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(RE)COVERED IN

Unmasking Disorder Recovery Counternarratives in the Internet’s Vegan

Community

An Honors Thesis for the Department of Sociology

Anna Mae Ellis

Thesis Chair: Freeden Blume Oeur

Second reader: Caitlin O. Slodden

Tufts University, 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: Boxes (and Boxes) of Bananas………………………………1

CHAPTER ONE: Tracing Vegan Recovery………………………….…………...6

I. The Current State of Eating Disorders……………….…………..10

II. Literature Review………………………………………………...14

III. Methods…………………………………………………………..30

IV. Overview of Chapters………………………………...………….33

CHAPTER TWO: From Medicalization to Morality: Making the Claim……….35

I. The Counterclaim………………………………………………...35

II. Moral Evidence…………………………………………………..53

CHAPTER THREE: Vying for Legitimacy……………………………………..66

I. The Doctor Said So…………....……………...………………….69

II. The Borders of Knowledge…..…………………………………..75

III. The Body Recovered…………...…………………………...……81

CHAPTER FOUR: Forging Community: Networking against Stigmas………...89

I. Myriad Stigmas…………………………….…...……………..…89

II. Networking Resistance…………………….…………………...100

III. Exclusion………………………………………………...…..….110

CONCLUSION: Scrapping Definitions…………………….…………..……...118

APPENDIX………………………………………………………………….….127

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………131

NOTES……………………………………………………………………….…138

INTRODUCTION Boxes (and Boxes) of Bananas

One of the best-kept secrets of the vegan community is that you can buy bananas for a few dollars a case from wholesale produce markets, as long as you arrive shortly before dawn. And for some in the community, this secret is their sustenance: when you live on 30 bananas (or 20 mangoes, or 8 papayas, or 6 watermelons) a day, not buying in bulk is a surefire way to go broke.

People who eat diets consisting mostly of fruit, with small amounts of uncooked , nuts and often call themselves, aptly, fruitarians (or high-carb, low- vegans). These HCLF vegans subsist a small yet vocal community that finds its nexus on Internet, with proponents of high-carb, raw vegan diets hunkering down on video platforms like YouTube, in myriad social forums, and within the healthism blogosphere also characterized by fad diets, popular recipe-sharing content, and discussions of celebrity (and individual) bodies. One controversial community centerpiece is Freelee the Banana Girl, an outspoken (and for some, grating) proponent of the fruitarian lifestyle, who often shares YouTube videos that evidence her eating exorbitant quantities of fresh , and who has drawn criticism towards a that is practiced by no small subset of the population. The general refrain against fruitarians like Freelee consists of statements like, “What the hell are you thinking? You're clearly not healthy” (Krista Smith, from Elle Tayla) or “You are extremely ignorant. Our body requires . All the you're eating, despite it being from fruits, is excessive and is harmful. 4 mangoes for lunch?” (Jinal Patel, from Elle Tayla).

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The community of vegans online consists of wide swaths of individuals whose dietary practices vary, from fruitarian to raw to ‘regular’ . While not all consume as much fruit as Freelee and her followers, and many even reject the prospect of eating such an extreme diet, they are often treated as a unit by

Internet users who denounce their practices, exemplified by comments like, “The lack of meat in her diet has caused brain damage clearly” (Ryan Ross, from

Freelee). Whether or not banana make up their days, the vegans online frequently field external criticism from voices that question their cutting boards covered in produce.

However, there is a reason that the community of online vegans, and especially the raw or high-carb vegans, continues to flourish online in spite of such contention: their lifestyle is attractive. In highly stylized digital spaces, vegans within this community portray their lifestyles with glamorous, carefully edited content, replete with images of thin, smooth bodies and even catchy music.

Furthermore, through the (mostly) rose-colored visage streams a consistent message of support and community for other vegans, which invites others to join in the fun, and many viewers seem to respond in kind. Blog and vlog comments like “Keep up the amazing work and great videos! You inspire me!” (Rachel

Kiran, from Alice Olivia) and “I just started on a vegan lifestyle, it's my 1st week and so far I honestly love it so much. I totally wanna recreate [your] breakfast”

(Kellbell15, from Claire Michelle) reveal a network of supportive viewers who derive inspiration from the vegan’s narratives and who view their lifestyles as templates.

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Whether the response is exuberantly positive or almost abusively negative, there is clearly a buzz about the vegan diet online. The vegan diets, and the more extreme versions practiced by raw and HCLF vegans in particular are either highly attractive or downright repulsive to many viewers. The hubbub is worth investigating, especially when considering that the vegan community has been embedded in society for centuries. The practice of abstaining from consuming (or wearing, or using) animal products is hardly new. Notably, however, as the vegan community establishes itself online, an intriguing pattern becomes apparent, best captured by one blog contributor: “As the vegan community continues to grow on social media, I’ve noticed that a lot of people who end up turning vegan come from a past of struggling with an ED,” (ED=) (from Kati Morton).

This commenter has not been the only Internet user to notice the correlation between vegan Internet bloggers and vloggers (video bloggers, including

YouTubers), and for good reason.

Among the Internet’s vegans (of which the subtypes are outlined in the

Appendix), a compelling majority publicly state that their vegan diet is a product of eating disorder recovery. Their many voices, synthesized, claim that veganism

‘cured’ their eating disorder. This statement is alarming to many viewers, who often claim that such eating practices, viewed as restrictive, perpetuate existing eating disorders, as in one comment appearing below a video of a fruitarian claiming to have recovered from severe anorexia: “No! No no noo! Thats not your full recovery. You're still making your old mistakes. Having a balanced diet will eventually satisfy all the that your body needs. Having only fruits is

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NOT A HEALTHY CHOICE” (Simran Sehgal, in Elle Tayla). People are passionate about whether fruitarian, raw vegan, and even ‘typical’ vegan foodstyles constitute a valid recovery, and wrestle with the contradiction that eating disorder recovery forbids restriction while vegan-centered diets require it.

Laypeople and clinicians alike often condemn the methods of the vegan recoverers, unable to reconcile the practices of the vegans (especially the fruitarians) online with what is currently viewed as a “healthy” recovery. This is even (especially) so for some non-vegan recoverers, who are often, apparent from the comments, the most vocal opponents of this lifestyle:

Sorry not sorry, love, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. I went down the same rabbit hole, came up […] I realized what a jerk-around anorexia is […] The fact that your diet is vegan because veggies and shit are ‘clean’ is a lie […] You deserve a fucking treat other than fucking fruit. And you know it. (Veronica Gombar, from Elle Tayla)

Regardless, vegan videos and personal web pages online continue to proliferate, and the persistence of this trend despite mainstream pushback further demands attention to the significance of these individuals’ foodstyles in the context of eating disorder recovery. By claiming that veganism can enable the attainment of successful ED (eating disorder) recovery, members of the community subvert the dominant medical, psychological, and cultural beliefs about what is, and isn’t, a “real” way to heal.

This thesis takes seriously the ways that vegan recoverers, including those with more ‘extreme’ dietary practices, negotiate how they recover from their eating disorders. Setting aside both the vitriol and the adulation, the narratives that are being voiced to a wide Internet public are, at their heart, subversive; they point

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out and counteract the limitations in the typical model of recovery, and conceive of powerful, if controversial, alternatives. This work provides an inroad and outlet to a community seldom heard at the level of public consciousness and seeks to unearth its underlying eating disorder counternarratives.

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CHAPTER ONE Tracing Vegan Recovery

A search for the vegan recovery community online returns a seeming plethora of colorful, well-crafted blogs and vlogs in individual websites and on popular sharing services like YouTube. The creators’ photographs reveal them to be young, mostly female, Western, and largely either white or Asian. The creators’ screen names and website titles often reflect their focus, including

“Crazy Vegan Kitchen,” “Sweet Simple Vegan,” and “Happy on Fruit.” While this work will reference their practices as singularly “vegan,” their practices vary dramatically and include what I will call “typical” veganism: whole -based veganism, raw till four veganism, raw veganism, and high-carb low- fat veganism (also called , and usually acronymed HCLF vegan).

Raw till four, raw, and HCLF veganism can be considered more extreme forms of dietary practice, and thus attract significant traffic online from viewers come to gawk or admire.

This sample includes 9 ‘typical’ vegans, 6 whole-foods vegans, 3 raw till four vegans, 3 raw vegans, and 4 HCLF vegans, for a total of 25 vegan recoverers. The typical vegans practice the most commonly recognized and interpretable form of the vegan diet and do not specifically restrict any type of food beyond the basic vegan qualification that eliminates animal products from the diet (no , meat, poultry, , eggs, , gelatin, etc.). Whole-foods vegans, the next largest category, also do not consume any animal products

(which is the case for all in this study), but also do not consume (or consume very small amounts) of processed foods, choosing instead to consume only “whole”

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foods: fruits, vegetables, , whole , nuts, and seeds in their unprocessed form. Raw till four vegans also consume only whole plant foods, but in addition, they do not consume cooked foods until dinnertime, at which point they will typically eat a consisting of whole, cooked plant foods, like potatoes or . Raw vegans eat an exclusively raw diet (also whole-foods), and finally, HCLF vegans (or fruitarians) are understood to practice the most restrictive diet, consuming only (or mostly) raw, whole, plant-based foods, while also consuming very low amounts of fat (and high amounts of fruit). Unlike a raw vegan, a HCLF one will typically limit raw plant foods like avocados, olives, or nuts. Fruitarians are also often known for their consumption of “monomeals,” or meals consisting of mass quantities of one type of fruit (for example, 15 mangoes for lunch).

