2003) further observes that there are multiple stages between the onset of an eating disorder and the time when clinical interventions will be successful, with many sufferers stuck in a hellish in-between, aware of the damage they are doing yet unready to accept help. In fact, successful recovery from anorexia often takes over ten years (Eddy et al. 2017).
[4.4] Thus, the pro-ana seeks not merely to continue her disorder but to enmesh herself in a community of like-minded members to alleviate her emotional pain and isolation. Fandom, in a similar vein, is often praised for its ability to render marginal voices legible, with Catherine Tosenberger (2014) writing that fandom "takes for itself spaces within the text and fills those spaces with stories for which the canon has neither room nor desire" (17). In the case of Wintergirls, however, these spaces are often simply ones where disordered thoughts can be expressed without the pressure to recover. Pro-ana reading, then, includes both true disordered reading, where the reader genuinely cannot tell the difference between their preferred reading and the intentions of the author, and self-conscious divergence, where the author's intention is acknowledged only for the reader's private meaning to have something above which to be placed.
5. Social media and mental health
[5.1] The inclusivity of modern social media over the moderated forums and websites of pro-ana's past has radically reshaped user behaviors, perhaps most notably through the practice of cross-tagging pro-ana content with non–eating disorder tags, which encourages cross-pollination between viral trends, other mental illness communities, and even media fandoms (Ging and Garvey 2018). Indeed, Ging and Garvey (2018) argue that the ability to easily reshare content "create[s] visual and discursive online contexts that are much more socially acceptable than conventional pro-ana websites," as each user who reposts a pro-ana image with a hashtag like "not me but goals" helps dull the edges of otherwise disturbing content (1193). Additionally, this behavior reveals "the continuity that exists between pro-ana and mainstream ideals of femininity" and that "a pro-ana sensibility…is by no means restricted to those who are unhealthily underweight" (1193). Their sentiment is echoed by Denise Paolucci (http://archive.today/2022.12.28-161620/https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1598978163916390400), a former moderator of LiveJournal, who warns that pro-ana content is "often indistinguishable from mainstream talk about food."
[5.2] Another major development is the ability to participate in online communities indirectly through curation. As Natalie Ann Hendry (2020) writes, platforms like Tumblr privilege "the visibility of shared interests" (318) over the real-life identities of its users, as resharing content allows users to "curate shared knowledge, experiences, and feelings" and thus "collectively produc[e] an emotionally and socially 'authentic' sense" of their mental illnesses (319). In contrast to offline spaces, Tumblr and X allow users to vent without saying a word, instead speaking through their reshares of quotes, jokes, and other media. In Hendry's (2020) interviews, many interviewees reported that Tumblr's curation abilities were emotionally freeing and that, despite not conversing with other website users, they nonetheless felt like "a part of something bigger" (322), enjoying the fruits of community without the work of socializing. One woman even described her blog as an "art gallery," a living collection of affective responses that could be viewed "without having to justify her posts or defend [their] authenticity" (322).
[5.3] This art gallery function and its resultant lack of justifying one's experiences may present a special appeal to the pro-ana, as, due to the competitive nature of anorexia, users can find themselves subject to accusations of being "wannarexics" merely pretending to have an eating disorder. Indeed, as Natalie Boero and C. J. Pascoe (2012) find, the specter of the wannarexic haunts many pro-ana spaces: Rather than encouraging new members to join, groups on older platforms like MySpace were aggressively gatekept, with tactics ranging from public shaming to randomly interrogating and mocking newer members. Platforms like Tumblr and X, however, seem to be different. Branley and Convey (2017) note little competition between users on both platforms, suspecting that this shift is due to their public nature. Additionally, in Daphna Yeshua-Katz and Nicole Martins's (2013) interviews with pro-ana bloggers, of which several came from Tumblr, the lack of competition is cited as a benefit of eating disorder–centric blogging communities. Their interviewees, however, echo Hendry's (2020) assertions about the privileging of interests over identities as the source of this behavioral change. I noted some similar discussions during my data collection: Talking among each other, several older pro-anas referenced how extreme the gatekeeping used to be, including one X user commenting that they were regularly told to kill themselves on the MyProAna forums.