It is important to emphasize that the distinctions between these practices are not always so clear-cut, and often, one person will switch back and forth between the more extreme practices, on some days practicing raw till four, and on others practicing a fruitarian diet. Some of the YouTubers no longer practice raw veganism and instead practice whole-foods veganism, or vice versa, as revealed in more recent video uploads. However, for the purposes of this research, the participants in the sample are classified by whichever diet they presented with at the time that the data was collected.

The blogs and vlogs generally resemble one another in content and form.

Most include space for recipe sharing, general blogging and story-sharing, advice, and tips to others. All of them have space for comments and request that viewers

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and readers subscribe or follow their site. Videos are assembled with photography and video-editing skills, and with carefully designed images of beautifully prepared fruits and vegetables; blog posts are similarly adorned with attractive pictures of meals, and often of the creators themselves. Some of the sites are more amateurish in nature, but even in these cases, an artful expression is integrated, and presentation of food is central. A sampling of screenshots of the blogs and vlogs is included in the Appendix to provide a glimpse into the appearance of the community, which informs the present analysis.

From the community of vegans online, it might be conceived that veganism is common in the wider, offline community (and here, as I will throughout this paper, I am referencing also more extreme vegans in the phrase

‘vegan community’). On the contrary, only about 1 million people (0.5%) in the

United States or the United Kingdom are vegan (where many of the creators of the videos originated from), with only marginally higher numbers in Sweden and

Australia (the origin of the remaining creators)1. There are no statistics available to tell how many people practice raw or another more extreme form of veganism; however, we can infer from the low number of general vegans that the number of more extreme vegans is minute. This emphasizes the important fact that the diets portrayed in this work and in the community itself are not representative of many, and are more extreme. Nevertheless, despite small numbers, the community practices themselves can be interpreted as a microcosm of the broader cultural movements surrounding plant-based diets and eating disorder recovery.

Moreover, the creators of the sites viewed manage large presences, demonstrating

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their widespread significance. Many of the videos have upwards of 100,000 views, with some reaching even into the millions. We can assume that not all of these viewers and blog readers actually follow the practices that they symbolically

“follow” online; however, this does reflect a widespread cultural interest in these practices. And of course, there are many people who are vegan and who do follow these lifestyles. There is a veritable community of participants and audience members alike – one that often overlaps. This movement, furthermore, appears to be more than a blip on the Internet screen. A search for raw veganism on

YouTube, for example, generates 2.3 million results in April 2018, and that number will likely increase, as it has blossomed in recent years.

Because of the influence and relative size of the Internet’s vegan community, the stories told about the creators’ vegan journeys hold significance.

Most of the sites are not focused primarily on eating disorders and recovery, and instead present themselves as vegan lifestyle sites; however, the number of eating disorder stories, shared as individual videos and blog posts within broader personal vegan sites, reveal that eating disorder stories course beneath the surface.

This undercurrent is not arbitrary: it inevitably shapes viewers’ interpretations of practices even in other, non-disorder-specific videos, because eating is an embodied practice managed by both veganism and eating disorders, often in overlapping ways.

For this reason, the narratives being produced about recovery through alternative dietary patterns reach diverse groups, at times engendering vitriolic criticism and continuously spurring debate over what constitutes eating disorder

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recovery. This dialogue, for the time being, has remained solely on the Internet among lay participants and has not yet transcended into spheres of academic research. This may be attributable to the Internet itself being young, and communicative spaces such as blogs, vlogs (video blogs), and forums even younger. Specifically, vegan recovery narratives have only begun to emerge and take root in the online consciousness within the last several years, with the content from this sample all published since 2012, only further emphasizing the need for analysis into the meanings and methods perpetuated in these spaces. This thesis rectifies this absence by examining the eating disorder stories contained within the blogs and vlogs of vegans to uncover the meanings ascribed to veganism in the framework of recovery from an eating disorder.

THE CURRENT STATE OF EATING DISORDERS

As the stories encountered in the vegan community discuss eating disorders at length, it is necessary to provide a unified definition for each of the disorders discussed. Here I use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5), which is produced by the APA (American

Psychiatric Association). The DSM-5, updated most recently in 2013, contains diagnostic criteria for the currently accepted mental disorders. The DSM-5 is controversial and limited in its multinational breadth2; however, it is currently the most widely accepted manual in use in the United States and abroad, and is the referent for most Western doctors, academics, and psychologists, as well as

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laypeople (Eating Disorders Victoria 2016; American Psychiatric Association

2013).

The DSM-5 defines (AN) as a condition where one severely restricts calories, leading to low body weight (below a , or BMI, of 18.5), along with an intense fear of and dysmorphic . It includes the restricting subtype (basic caloric restriction as means of ), as well as the lesser-known binge-eating/purging subtype, which has the same criteria and symptoms of , only that the sufferer has a body weight below 18.5. Anorexia affects about 1% of the population in the

United States and skews towards white women (American Psychiatric

Association 2013; NEDA 2018). Bulimia nervosa (BN) is implicated when a person binge eats (eats a large quantity of food in a short time, with guilt and a sense of lack of control), along with compensatory behavior such as vomiting, laxative use, , or excessive , with behaviors occurring at least weekly for three months alongside body weight and shape preoccupation. Unlike anorexics with the binge-purge subtype, bulimics are not (below 18.5

BMI). Bulimia affects about 1.5-2% of the statistical population and also skews towards women (American Psychiatric Association 2013; NEDA 2018). (BED) involves binge eating, including eating very rapidly, eating to the point of pain, and self-disgust, without compensatory behavior at least once a week for three months. BED affects genders and ethnicities more equally and is present in about 2-3% of the population. Individuals with either bulimia or BED can be of any weight, and each of the three main eating disorders above are

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marked by intense impairment and distress (American Psychiatric Association

2013; NEDA 2018). There are other eating disorders included in the DSM-5, but the three above were the only ones mentioned by the individuals in this research.

10 identified as having had anorexia, 2 had bulimia, 2 had binge eating disorder, and the remaining 11 described a mix of the three over time. The mix of several disorders over time is very common, though it is not reflected well in the DSM-5 categories.3

The parameters for recovery from eating disorders are often amorphous and narrowly defined, a dilemma long emphasized by scholars in the field. Some of the current criteria used by researchers and medical professionals are constrictive, focusing on symptom reduction and weight gain (in underweight individuals) rather than on achieving a more holistic understanding of recovering patients’ experiences (Bowlby et al. 2015; Emanuelli et al. 2012; Fennig, Fennig and Roe 2002). Nevertheless, many eating disorders and ED recovery researchers use the available criteria in their population assessments. For example, many studies rely on weight measurements of ED patients to determine their recovery status, linking those with BMIs below 18.5 with incomplete recovery (Bardone-

Cone et al. 2012; Fitzsimmons-Craft, Keats, and Bardone-Cone 2013). This reflects a pervasive dependence on physical metrics used to describe metaphysical states of being.

While biometric frames have long been embedded in eating disorders research, data are sparse that describe the numbers of ED recoverers who consume vegetarian or vegan diets. Some research has initially discovered that

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about half of active anorexics follow a vegetarian diet, compared with 6-34% of non-anorexic adolescent women (Bardone-Cone et al. 2012). While the DSM-5 does not mention vegan or vegetarian recoveries specifically, a variety of sources—from professional to semi-professional to layperson—condemn the practice of vegan recovery. Any form of limited diet among recovers, including vegetarian and vegan diets, is generally denounced by medical practitioners; however, allowance is often made for vegetarian (not vegan) diets that are practiced for ‘ethics only’ (Bardone-Cone et al. 2012). Medical research views vegan ED recoverers with skepticism and frequently pathologizes their practices regardless of the unique narrative. Even laypeople often argue that a vegan diet is a smokescreen for ongoing eating pathology. Nonetheless, most do permit some variability, allowing that vegan pathology is circumstantial. Yet there are those who unwaveringly state that and veganism are decidedly harmful for a recovering person, emphasizing the potential for deficiencies, and who label vegetarianism among anorexics as a definitively disordered eating practice (Marzola et al. 2013). Lastly, while the scope of research on vegan recovery is limited, what does exist today focuses on the individual rather than the burgeoning community online, a cleft leaving ample room for new treatment of the question of vegan recovery.

Not only has eating disorders literature generally privileged biological understandings of recovery and sweepingly condemned vegan methods, but the frames on which it rests translate into real-world practice. Dieticians, , and residential centers often condemn these practices, deterring people from

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obtaining treatment. Increasingly, treatment centers are offering vegetarian treatment options (such as at Mirasol)4. A few do offer vegan options (Center for

Hope of the Sierras5, the Program6), but they are the anomalies. In general, treatment center websites lack information pertaining to vegan diets at all

(Walden7, Canopy Cove8, and others), or include information about lactose intolerant recoverers or those with only. Even for those centers that accommodate vegans, they emphasize a cautious approach, stressing the need to assess whether veganism results from ethics or disordered thoughts. Thus, in using the policies of recovery centers as lenses into treatment settings for recoverers, it is revealed that the hesitancy surrounding vegetarian and vegan recovery translates into “real-world” settings, and tangibly impacts individuals’ lives.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Parting ways momentary with more traditional varieties of eating disorder recovery research, we are left still without any studies that examine the vegan community online. However, ample sociological, anthropological, and social psychological literature has endeavored to explore eating disorder recovery more broadly, viewing it with socio-cultural rather than biomedical lenses. The following review focuses on this body of literature, for it is these works that this thesis draws its methods and theories from.

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The Medicalization of Starvation

The vegan recovery narratives produced by the individuals in this study must first be contextualized within the history of eating disorders, which Joan

Brumberg’s seminal work does extensively, serving as much of the basis for subsequent social criticism of shifting eating disorders conceptualizations.

Brumberg traces the history of anorexia nervosa, belaboring the point that the illness was once understood through a lens of religion. Girls who starved were viewed as the ultimate ascetics, lauded, observed, and idolized as morally and spiritually enlightened. However, with the rise of modern in the 20th century and the concurrent decline of cultural religion, the starvation practices characteristic of anorexia were pathologized anew via a medical (and medico- psychological) framework. Anorexia (and other eating disorders) were increasingly understood as mental requiring medical intervention in a process of medicalization, which culminated in their inclusion as mental illnesses in the DSM-III in 1980 (Brumberg 2000). Brumberg’s history of anorexia traces a newly non-clinical conception of eating disorders and is thus groundbreaking in the way that it reveals, through a historical analysis, the instability of, cultural influence in, and shifting moral frames around eating disorders to reflect the societal evolution and evolving understandings of illness, gender, and individual performance. Her analysis paves the way for conversations about eating disorders as ever-shifting experiences that reflect their cultures. In more recent years, qualitative researchers have engaged more directly with the concepts of

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medicalization and have moved further to problematize the effects of this process in the formulation of eating disorders.

The medicalization of eating disorders remains a stalwart theme underlying much eating disorders literature to date. Drawing on Peter Conrad’s formulations of the medicalization of mental illnesses9, ED researchers have examined the dominance of medical literature and have warned of its limitedness.

According to Gailey (2009), due to the strong presence of psychological and medical research in the eating disorders community, the focus in recovery dwells on clinical treatment, with the primarily emphasis on medically corrective action and on physical parameters (Bardone-Cone 2012; Fitzsimmons-Craft et al. 2013;

Marzola et al. 2013). According to Gailey and numerous others, this is troubling as it tends to understate or even ignore the crucial cultural factors in eating disorders and recovery, pressing scholars to argue for an alternative illness model with a redistributed focus on lay experience.

The Recovery Literature

With thorough documentation of the medicalization of eating disorders and the ways in which such medicalization necessarily narrows understandings of recovery, social science researchers have attempted to realign recovery scholarship along the lines of self-definition, illness narratives, labeling theory, and identity formation. For example, sociologist Emma Rich’s (2006) research on eating disorders deals in the topic of medicalization explicitly, using clinical interviews to focus on the navigation of the eating disorder identity in relation to a perceived medicalized discourse. Recovering individuals negotiate their illnesses,

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and their recovery experiences, as different social and interpersonal identity elements, each fine-tuned to navigate stigmatization and “discursive constraint”

(Rich 2006:294).

Other researchers marry ideas of the social eating disorder identity with work on narrative formation. One scholar, for example, found through interviews with recovered women that alternative, social, and meaningful identities were both imperative for, and shaped by, a unified recovery narrative (Garrett 1997). In other words, structuring a personal narrative appears to be a crucial element in eating disorder recovery; because medical frameworks may be perceived to constrict these narratives, recoverers look outside the available frameworks to develop alternative and community-based identities within which to develop their recovery (Garrett 1997; Matusek and Knudson 2009; Rich 2006).

Repeatedly, the idea of the recovery identity (as a dynamic alternative to the clinically, cognitively-defined eating disorder identity) appears in the recovery literature, contingent with recovery narrative work. Howard (2006) examined the temporal ambiguity of the ED “recovery” identity, bringing Goffman’s (1963) labeling theory of identity to the table to emphasize the ways that recoverers both obtain and eventually exit their recovery identity. Her work introduces the temporally fluid nature of the ED recovery identity and the narrative concurrently formed around it, emphasizing the process by which recovering individuals construct their identities with respect to cultural frames (Howard 2006).

Furthermore, a number of scholars have investigated the meanings attached to such identities by eating disorder recoverers. Spirituality and community

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engagement (including activist and advocacy work) emerge repeatedly as important components of an alternative recovery identity (Garret 1997; Matusek and Knudson 2009). Importantly, many scholars (and laypeople) frame such spiritual, activist, and community-based narrative identities as intentionally resistant to the dominant medical narratives. For the recovering and recovered subjects of the sociological research, there is active resistance to the narratives of recovery provided by medical and psychological lenses that are seen as restrictive.

Recoverers are repeatedly posited as actors that deliberately renegotiate dominant narratives in favor of incorporating alternatives into the fore (Bowlby et al. 2015;

Matusek and Knudson 2009).

Each of the researchers in the eating disorders recovery research effectively leverages patient voices in their investigation into recovery meanings and identity frames. Additionally, they take seriously the active negotiations that recoverers undergo within their narratives against the cultural recovery discourse, drawing heavily from recovery support groups. Thus, as support groups have transcended the boundaries of the Internet, the field of identity and labeling research in recovery has followed them into the online sphere, with digital formats coloring the outcomes of the research itself.

This breed of Internet identity research tends to focus more so on the social aspect of recovery, seen as crucial to facilitate the process of delabeling from the disordered identity (Howard 2006). In online settings, where recoverers can congregate and share their narratives with ease, social recovery identities are quickly formed, and the old illness identity effectively discarded (McNamara and

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Parsons 2016). The fact that the support group is online facilitates the transmission of a group identity based in recovery, healing, and alternative meanings (like, for example, group activism) in a way that, according to researchers, can promote the generation of new self-concepts along group norms which privilege wellness over disorder maintenance (McNamara and Parsons

2016). Such findings trouble the assumption propelled by dominant cultural and medical understandings of eating disorders that they are uniquely individual and find that they are instead influenced by (and perhaps, limited by) the social.

Research on ED identities and narratives as vehicles for alternative meaning-making have increased in recent years, culminating in work that makes specific, direct attempts to counter medical and psychological literature and insert alternatives to understanding ED recovery. LaMarre and Rice, for example, locate through their investigation into digital storytelling of ED recoveries that recoverers, as autonomous actors, reveal the constructed rift between what is seen as ‘normal’ verses what is seen as abnormal (2016). Continuing in the tradition of research that troubles ED medicalization, they find that their recovering participants resisted medical pathologization of eating disorders; however, in this case, they generate their alternatives in digital, community-centric formats. The re-imagination of recovery, especially in online settings, thus remains a recent focus among recovery scholars (LaMarre and Rice 2016; McNamara and Parsons

2016), with specific methods for reframing a blossoming focus of scholarship.

Embodiment and the negotiation of vocabularies, for example, serve to generate unified (yet alternative) frames for understanding recovery among online groups

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(Koski 2014; LaMarre and Rice 2016; Wahlstrom 2000). Clearly, researchers have noticed that alternative narratives are being created on-(and off-)line, and that recoverers are engaging in specific practices to do so.

However, these works, while they suggest that recoverers’ perceive constraint in their identities and pursue alternative constructions of the self, fall short of exploring just what those alternatives might be. Beyond a description of some who find solace through spiritual or educational ventures in their reconstruction of identity post-recovery, the current research lacks a look into formally structured alternative communities for recovery (including, of course, the vegan recovery community), with one glaring (and problematic) exception.

Most of the literature on what might also be considered an “alternative recovery community” has dwelled on the pro-anorexia community to the exclusion of many others.

Pro-Ana

Pro-anorexia (pro-ana) communities online propagate the idea that eating disorders are lifestyles, and members share methods for increasing the success of individuals’ disorder practices while providing a supportive community. The arena of pro-anorexia research has strengthened over time, and now occupies a significant portion of eating disorders research more generally. A heavy-handed focus on pro-ana sites in academia has left research into other forms of eating disorder community lacking (Riley, Rodham and Gavin 2009). The sheer quantity of pro-ana research is perhaps attributable to the fact that popular culture and

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media influence have taken up the topic as evidence of a moral-psychological crisis, where social research then follows the cultural eye. These sites draw public and academic attention due to the startling nature of their content, often including examples of how individuals can enhance their restrictive eating “success” (Boero and Pascoe 2012; Ferreday 2003; Overbeke 2008). Researchers have thus far analyzed the ways that pro-ana participants make meaning of their lived experiences, manage stigma, and form dynamic online communities. Because

EDs are contested illnesses, online communities can serve as places for individuals to make discursive meaning of their experiences whereas they are not understood clinically (Giles 2006). Among pro-ana communities, story-sharing is key: where websites are places to tease out medical conceptualizations of anorexia as a , pro-ana participants take space to negotiate medical frameworks in the safe context of an Internet subculture (Gailey 2009). Boero and

Pascoe (2012) take up the issue of the pro-ana community in depth, and their findings on digital embodiment, illness and identity management, and medicalization resistance bear marked similarities to both other illness communities and the vegan recovery community. Naturally, the vegan recovery and pro-ana community are inherently different entities, at least on the surface— yet they share the label of being ‘deviant’ online communities in which marginalized individuals come together, making it necessary to compare and contrast the two. This is done throughout this body of work, with pro-ana research findings being discussed often in relation to the findings of this research.

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It is worth noting that this thesis does not address the more concrete ways that vegan recovery narratives interact with pro-ana ones, with respect to the fact that that line of inquiry could be a thesis in itself. On pro-ana sites, veganism

(especially raw veganism) frequents as a topic, with veganism positioned as a method for enhancing the ‘success’ of eating disordered efforts10. In these instances, veganism, particularly in its more extreme variations, is framed as an aid to eating pathology; therefore, while this thesis investigates solely the vegan recovery community and necessarily ignores the vegan pro-anorexic and eating disordered community, the ways in which veganism is described in relation to ED recovery in this work cannot necessarily be extrapolated to understand the ways the veganism appears in other so-called ‘segments’ of the eating disorders and recovery subcultures.