[5.4] Interestingly, while Hendry's interviewee describes her blog as an art gallery, Yeshua-Katz and Martins's (2013) describe theirs as the backstage area of their lives, "who I am…when I'm stripped of the makeup and costume" (503). As Dias (2003) notes, because of the rejection many pro-anas feel from those in their offline lines, many use these "backstage" spaces to receive emotional support as they gradually ready themselves for recovery. In this light, pro-ana content often serves not to encourage disordered eating, but to render legible the mental pain many young people feel (Ging and Garvey 2018). Indeed, many of Yeshua-Katz and Martins's (2013) interviewees purposefully avoided providing curious blog visitors with "tips" and worried about their content's potential to trigger others (505). This provides a fascinating contrast to the "anorexic discourse" Seaber (2016, 498) finds in Hornbacher's memoir, where the physical and psychological anguish caused by anorexia is downplayed. A growing portion of modern pro-ana content seems to prioritize discussing the ways in which anorexia assuages immense inner pain—even if at a great cost. As one pro-ana forum poster writes, "Anorexia and bulimia are horrible illnesses. They kill and they destroy lives. But sometimes life sucks so much that anorexia becomes the only way to escape" (Hilton 2018, 870). This movement within modern pro-ana communities is less about reifying the superiority of the sufferer over others, as Seaber (2016) finds Hornbacher to imply, but about reifying anorexia's function as (temporary) anesthetic. Long posts on harm reduction techniques further emphasize the dangers of starving, cutting, and purging—as well as the concern many pro-anas feel for each other.
[5.5] Regardless of the poster's relationship to their disorder, a decent portion of pro-ana content remains poached, stripped of its original context and refitted onto new affective situations. As Jessica Hautsch (2018) notes, utilizing a shared pool of media allows users to present an "authentic" response "while simultaneously asserting…their membership to the fan community" (¶ 2.11). Thus, by curating a pool of common ana media, pro-ana users can identify each other, assert their place within the community, and express common experiences or feelings. The art gallery/backstage functionality of social media and its displacement of one's emotions onto another's content further maintains privacy and avoids potentially devastating backlash—both from fellow pro-anas and from members of one's offline community.
6. Pro-ana fan production
[6.1] Scholarship on pro-ana behaviors as specifically fannish are limited: Krista Whitehead (2010) argues that pro-ana spaces use fandom as a recruitment method, although this discussion does not extend beyond mentioning pro-anas' desire to emulate thin celebrities. Thinspiration, however, can be combined with an emotional connection to the celebrities or characters in question, as Su Holmes (2015) discovered when studying how pro-ana forum users related to Elsa from Disney's Frozen (2013) and her struggle to conceal her emotions—perhaps even more than they wanted to emulate her thin physique. Interestingly, Holmes also notes a trend of users creating GIFs that edit food into the film, showcasing the off-screen eating behaviors of the character(s) used to inspire starvation. Transformative fannish behaviors such as these, however, often remain unnamed, merely collected under the larger umbrella of pro-ana identity formation.
[6.2] By far the most popular type of Wintergirls fan production is the fragmentation of the novel into miniature pro-ana texts, as users repost their favorite passages, photograph themselves reading the book, and caption pictures of self-harm scars or skeletal girls with quotes from it. Indeed, the sheer scale and endurance of Wintergirls's fragmentation led one X user to comment that the book seemed "like it was made to be read in quotes on [eating disorder] tumblr." Like "The Thin Commandments" being poached and placed onto pro-ana websites as holy writ, pro-anas on modern social media platforms can almost effortlessly excise the parts that make Wintergirls's anti–eating disorder intentions clear, focusing instead on the text's most disordered moments.
[6.3] One of the most commonly reshared snippets is the passage where Anderson repeats "Must. Not. Eat" for two pages, the narration reduced to its protagonist's pathological refusal of food. An X bot account that automatically posts Wintergirls quotes from a preselected pool uses a photograph of these pages for the beginning of its introductory thread. Other users take multiple quotes to form collages, such as one that strings together photographs of pages where Lia uses strikethrough to represent her denied desires for food and her conscious reassertion of how much she hates eating.
[6.4] The tags on one Tumblr post, including "sweetspo" and "meanspo"—short for "sweet inspiration" and "mean inspiration," respectively—reframe Lia's denial of her hunger as aspirational for the original poster and other pro-ana users. Placing these photos in one post and applying this new interpretive framework via the tags prompts readers to approach these passages less as individual pieces of a book and more collectively as a sort of macabre cento poem created from Anderson's materials. In contrast, the bot account's introductory thread acknowledges that the moderator's view of the text differs from Anderson's and that they "do not intend to overshadow the meaning or value of the text," but are simply expressing themselves through these fragments. The novel's first-person narration perhaps makes this expression easier; stripped of context, one can read the "Must. Not. Eat." passage as a mantra rather than a horrific breakdown. Ricks (2019) echoes this sentiment, stating that Wintergirls functioned as a "collection" of such mantras for her, and her experience reading the novel "was akin to…reading 'thinspo.'"