Embodied Movements and Claims-Makers

Fortunately, there is an arena within social research and theory that has explored the issues of illness and ‘the creation of social alternatives,’ so to speak, which can best be categorized within social problems theory. Extrapolating theories developed fully by Spector and Kitsuse in the 1970s and beyond, social problems exist where the behaviors or characteristics of significant numbers of people are disagreeable to a society’s moral consciousness, based on definitions of normativity created by specific authoritative actors (Spector and Kitsuse,

1987). Those who traditionally define normative definitions represent the claims- makers, while those who contest such definitions in favor of culturally alternative

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frames are counter-claimsmakers. Struggles around the framing of social problems and claims-makers revolve around the struggle for control of the definitive process, with the succeeding claims-maker having their definition institutionalized (Spector and Kitsuse 1987). For example, cultural narratives around fatness have undergone definitional shifts as various social claimants struggle for control over framing: among fat acceptance activists, efforts have occurred to reframe the concept of fatness itself, from disease to a social category by, in part, dismantling medical understandings that ascribe disease terminology onto fat individuals (Kwan 2009; Saguy and Riley 2005). Social problems theory can be implemented to understand the ways in which vegan recoverers formulate counter-claims against medicalized, culturally dominant definitions of acceptable recovery, specifically through demedicalization. Using social problems frameworks, we are enabled to ask specifically how the vegan recoverers convey their message, cite their evidence, defend themselves, and “get away with” their claim (Spector and Kitsuse 1987:71). It is these questions which essentially frame the chapters of the following analysis, with Chapter 2 focusing on the “what” (the messaging and framing of the counter-claim itself), Chapter 3 focusing on the methods by which the recoverers “get away with” their claims (and achieve legitimacy), and Chapter 4 focusing on the ways that the recoverers defend themselves and extend their claims to others.

While claims and counter-claims may feature any number of social issues, the focus of many researchers has been on, essentially, claims-making activities among health and illness movements, such as in the case of the shifting meanings

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of fat bodies and as a disease (Kwan 2009; Saguy and Riley 2005). For example, Brown et al. (2004) narrow their focus to describe the activities of embodied health movements (EHMs), in which individuals organize around the issue of disease or illness experience by challenging science and are concerned with access to services and health inequity. Using social movements theory,

Brown et al. (2004) explore EHMs, including environmental breast activists. Central to the work of the breast cancer activist EHM is the contradiction of traditional medical knowledge and the propagation of a democratic participation in the generation of scientific knowledge instead. For the activists, the experience of illness—particularly, an experience written on the physical body—constitutes authentic knowledge, and is thus wagered in the bid to change scientific and cultural understandings of environmental carcinogens. In another example of a ‘battle’ between claimants and counter-claimants regarding embodied health issues, recent literature on the anti-vaccination movement is useful. Among anti-vaccination activists, lay expertise is similarly privileged over and above medical authority, though selectively (Reich 2016). Along the lines of

(embodied, health-related) social problems theory, then, the vegan recovery can be placed, and the findings from much of this literature guides analysis of the community to understand it as a counter-claimsmaking group throughout this thesis.

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Illness Communities Online

The literature on illness groups, as previewed with the work of Brown et al. (2004) and Kwan (2009) among others, is also found deeply rooted within

Internet studies. In joining the lenses of illness groups and Internet community for illness recovery, then, the following literature helps to illuminate the ways in which online interaction tinges the claims-making activities of the vegan recovery community.

Similar themes to those above are repeated in the online illness groups literature, in regards to medicalization resistance and negotiations over knowledge and expertise. This appears to be the case among fibromyalgia sufferers online, who form and draw upon a collective illness identity, facilitated by online interaction, to reify the meanings of professional knowledge (Barker 2002).

Similarly, among breast cancer sufferers who participate in online support groups, community identity and a shared illness narrative enable discussions surrounding individual autonomy and empowerment over embodied experience (Pitts 2004).

Within the Internet illness groups literature, a number of individual tactics for asserting community membership and legitimacy appear, including embodiment through numerical representation and information sharing—which, importantly, in many ways mirrors the activities performed among pro-ana and other groups online, informing investigation into the vegan recovery community (Barker 2002;

Giles 2006; Pitts 2004). Across illness experience (from fibromyalgia to breast cancer), we see the establishment of oneself as validly “ill” as imperative to the function of the online groups. In conjunction with this, the validation of an illness

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experience that is insufficiently medicalized (in the case of fibromyalgia) or over- medicalized (in the case of pro-anorexia groups), is one of the primary prerogatives of the illness groups. Thus continues the conversation with medicalized and non-medicalized claimants around the definitions of illness (and recovery), revealing how illness literature, claims literature, and even eating disorder recovery literature come together to drive investigation into the vegan recovery community.

Stigma And Internet Resistance

Another key factor that unites each of the above bodies of inquiry with the vegan recovery community is the driver of stigma. As many online express doubts as to the efficaciousness of veganism in eating disorder recovery, the stigma around those who do practice is pervasive, and even appears in pop-culture psychological articles and professional reports, summarized neatly with this phrase: “vegetarianism is a perfect cover for anorexia and other eating disorders”11. The stigma asserting that veganism is a front for eating disorders

(and thus, renders its practicers illegitimate and pathological) demands the question of how vegan recoverers negotiate the presence of stigma, which the ample stigma literature can begin to fill.

Among individuals who have stigmatized identities (meaning they are disdained and viewed as non-normative within society at large; they are labeled as different, then discriminated against) (Goffman 1963; Link and Phelan 2000),

Internet community formation can serve as a valuable method for resistance.

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Goffman (1963) points out that individuals with similar stigmas coalesce into in- groups in service of a group identity that aids in the management of stigmatization and mature self-definition. With the growth of Internet subcultures and social media reliance, the Internet has become a site for resisting stigma in the formation of groups. Stigmatized and marginalized individuals can find like-minded others and safe spaces online, enabled by disembodiment, anonymity, and other factors

(Miller 2016). Emboldened by Internet community, individuals may then make claims against their stigmatized definitions. Thus, stigma is revealed as an underpinning of many of the online (and offline) illness and deviant communities described in the literature above. From breast cancer support groups to pro- anorexia communities, individuals with stigmatized, discredited, and marginalized positions locate one another online and enable one another to voice a unified claim against their definition, whether that be of anorexia, self-harm, vaccination, or fibromyalgia. To date, there has been no systematic examination into the stigmas faced by vegan recoverers, or their own descriptions of it; thus, this will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 4, as it is important to gain an understanding of individuals’ views of stigmatizing experiences to gauge the ways in which community is formed and maintained.

Veganism and Healthism

Strikingly absent from the literature reviewed above has been a key concept in this investigation: veganism itself. Excepting the case in which psychological researchers have found correlations between vegetarianism and

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eating disorders (Bardone-Cone et al. 2012), there is a dearth of literature on the qualitative meanings of vegetarianism/veganism in eating disorder recovery.

Although there is no research on the vegan recovery community, there is a sizeable body of literature on veganism more generally. First, and often cited by the vegan recoverers, is the statement by the American Dietary Association

(ADA) that vegetarian and vegan diets, well-planned, are safe and healthy options

(Craig and Mangels 2009). The majority of social researchers have taken up the issue of stigma within veganism, while some have conceptualized veganism in terms of gender, race, and political alignment. This, of course, further informs an understanding of the stigmatic experiences of the vegan recoverers themselves, although the vegan literature alone does not account for eating disorder recovery.

Researchers on vegan stigma locate the labeling of deviance (i.e. vegan labeling) as a key marker for vegan stigma and establish the violation of community meat- eating norms as a prime factor in stigmatization (Bresnahan et al. 2016; Link and

Phelan 2001). They then trace the ways that vegan stigma appears, including in negative emotional interactions with vegans and in the lack of provision of vegan options in most food locations (Bresnahan et al. 2016).

Any connections that exist between vegetarianism and eating disorders have been extrapolated based upon moral frameworks of understanding pathology. Vegetarianism is linked with anorexia in that it is a more extreme and ascetic food practice and is framed as being an extension of disordered patterns, assuming that both are oriented to ideas of control and personal purity (Lindeman,

Stark and Latvala 2000). Finally, we see this where veganism and vegetarianism

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are described in the literature as drivers in the moral imperative to health (Conrad

1994). An interesting duality develops in which veganism is both stigmatized and at the same time lauded as a cultural marker of prestige and moral health—both a mark (of stigma; see Goffman 1963) and a cultural totem. There lacks a scholarly look at the ways that vegan stigma factors into the experiences of the vegan recovery community—thus, lacking specific literature, the vegan stigma, eating disorders stigma, and Internet-as-resistance literature will be linked to begin an investigation into meanings and values inscribed onto vegan recoverers’ experiences in Chapter 4.

New Dialogues

Out of the present literature on ED recovery, online illness recovery, and veganism emerges a new dialogue, which constitutes the foundation for this work.

The vegan recoverers, who embody practices from the more ordinary (typical veganism) to the extraordinary (fruitarianism), enact “narrative resistance” (Rich

2006:299) to the medical and psychological frames that constrain them.

Employing theories from the study of social problems, from stigma studies, from identity research and the sociology of the illness narratives, this thesis parses apart the narratives that they tell—or, rather, the counternarratives that they construct in discursive opposition to the dominant recovery paradigm. Examining the illness counternarratives of the vegan recoverers reveals far more than the mere intricacies and sorrows of illness experience; as eloquently elaborated by Arthur

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Kleinman (1988), alternative illness narratives cultivate new understandings, and perpetuate new dialogues, within a culture about its illnesses.

METHODS

This research draws on data from a sample of 13 YouTube vlogs and 12 blogs for a total of 25 vegan recovery sources. Sites were chosen based on the author’s inclusion of vegan practices and their inclusion of an eating disorder story. Within each recoverers’ site, one blog post (or one vlog post) was chosen which best represented the eating disorder story; in nearly all cases, this meant that the “Eating Disorder Story” video or post was chosen for analysis, which discussed vegan recovery practices in clear relation to the eating disorder.