[6.5] Rose (2024) describes a similar kind of fragmentation as "parallel posts," a practice originating from the Dark Academia subculture that emerged on Tumblr in the late 2010s, wherein users collect and juxtapose quotes from poets like Richard Siken with classical paintings and stills from television shows like Hannibal (2013–2015). Although pro-ana groups have edited images of thinspiration models with text since the early 2000s (Dias 2003), quoted texts were often uncredited or from nonartistic sources, such as Kate Moss's infamous comment that "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." Further, pro-ana fragmentation of Wintergirls usually does not include other texts, with accompanying visuals either accentuating or attaching new aesthetic elements onto the emotions expressed within the quote(s). For instance, in one Tumblr post, two monochrome images of a woman with visible ribs are accompanied by a quote from Wintergirls: "I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of my body, then I would see who I really am." Despite the photographs and their accompanying quote describing a sense of alienation from one's body rather than a desire for thinness, Ricks (2019) cites this post as demonstrative of how pro-ana users create thinspo from the novel, a trend she participated in while struggling with her disorder. In a more blatant example, an X thread juxtaposes screenshots from Wintergirls with "th!nspo" images of emaciated women. Selected quotes center on seeing oneself in extremes, as either a "pus-filled whale" or "the thinnest girl in the room." Despite the quotes' horrifying contents, this thread, like the cento poem before it, applies a pro-ana framework through its addition of thinspo women wearing cute, oversized sweaters, stretching in athleisure, or posing in alt fashion. Pro-ana fan production, then, includes not only fragmenting the text into thinspo, but marrying these fragments with their visual counterparts to enhance the effects of both.
[6.6] As Rose (2024) writes, due to Tumblr's curatorial nature, "the self is found, harvested, created, and shared through fragments" (¶ 3.2). Parallel posts encourage their creators to linger within media, creating deeper attachments to texts even as the posts themselves break said texts apart. Thus, "the user archives not their own words but their own textual experience; texts are filtered and transformed through the self, even as the curator withholds their voice" (¶ 5.7). While Anderson's novel ends with Lia recovering, pro-ana reading experiences are nevertheless ones of textual thinspo, centering almost exclusively on Lia's disordered thoughts and attaching tags and even visual elements to highlight Lia's strength.
7. Fandom and community signifiers
[7.1] Near the middle of Wintergirls, Lia reflects on her and her friend's shared disordered habits, describing relapse as a bloody fairy tale that ends with them becoming "wintergirls" together (Anderson 2009, 99). This moniker has been taken up by many pro-anas, who use variants of the title for their Tumblr or X handles or quotes from it for their blog titles and bios. Indeed, the word wintergirls is understood by pro-ana users to denote both engaging in anorexic behaviors and pro-ana culture overall. One Tumblr user, for instance, calls their desire to reread the book an "annr3x!c [anorexic] urge," while another posts a photograph of a journal with the entire left-hand page covered in the command "Don't eat," which the user refers to as a "Wintergirls moment." Tumblr users also often tag pro-ana posts with "wintergirls" to circumvent censorship, even when they are not discussing the book at all.
[7.2] The best illustration of Wintergirls being used to signify pro-ana subjectivity, however, is a collage posted on X (then Twitter) of several cute, simplistic graphics depicting the various "vibes" of adult eating disorder Twitter users. The first group of archetypal adult pro-anas are, of course, called wintergirls, represented by a red butterfly. The X user describes adult wintergirls as ones who have "had an ed for a long ass time but their behaviors haven't changed even a little bit." In the replies and quote-retweets, dozens of users identify themselves as wintergirls with the same tone one might use to share the results of a Buzzfeed quiz.