Furthermore, a variety of sources were selected, drawn from specific searches for raw, HCLF, raw till four, and whole-foods vegans to facilitate the inclusion of more ‘extreme’ forms of veganism in the sample. As a whole, sampling was conducted in a nonprobablistic and nonrandom manner based on the ability of each selected blog and vlog to represent both the eating disorder and vegan recovery story simultaneously.

The data were coded and analyzed with respect to the principles of grounded theory (Charmaz 2016), in which coding and analysis co-occurred and informed one another. Qualitative analysis of quotes drawn from the vlogs and blogs yielded patterns, and as it did, it shaped subsequent coding schemes. For example, it emerged early in the coding process that the recoverers use certain

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words indicative or a moral experience—thus, subsequent coding efforts were shaped to look specifically and to account for this type of language.

There is significant debate over reasonable expectations for privacy for subjects on the Internet. Since the data collected were originally presented by its creators for public viewing, this thesis did not require IRB review. However, to protect reasonable expectations for individual privacy, this thesis does not use any sites that require a login to view postings, only using purely public material.

Following in the tradition of many Internet researchers, the online names that individuals have chosen to present publicly are used in lieu of pseudonyms in order to provide full credit to the creators of the content (Pitts 2004).

As expected based on previous documentation by Internet research as well as eating disorders research, the demographic spread of this is limited.

Demographic data (namely, race and gender information) is implied based on

Internet representation rather than self-disclosure of the participants, so while a general idea of demographic dispersion can be gleaned for purposes of analysis, the specifics are not necessarily reliable. Of the 25 individuals in the sample, 72%

(n=18) are white, 20% (n=5) are Asian, 4% (n=1) identified themselves as non- white Hispanic/Latina, and 4% (n=1) had undisclosed ethnic or racial identity.

96% (n=24) identified as cis-gendered women/female, and only one in the sample identified as male. Of course, it is impossible to fully extrapolate demographic information from faceless sites and white, female, wealth-occupied spaces, since those that do not identify with the dominant identity might make specific efforts to obscure their identities online (Adler and Adler 2008). In Adler and Adler’s

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research on self-harm online communities, they found that some men used female pseudonyms to disguise their identities within the female-dominated forums, illuminating the difficulty in inferring individuals’ identities (2008). Rather than making conclusive statements about the demographic composition of the people I am looking at, then, I characterize demographics loosely to enable an assessment in Chapter 4 of the identity politics enacted in vegan recovery spaces more broadly, due to the significance of embodied identities in a largely disembodied space.

There are a few significant methodological limitations to the present study. For example, the sample size necessarily limits the extrapolation of the analysis. It cannot be posited by any means that the experiences of the recoverers in the sample are fully representative of all the experiences of all vegan eating disorder recoverers. Further, while there is value to viewing the cultivated web pages and YouTube channels of the people in this sample, there may be information lost. To truly gain an understanding of the lived experiences of those in the sample, in-depth interviews are necessary and might be considered for future research. Instead, we are left with the valuable yet limited claimed experiences of those in the sample. Regardless, the claimed experiences inform a great deal about the ways that vegan recoverers may choose to be represented, or may choose to have their lifestyle interpreted by others while paying attention to what they choose to share—and not share—in these spaces. Furthermore, it might always be possible that the information provided by the individuals online is not true and that individuals may be misrepresenting themselves, as discussed in other

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Internet research (Adler and Adler 2008; Giles 2006; Pitts 2004). However, I will assume for the purposes of this research that individuals’ online representations are valid for the examination of symbolic interaction (Pitts 2004).

Finally, this thesis does not seek to evaluate whether recoverers’ practices are pathological. Such an analysis is beside the point and is better reserved for other types of investigation. It will instead inquire into the methods and symbolic meanings that are constructed in the stories presented, which are, as Spector and

Kitsuse describe, unrelated to the “truth” of the claim itself (Spector and Kitsuse

1987:71). As Boero and Pascoe eloquently state, “members’ discursive constructions of self and community are far more relevant to our study than whether they actually are anorexic by agreed-upon diagnostic measures of the moment” (2012:38). I will seek only to explore individuals’ beliefs and embodied relations around their own recovery processes, “grounded as these are in the various discourses about recovery that circulate around, within, and through us”

(LaMarre and Rice 2016:6) with an effort against reverting to a pathologizing framework through which to examine the practices of the vegan recoverers. This thesis will, at its crux, take the recoverers’ claims as they are presented, which is their intention after all.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

Acquiring a complex understanding of the vegan recoverers’ counterclaims must be grounded in the existing literature across topics of medicalization, stigma, and health movements. Thus, such has been the focus of

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the first chapter. In Chapter 2, I dig deeper into theories of medicalization to posit the recoverers’ claims as largely anti-medical, and then array their moral narratives to explicate a medical-to-moral shift. In Chapter 3, I center my analysis on the techniques by which the recoverers’ establish legitimacy as claims-makers, focusing on their performance of boundary maintenance, online embodiment, and the inherent re-introduction of scientific authority into the narrative. In Chapter 4,

I explore the propellers of recovery community formation, locating multiple stigmas as contributing factors. Subsequently, I analyze the parameters of the community, paying specific attention to its cohesiveness, and conclude with a discussion about which voices are excluded from the community. In the conclusion of this thesis, I explore elements of my own positionality as a researcher and suggest that the recoverers’ claims constitute subversive alternatives to a constricting world of traditional eating disorder recovery. I conclude finally by questioning whether the vegan recovery narrative will be inscribed more deeply into popular consciousness, translating into modified eating disorder treatments and an enhanced cultural understanding of the complexities of recovery.

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CHAPTER 2 From Medicalization to Morality: Making the Claim

“Here is the premise of it all: A plant-based diet does not cause disordered eating.” (Sweet Simple Vegan)

THE COUNTERCLAIM

An investigation into the recoverers’ narratives first requires a fleshing out of their counterclaim, and a description of exactly what they are countering. For the recoverers, the conventional (medicalized) definition of eating disorder recovery does not suit them. Instead, they choose and advocate a new (and improved) recovery. While the specific claims varied slightly across the 25 individuals observed, their claim can be summarized as follows:

“Veganism/vegetarianism does not CAUSE eating disorders” (Sweet Simple

Vegan) and “Veganism can also aid in the recovery of an eating disorder” (Crazy

Vegan Kitchen). They thus assert not only that vegan-based recovery is nonpathological, but that it is conducive to recovery.

For the recoverers, the rejection of the traditionally unfavorable framing of vegan recovery is central to their argument given the medicalization of ‘typical’ eating disorder recovery by those outside the community (Bardone-Cone et al.

2012; Musolino et al. 2016). This is, essentially, their counterclaim (which informs their counternarrative), such that it might be situated within social problems theory (see Chapter 1). With this in mind, we can conceptualize the

“putative conditions” (or the reprehensible conditions that inform counterclaims) described by Spector and Kitsuse as aligning with the restriction of the recovery model (Schneider 1985:211). For the recoverers, the professional and lay

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conclusion that veganism and eating disorders feed into one another is structurally limiting, and even restricts the level of (vegan) recovery care that they can receive—and, put forth as it is largely by medical and psychological authorities, it represents the dominant claim (which is outlined briefly in Table 1).

Furthermore, within social problems theory, the activities surrounding the counterclaim are central in order to socialize the problem (Schneider 1985), and for the vegan recoverers, their online presence (through vlogs and blogs) formulates their social activity-production around their counterclaim. For example, Spector and Kitsuse document the public activities of gay activist groups, such as the rallies and protests in the 1960s and 1970s, as being examples of strategic action to propagate the (at the time, counter-)claim, which asserted that homosexuality is not a mental illness (Spector and Kitsuse 1987). For the vegan recoverers, then, their online publicity is not an arbitrary form of activity, but instead marks the socialization of their counter-claim to a wider audience.

Additionally, social problems theory reveals processes that occur in vegan recovery narratives in terms of their methods and outcomes. For example, Spector and Kitsuse find that claimants, unsatisfied with institutional interventions, may create their own “alternative institutions” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977:156, in

Schneider 1985:212). This is true of vegan recoverers who seek to form alternative communities in which to express their alternative realities. The importance of understanding recoverers’ statements as counterclaims lies in the fact that such statements cannot be addressed without reference to the dominant narrative. In other words, the significance of the recovery narratives lies in their

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oppositionality, a fact that the recoverers themselves accentuate. The formulation of their own claims as being counter to normative narratives is reflected throughout the sample, with statements such as “Veganism never had anything to do with my eating disorder. Veganism is a rejection of [violence against animals] and has nothing to do with ” (Jenni Lorette). This recoverer makes an unambiguous claim that her fruitarian diet and her earlier anorexia are distinct entities, anticipating the likelihood that the opposite assumption will be made by the viewers of her video in line with predominating beliefs about veganism and eating disorders.

Table 1 Outline of Claimsmakers

Claim Psycho-medical (the dominant Vegan Recovery (the Perspective cultural claim) counterclaim) Claimant Medical and psychological The vegan recovery professionals & researchers community

Expertise Traditional medical and scientific Laypeople produce practitioners generate knowledge knowledge; personal and have expertise experience as expertise Activity to Research, treatment policy and Internet community Create the practice activities: posting vlogs, Claim blogs, or engaging in forms

Recovery Recovery occurs over the life Full recovery is possible Position course; emphasis on relapse. with veganism. Veganism is not a viable recovery Vegan is not a cover for method and is a cover for pathology when pathology. undertaken for moral reasons.

Disease Frame Eating disorders are a disease. Mixed; mostly, eating disorders are not diseases.

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Having established their preliminary claim that veganism is not a disordered practice in recovery, the recoverers are then able to conceive of the second act: that their lifestyle “is absolutely amazing at helping people with eating disorders” (Happy on Fruit). This is what truly characterizes their assertion as a counterclaim to the dominant narrative: they are not merely asserting veganism’s efficacy in their own recovery, but are relating their lifestyle (and perhaps recommending them) to others. What distinguishes social problems claims from other branches of social science is that the social problems affect significant numbers of people subset within a culture (Spector and Kitsuse 1987)—and by discussing their veganism in terms of its utility for others (anyone, even) in eating disorder recovery, they rope the vast arena of recovering individuals into the field.

Therefore, it is this particular assertion that relegates their narrative to the territory of a counterclaim, rather than merely as an expression of their isolated story.

As previewed, the dominant claim against which the vegan recoverers situate their assertion is comprised of many voices, from lay allegations that vegan recovery is pathological (“She still has a big eating disorder!”) to pop- psychological (“Veganism can be a convenient cover, especially for adolescents, among recovering anorexics”1). However, it is the medical-psychological (or, for the purposes of this thesis, psychomedical) institution in particular that possesses the power to tell the cultural narrative of eating disorder recovery. It is this medicalized ‘traditional’ eating disorder recovery that the recoverers take pains to work against, explaining that their method and their conceptualization are atypical, unconventional (i.e. non-medical), and yet effective.

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Previous analysts have documented the ownership struggle between professional and nonprofessional claimsmakers over the medicalization of health problems, reflecting the struggle by vegan recoverers to resist their own medicalization (Schneider 1985; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). This is the case with fat acceptance activists, a group comprised of nonprofessional voices, who symbolically battle professional authorities with the intent of reframing obesity from a medical problem to a social one (Kwan 2009). In the case of eating disorders, the professional claimsmakers have traditionally insisted on a psychotherapeutic treatment modality, and for some, hospitalization (without vegan food options, of course) (Marzola et al. 2013). It is this conceptualization of recovery that many of the individuals in the study resisted, seeking instead to lay claim to their own non-medical methods. One vlog creator who lauded whole- foods veganism as the cure to her binge eating disorder, discussing her experience with traditional eating disorder treatment with a psychotherapist, said:

If you’re anything like me I went to a psychologist, I talked to a dietician and they will start talking to you about things such as your childhood, […] they’ll get you to like write down a little chart of like the time that you’re eating at, how hungry you are when you start […] This method is nothing like that. (Alice Olivia)

This excerpt demonstrates an effort at clear-cut separation from traditional psychomedical recovery. She does not merely imply separation, but emphasizes it as a key factor distinguishing her own “method.” Like Alice, for many of the recoverers in the sample, an opposition to standard recovery methods is central in their construction of their counterclaim wherein they reject the idea that psychotherapy, hospitalization, and other formal treatments are necessary.

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Speaking about her experiences with the psychotherapeutic and traditional method of eating disorder treatment, Alice continues:

I found that method of recovery to just continue to put me back. And not, just not help me at all and not help my mental state at all, it made me feel even more that there is something wrong with me as a person and it wasn’t just what my body needed. It made me think that like something is wrong with my head and that I needed fixing, basically. When that’s not the case at all. (Alice Olivia)

This quote is illustrative of the sentiments of many of the recoverers in this sample. Their separation from the common narrative hinges on resistance to the pathologization inherent within the process of visiting a psychologist, being hospitalized, going to a treatment center, or any number of components within a medicalized, standard eating disorder recovery. Alice, like others, instead seeks to reclaim her own understanding of her condition, asserting that there is nothing

“wrong with [her] head.” Efforts to resist pathologization exist not only among vegan recoverers but among non-vegans as well, as explored by a number of sociological eating disorders scholars. Garrett (1997) finds in her interviews with eating disorder recoverers in a support group that they often “rejected particular clinical criteria,” finding fault with the standard medical evaluation of their recovery status (P. 263). Rich (2006) notes too the imperative for eating disorder recoverers to create spaces and narratives in which they are not pathologized, both in their lived experience as disordered individuals and in their efforts at recovery.

Similar efforts are evident among the vegan recoverers, excepting that their efforts are necessarily more specific than those of more traditional non-vegan recoverers. For Alice and others in the sample, not only must they exert efforts to resist pathologization of their eating disorder, but they must further resist attempts

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to pathologize their specific and atypical method of (vegan) recovery. In light of community ‘outsiders’ who accuse raw vegans of closeted anorexia, the imperative to depathologize the method is paramount.

Vegan recoverers challenge existing versions of medical knowledge about their condition and about viable recovery methods, at times upending the influence of psychotherapists and other traditional treatments in their recovery in the process. By the same token, numerous other health counter-claimants have rejected dominant medical meanings in favor of their own alternative frames, which can be traced across the social problems literature (Brown et al. 2004;

Saguy and Riley 2005; Schneider 1985; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). Significantly, in order to form a resistance to the proscribed medical recovery that is most salient in cultural consciousness, the recoverers sculpt their identity around a demedicalized, non-traditional image. For most of the individuals in the sample, this manifests as the selection of a “fully recovered” identity from among the available meaning-making frameworks.

The “Full” Genre and Medical Disease Models

Eating disorder recoveries have often been separated into two “genres”: full/complete and struggling/continuous (Shohet 2007:344). The struggling or continuous recovery pattern is described also as the “accepting trajectory” of illness recovery in which the sufferer embraces the disordered label as essential to their identity, further viewing the eating disorder as being elementary to their being in a permanent fashion (Howard 2006:316; Shohet 2007). Contrarily, the

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full or “complete” recovery conception is understood medically to be the absence of disordered symptoms (Isomaa and Isomaa 2014) while in qualitative research it is described to be a disidentification fully with the eating-disordered label (Koski

2014). Both genres of recovery are replicated in medical research, seen where researchers categorize participants into “partially recovered”, “fully recovered” and “unrecovered” groups based on somatic criteria (Bardone-Cone et al. 2012;

Fitzsimmons-Craft, Bardone-Cone, and Kelly 2011; Isomaa and Isomaa 2014).

Nevertheless, most medical research has documented eating disorder recovery as a lifelong, ongoing process, marked with frequent relapses and a permanent persistence of pathological thought processes. Wherever research has labeled a group or person as “partially” or even “fully” recovered, authors invariably caution against such categorization, stating that rates of relapse are extremely high among eating disorder patients over the life course, and that lasting recovery is not, generally speaking, a stable reality (Fitzsimmons-Craft et al. 2013; Isomaa and Isomaa 2014). This understanding is firmly grounded in the conceptualization of eating disorders as diseases for which there is no cure (Bowlby et al. 2015).

According to the modern disease model of eating disorders, “Full, complete recovery is not obtainable, regardless of how long an individual stays abstinent from disordered eating behaviors. […or] when recovery is possible, […] there are certain residual factors” that preclude its ultimate success (Bowlby et al. 2015:3).

In the sample, self-described fully recovered vegans represent the majority, in contrast with other research that finds full recovery to be infrequent, if not altogether impossible. 76% of the sample (N=19) claimed to be fully

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recovered, with only 6 admitting to ongoing symptoms or describing their recovery as “lifelong.” For the recoverers, indications of a permanent “curing” of their disorder, or a sense of finality in their “freedom” from symptoms designate them to the full recovery category, appearing in statements such as these: “I’m really into the raw food and it has helped me so much […] it’s helped me overcome my lifelong eating disorder finally” (Happy on Fruit); “I healed from binge eating disorder for good” (Alice Olivia); and “I found raw till four which was the ultimate, just, cure for me. […] That was just, my eating disorder just vanished” (Supreme Banana). Some other statements included a description of being marked “well” or “healthy” from disordered eating, such as a person with physical illness might be declared “cured,” evidenced in statements like this:

“Since 2012 I have been declared healthy from my eating disorder” (Life without

Anorexia). Granting all this, not all claims to full recovery were partnered with a true absence of demonstrated disorder. For example, one recoverer declared that her veganism had “ended” her binge eating and that she was “finally” symptom- free, and in subsequent minutes in her vlog she proceeded to admit to ongoing symptomatology (Hitomi Mochizuki). However, the purpose here is not to assess whether or not claims to full recovery are valid; instead, it lies in the very fact that the claims are present at all.

By claiming to be “fully” recovered, the recoverers are effectively rejecting more standard, medicalized understandings of the permanency of eating disorders. Their full recovery narratives displace traditional framings of recovery as “requiring constant vigilance,” or as being “an ongoing process” that strives for

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normality but in which one never truly attains fruition (Koski 2014:81).

According to Koski, the professional framing of recovery as continuous is not coincidental: illustrating recovery as constant and ongoing, and as precluding

“full” healing, preserves individuals within the treatment system, protecting the stability of support groups and other treatment modalities from losing recovered patients (Koski 2014). Through this perspective, full recovery and a disease framework cannot exist together within one recovered individual, demanding that claims to full recovery reject the disease model altogether. With this, another frame is peeled back to reveal the extent of the vegan’s counterclaim: because eating disorders are not diseases, full recovery is achievable with a vegan diet.