[7.3] The adult wintergirl also performs other acts of pro-ana cultural consumption, wearing red butterfly bracelets and being a "myproana junkie" to the present day. The red bracelet references the Red Bracelet Project, wherein girls would make colored bracelets with which to publicly identify other pro-ana members (Whitehead 2010). For fans, as Jenkins (2014) writes, "their pleasure comes through the particular juxtapositions that they create between specific program content and other cultural materials" (33). Butterflies and bracelets are not part of Anderson's text, nor are the MyProAna forums named, though Anderson (2009) references Lia visiting pro-ana blogs. In fact, nothing in the description of an adult wintergirl references anything from Anderson's book, and yet the word alone is a powerful signifier of a specific kind of pro-ana subjectivity, so much so that no one in the replies or quote-retweets questions its usage.
[7.4] Fans creating group names for themselves, such as Trekkies and Potterheads, is nothing new. However, as Emily Tarvin (2021) notes, social media's allowance for direct communication between fans and authors has led many of the latter to now acknowledge or even name their fandoms themselves, often incorporating these names into official merchandise. In stark contrast, Anderson uses the wintergirls moniker to reinforce her preferred readings of the novel. Her website's page on Wintergirls (https://madwomanintheforest.com/book/wintergirls/) features a small FAQ section, wherein Anderson answers the question of whether she believes her book has influenced readers' body image: "I've heard from countless readers who said the book finally helped them understand that anorexia is not cool and starving is not beautiful—readers who have decided never to become wintergirls."
[7.5] Yet, as demonstrated by accusations that Anderson has written the "pro-ana bible," her attempt to author her fandom's narrative has not been successful. Indeed, many anti-pro-ana posts I encountered dismissed Wintergirls as "pro-ana garbage" and not an authentic representation of anorexia. Pro-ana readers' responses serve as reminders that, despite the unequal power dynamics between creators and consumers, fandoms are beasts not easily tamed. After all, every admission of understanding Anderson's pro-recovery intent prefaces a blatant, even joyful subversion of it.
8. Conclusion
[8.1] Although older pro-ana content sought to downplay the negative consequences of starvation, modern pro-ana readers attempt to navigate their awareness of the danger they place themselves in with their lingering attachments to their illness. Consequently, they isolate within texts those parts that shore up their preexisting commitments to disordered eating—a reading practice that is then validated and replicated through participation in online communities. Despite their shocking nature, however, many pro-ana reading practices are essentially fannish, put toward similarly fannish ends of self-expression and community-building. Pro-ana readers utilize Wintergirls to enact disordered eating behaviors online in two major ways: first by fragmenting the text to focus on the narrator's most disordered thoughts, and second by using the moniker of wintergirl to signal a certain kind of pro-ana sensibility, one held particularly by those who have been in pro-ana spaces for a long time. Sadly, this depiction of anorexia as something one never outgrows aligns with findings that anorexia is especially resistant to treatment. Indeed, while analyzing Hornbacher's memoir, Seaber (2016) concludes that Hornbacher constructs anorexia "as an almost inevitable behavioral manifestation of global character attributes," with Hornbacher even calling anorexia a "netherworld" that one never fully escapes (492). As such, recognizing that these attributes and their resultant reading practices belong to a larger, more-storied literary tradition may provide healthier alternatives.
[8.2] Additionally, we must remember that the voices of eating disorder survivors who were genuinely inspired to pursue recovery by Anderson's tale are not being heard in these discussions. The idea that pro-ana content may even be beneficial to some sufferers is rarely considered, yet Williams (2014) describes pro-ana forums inspiring her to recover because connecting with other sufferers "helped me realize that I did not want to get worse." Similarly, although Seaber (2016) dismisses anti-pro-ana content as unintentionally promotional due to "the authors' own disordered approach to reading" (502), many of the top comments on the blog post she cites to prove this point expressed gratitude toward the author for inspiring a desire to recover ("Bulimia Kills," https://web.archive.org/web/20220429012240/http://www.2medusa.com/2008/09/bulimia-killswarning-graphic-pictures.html?m=).
[8.3] It is likely that others read Wintergirls and feel the same way. The potential reasons why they are underrepresented in online fan communities are myriad: Perhaps they are simply disinterested in posting these experiences for public consumption, or perhaps the pro-ana appropriation of the book is pushing them out of what would otherwise be a regular fandom space. Perhaps many people's recovery is happening increasingly offline, leaving only those still lost in the throes of their illness to create these vast online communities. Regardless of the reason, researchers must be careful not to privilege pro-ana readings as the de facto audience response simply because these users are more likely to document their reading practices online. Further, understanding these reading practices allows for a more nuanced understanding of pro-ana communities as well as the texts they appropriate, opening the door for greater research into the best practices for clinicians and producers of young adult content.