Rejection of the disease frame of eating disorders popped up across the cases in the sample. Examples include, “Eating disorders to me are not a disease—they are merely a symptom of something fundamentally wrong with you” (Crazy Vegan Kitchen), and from fruitarian Freelee, “You know and, it’s all like a lot of people are like oh no no, eating disorders are, they’re mental, people have got a psychological problem and rarara, okay, that…that I really, really don’t agree with” (Freelee). Other efforts to directly demedicalize eating disorders were slightly more subtle than ‘anorexia is not a disease’, yet still achieved the same aim: to reconceptualize eating disorders as nonessential processes, exposing the possibility for a full disidentification with the medical eating disorder label and the adoption of a recovering one. One individual separated herself and her recovery from drugs and medical treatment: “I went to the doctor but she only wanted me to take drugs. I did for a while, but did not see any improvements and

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I knew that it does not heal the real problem” (Follow the Intuition). Another rejects the medically-formulated “disorder” label by and large, instead (like the others) rooting her experience in a dephysicalized, personally emotional experience: “I really thought that I truly had binge eating disorder and I had to go to counseling and sort out my stress issues and everything, but that was not the case” (Alice Olivia). The opposite of eating disorders as disease or disorder is presented as underlying emotional and spiritual difficulties that are the “real problem.” In the words of other scholars of eating disorder recovery, the recovery narrative involves a “rediscovery of the self that can be framed as the ‘true me’”

(Lamoureau and Bottorf 2005, in Bowlby et al. 2015:7). Interestingly, this framing renders medical-psychological solutions as ineffective treatments to the incorrectly understood issue (and as inherently disconnected from the emotions as a ‘truth’.)

A disidentification with the “disorder” and “disease” label supplied by medical institutions has been documented among members of the pro-anorexia community as well, marking one of the first (and most consistent) similarities between the vegan recoverers and the pro-anorexic non-recoverers. Like the vegan recoverers, pro-anorexics online have the prerogative to present their experience as an alternative to the one available within medicalized eating disorder understandings, rather than as pathological. Researchers have noted that people on pro-anorexia websites frequently spurn the notion that eating disorders are diseases, framing them instead as choices, lifestyles, and even signs of personal strength (Giles 2006). Vegan recoverers take much the same approach by

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rejecting the disease label. This similarity says less about overlaps between the vegan recovery and pro-anorexia community than it does about groups that are medically marginalized through processes of disease pathologization and who then employ tactics of labeling resistance to reframe themselves and make a viable counterclaim to their own realities.

However, pro-ana researchers note that the views on pro-ana sites are heterogeneous, with some maintaining the essentialist position that eating disorders are “illnesses” or diseases. They further qualify that the same users may employ anti-disease and pro-disease labeling at different times depending on the context (Gailey 2009; Giles 2006). Given the fluidity of the demedicalization technique in pro-ana groups, it is not wholly surprising that a similar level of inconsistency and fluidity is apparent in the vegan recovery community.

Ambiguous Resistance: Reliance on Disease Frameworks

Even from the same recoverer, sentiments are mixed as to whether eating disorders can be qualified as diseases. For example, one recoverer initially emphasizes in her blog that eating disorders are, to her, not diseases, making the assertion twice. However, she then directly states, “Anorexia and [other eating disorders] are MENTAL DISEASES – they have nothing to do with the size of your body, your weight, or the circumference of your thighs” (Crazy Vegan

Kitchen). Others made similar statements which concur with the disease frame of

EDs, such as in this example: “In making this video I want people to know that anorexia and other eating disorders are a seriously life threatening disease!” (Elle

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Tayla), and where one YouTuber referred to his anorexia as “this disorder in your brain” (Chris Henrie), ascribing the eating disorder to a biological location (the brain). Assertions like these, especially when they contradict a blogger’s own anti-disease sentiments, lend evidence to the fact that dueling models of eating disorders exist and are mediated by the public. While the vegan recoverers seek separation from a medical framework that pathologizes their vegan recovery, they paradoxically rely on traditional blueprints of disease etiology in plotting their tale.

The vegan recoverers are not the first to wrestle between the rejection and utilization of medical frames. In fact, this tension is a cornerstone of social claims, illness movements, and eating disorders research collectively; thus, it follows that the same struggle would present in the recovery community. Brown et al.

(2004:594), for example, confirm a pattern in which alternative care activists

“simultaneously challenge and collaborate with science.” Their narratives, while attempting to structure alternative recovery realities, are intrinsically impacted by broader medico-cultural understandings of disorder. This arises once more where fat acceptance activists, in spite of rejecting the framing of obesity as a disease, emulate the disease terminology they detest in order to support a veneer of academic credibility (Saguy and Riley 2005). Contests between frame focus and articulation reveal the constant influence of medicalization in individual understandings of illness and health, whether expressed through the struggle over fatness (Kwan 2009), vaccination schedules (Reich 2016), or vegan recovery.

While claimants’ stories attempt to deviate from the norm, they are nevertheless

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“not immune to powerful systems of representation” such as those instated by medical institutions (Pitts 2004:53).

Medicalized and disease-centric eating disorder theories also surface where vegan recoverers liken themselves to drug addicts. One user in particular says, “I was hooked to my Anorexia the way an addict would be hooked to drugs”

(Crazy Vegan Kitchen). Medical and psychological researchers have recently analogized eating disorders and substance abuse, noting the similarities in behaviors, etiology, and factors affecting treatment2. As alcohol and drug addiction have undergone medicalization processes (Conrad 1992), forging a connection between eating disorders and substance abuse contributes to their further medicalization. Therefore, referencing the addiction framework for eating disorders reflects once more the influence of more traditional medical conceptualizations of eating disorders in the narratives of recoverers who otherwise make concerted attempts to distance themselves from medical depictions.

Personal Choice Narratives

Evidently, medical frames manifest in the recoverers’ narratives, waxing and waning according to how well they suit a particular statement. However, one of the ways that the recoverers most consistently rebuff the disease model is in their recruitment of the personal choice narrative. They variously suggest that their audience (presumably those who are engaging in recovery from eating disorders) should “choose” to recover. According to one raw vegan, “Recovery is

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a choice and every day you have that choice to reclaim your life back” (Chris

Henrie), or as another (fruitarian) recoverer conveniently emphasizes, “CHOOSE to live vibrantly. CHOOSE to be happy. CHOOSE raw fruits and vegetables”

(Jenni Lorette). In this and many other examples, there is no room for interpretation—the vegan recoverers definitively state that recovery is exercised at one’s volition. The conceptualization of illness recovery as being choice-based exists outside the vegan recovery community as well, and has been the subject of ample illness research. For example, Pitts’ (2004) breast cancer patients also accentuate a choice narrative, insinuating that other suffers must commit to effort if they are to survive. By indicating that an individual has the choice in their recovery, the vegan recoverers (as in other illness groups) put the onus of responsibility on the individual to affect their own change.

This sits in stark contrast with the eating disorder-as-disease model that effectively transfers culpability from the patient to the professional caregiver. A medical frame of eating disorders places treatment within the jurisdiction of doctors, and while this does not fully preclude the personal choice narrative, it certainly interrupts it. Therefore, by insinuating that recovery is a choice, the vegan recoverers return the responsibility for care to the patient, even while grappling with the ongoing and contradictory conception of eating disorders as diseases outside the grasp of volition. This conflict is expressed clearly in this excerpt from a HCLF vegan recoverer of anorexia: “I want people to know that anorexia and other eating disorders are a seriously life threatening disease! But in the end… only you can save yourself!” (Elle Tayla). This example reflects the

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conflict managed by many of the vegan recoverers. While a handful invokes the disease model of eating disorders, which externalizes blame (Conrad 2005), they also assert choice. The presence of conflicting ideologies regarding choice in recovery, which implies volition, and the disease model that subverts it, indicates the duality inherent within medical and psychological discourses around eating disorders, and thus the ways that recoverers must untangle them.

The personal choice narrative marks yet another commonality between the vegan recoverers and pro-ana community. According to pro-ana scholars, individuals within those communities regard their eating disorders as states that they can control, flexing their disorder at will (Overbeke 2008). Yet, at the same time, they occasion to describe their disorders as diseases, undercutting their claim to control. It is the same tension that emerges in the vegan recovery community, suggesting that both groups actively contend with the conflicting cultural dialogues that posit disorders as disease and illness as a choice. Because they share the common identity of eating disorder (albeit, for most of the vegan recoverers, in the past tense), they present with the same techniques for managing the personal choice narrative.

The recoverers in the sample further projected the story of personal choice by suggesting that their (presumed recovering) audience has the ability and the choice to select their own doctors. According to a number of recoverers, such as this one, if an individuals’ treatment team did not allow them to pursue a vegan diet, they should “take the initiative” to find a new team that would acquiesce to their unusual recovery lifestyle (Crazy Vegan Kitchen). This proposition is a

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unique product of a postmodern culture in which individuals have begun to presume the personal ability to select from among sources of authority, whereas in the past, professional medical authority was more or less accepted at face value3. As Arthur Frank neatly summarizes (2012:188), “for people to move their stories outside the professional purview involves a profound assumption of personal responsibility.” As the vegan recoverers espouse the notion that individuals essentially have the resources and choice-making capacity to make decisions about who they will accept as medical authority, they too make assumptions of personal responsibility. If an individual’s team does not allow them to be vegan in their recovery, it is up to them to “initiate” a change and to locate doctors who will allow them to pursue vegan recovery. Practitioners are thus excused from the responsibility to offer vegan treatments.

Illness groups, including the vegan recoverers, largely frame patient choice as a positive. They situate choice making in the fabric of self-advocacy and personal power, and seek to challenge medical authority in the process. However, this translates into a number of problems, as illness group scholars have investigated (Barker 2002; Pitts 2004). Pitts (2004), for example, explains eloquently the issues inherent wherever breast cancer sufferers instruct each other to choose their own oncologists: “Even though women are positioning themselves in ethical communities of caring, the advice they give each other ultimately still asks a great deal of women who are sick and recovering, and does not ask much of the social systems that need to be transformed to address women’s illness adequately” (Pitts 2004:49). The same must be said of the advice provisioned by

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vegan recoverers, in some respect. For example, where the blogger of Journey to

Health encourages her audience to “CHOOSE to be happy,” and where Amrita earnestly tells her viewers to “take the initiative to fix the problem” (Crazy Vegan

Kitchen), they are essentially implying that not only is it the responsibility of the recovering audience to seek out accommodating treatment teams, but it is their responsibility, too, if they cannot recover. Closeted in the suggestion that one can choose to recover is the insinuation that if one does not recover (or does not recover using a vegan, raw vegan, or fruitarian diet), it is their fault.

Although sociological reviews of illness groups have often taken a negative view to the personal choice in recovery narrative, there is something to be said for the empowering nature of this position. Eating disorders researchers have long emphasized the fact that individual empowerment in recovery is crucial for making it last (Darcy et al. 2010). Narratives of choice may also be viewed nearer their face value—as acts of resistance against the medical paradigms that typically rob recoverers of power over their bodies. By advocating choice, the recoverers attempt to reject their psychomedical framing as diseased individuals who cannot recover without standard professional treatment, and instead recapture power for themselves in a way that enables actionable recovery. Of course, as mentioned previously, the story is not nearly so clear-cut, with a number of recoverers employing disease and choice mentalities even in the same sentence

(Elle Tayla). This, however, is more an artifact of the duality of available recovery narratives from which recoverers must select and negotiate their own cohesive stories. Deemphasizing for a moment the contradictions present in their

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stories, the narrative of choice and power resounds in contrast to the medical disease model, and recoverers are able to speak back against the professional authority that they feel cannot hold their experiences.

This review has sought to establish the recoverers’ claim as a demedicalized one, speckled as it is with allusions to the medical frames it dismisses. They reject disease labels and reclaim their vegan lifestyles as objects of personal choice, rather than as pathological manifestations of disorder, as the traditional paradigm would suggest. By providing, in effect, a compare-and- contrast view of the medical versus the vegan claims to recovery methodology, we have seen that the recoverers’ seek to counter the medical institution that fortifies eating disorder treatment with their own version of events. However, by discarding medical models of recovery, the recoverers leave bare a platform on which to constitute a new recovery model. As will be elucidated in part two of this chapter, this space is filled with a framework of moralization. Apparently, demedicalization is only the precursor to their vegan claim, while the moral story is the (punny) meat.

MORAL EVIDENCE

With the slippage of the medical frame from the vegan narratives, the moral one rises to takes its place. Conrad (1994) explains a similar medical-to- moral transition undergone through the medicalization of health behaviors; in the case of dietary restraint, what once characterized a medical concern has more recently been molded to a moral one anew (one is reminded here of Brumberg’s

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analysis of eating disorders over time as well). The ethics of eating features in the majority of the blogs and vlogs, in descriptions such as this: “This [blog] explores the notion that a world view in which food choices have a political, ethical, and personal significance can in some cases serve to help heal people who have traumatic histories with food” (The Full Helping). Centering the ethics of food choice is often as explicit as in the case above; however, many of the recoverers sought to position themselves as morally “good” rather than to state the connection directly. In this example, a high carb low-fat vegan describes her choice to privilege her morality over medical treatment for her anorexia:

One day, I completely broke down and called literally every in-patient facility I could find online, begging them to take me in…. All of them told me that they wouldn’t let me be vegan because it was too “restrictive.” I knew in my heart that I could never compromise my moral and ethical beliefs so I never checked myself in. (Jenni Lorette)

The above quote demonstrates, for this vegan recoverer, the salience of ethics and morals in her narrative formation. Rather than make causal statements as to the morality of her lifestyle of vegan recovery, she positions herself as ethical by weaving morals into her story of shunning a medical treatment that is opposed to her lifestyle. An interesting phenomenon arises, in which morality and medicine are positioned as conflicting ideals, with some recoverers foregoing the medical in favor of a broader banquet of moral options. This type of moral choice making might also be contextualized against research on anti-vaccination advocates (parents), who cast their health decision-making as a “moral venture” in which their own power to regulate their children’s vaccines is ethically privileged over medical power (Reich 2016). For Jenni and for many of the other recoverers,

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their moral responsibility to fruitarianism or veganism overrides the medical authority in a turn from the medical to the moral.

Techniques of Moral Framing

At second glance, the vegan recovery narratives are richly imbued with moral meaning, conveyed via a number of subtle (and not so subtle) techniques of storytelling. The majority emphasizes as a primary motive for their lifestyle, such as this recoverer who asserts, “I became attuned to the suffering of animals within our food system and started to explore a vegan diet.

Veganism allowed me to see that the act of eating could be more than a source of personal anguish” (The Full Helping). Many of the recoverers painted images of themselves as compassionate towards animals throughout their narratives as a way to give moral testimony. One recoverer testified that she could “literally just start crying” if she saw “any sort of cruelty” towards animals (Follow the

Intuition).

Furthermore, the centrism of animal compassion in these narratives does some symbolic heavy lifting: not only does it prove moral credibility, but it also cleaves the vegan method from the dominant pathologizing paradigm. Attributing their veganism to animal concern forestalls any accusation that their diet is only an extension of their eating disorder. An emphasis on environmentalism in their narratives achieved the same goals. According to one vegan recovering from anorexia, when considering “greenhouse gasses and global warming and the effects on the environment, that isn’t really anything compared to animals”

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(Natashaka). Whether the emphasis hinges on resistance to animal cruelty or concern for the environment, for the vegan recoverers, casting their lifestyle in a moral spotlight allows them to both deconstruct the narrative of pathology and in the same moment reconstruct a new narrative of ethicality, divergent from medicine.

Furthermore, the recoverers’ language choice revealed a pervasive moral self-portraiture. They frequently framed themselves as embarking on a moral

‘journey’, ‘odyssey’, or ‘mission’. One vegan vlogger recovering from binge eating stated, “I’m on a mission to end [consumption of animal products] and I feel so much more compassionate and connected to every earthling on this planet,” and went further to say that she wanted to make “change in this world,”

(Hitomi Mochizuki). This vlogger lists having with almond milk for breakfast as being a moral act to intentionally “save the world”, drawing a clear connection between her personal moral image and her veganism. Declarations like these populated the sampled v/blogs, with the word “journey” used most often in personal narratives. Others, momentarily bypassing this language, nevertheless conveyed themselves as seeking to help others by advocating for the greater good. One woman writes, “IF I CAN HELP SOMEONE ON THIS

PLANET WHO IS READING THIS, THAT IS ALL I ASK FOR REALLY”

(Crazy Vegan Kitchen). What these excerpts have in common is an attempt to create, portray and manage a moralistic identity featuring a compassionate need to help others and the world at large.

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The process of moral centralization in identity creation appeared regularly through the use of certain moralized vocabulary. Specifically, the terms “clean” and “light” made periodic appearances, with the latter term appearing in 24 of the

25 cases in reference to physical, emotional, and spiritual lightness. For example, according to raw vegan bulimia recoverer Supreme Banana, “I just felt cleaner and lighter once I found raw till four.” The presence of such terms in the creation of the moral narrative has been noted by previous scholars, who note that the moralization of foods and food choices has been associated with cleanness, and

“dirtiness” or “filth” where foods are seen as immoral (Sheikh, Botinardi, and

White 2013:510). These words translate into a subtext of moral “purity” that elevates the recoverers’ newly demedicalized claim. Evidently, the moralization of vegan food practices appears not just in the thematic content of the claims, but in the very words they choose to convey them.

The practice of narrative reconstruction among deviant identity communities has been documented by previous scholars, though not often within the parameters of morality. Brown et al. (2004) describe the importance of establishing moral credibility among members of an illness group for a variety of reasons, including the building of community cohesion and the establishment of viability against a dominant medical narrative. Fortifying moral credibility through illness stories serves the crucial function of delineating, for the claimsmakers, a new narrative that can present a unified front to the medical claim. Illness movements scholars have tended to focus on the process of demoralization of illnesses or of group behavior, such in the shift from an

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understanding cigarette smoking as a moral issue to a medical one (Saguy and

Riley 2005; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). However, rather than evade the connotations of moralizing behaviors, the vegan recoverers skillfully wield their new moral identity to undermine the pathologization of their lifestyle.

From Medical to Moral

The recoverers also construct their ethical selves by emphasizing the

“right” reasons to in recovery, which are, predictably, moral ones. One recoverer instructs her blog readers, “You can go vegan later if you want to do it for ethical reasons” (Follow the Intuition). The “wrong” reasons to go vegan, which are frequently referenced in recoverer’s stories, are illustrated as those that are immoral. Take, for example, another excerpt from the same recoverer above, who tells of her decision to pursue a vegan recovery: “I realized that it wasn’t my eating disorder talking and wanting me to restrict foods, but it was my HEART talking, telling me that I really do not want to support the industry that causes animal suffering” (Follow the Intuition). In this example, she arranges her “heart”

(i.e. compassion, specifically towards animals) to contrast her eating disorder. Her compassion for animals is thus depicted as the “correct” and moral reason to undertake a vegan recovery, while a desire to restrict food is characterized as an incorrect (and in contrast with the second statement, immoral) reason to adopt a vegan diet. Thus, the recoverers depicted eating disorder-driven reasons to become vegan as the opposite of more “moral” or ethical reasons. Some discuss their initial lure into veganism “because of the restriction aspect” (Good Saint),

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having been attracted to it from the outset “for all of the worst reasons imaginable” (Crazy Vegan Kitchen). Recoverers like these who speak of an initial, problematic attraction to veganism due to disordered motivations then disclose a later discovery of the ethical reasons to go vegan, describing a transition towards a more moral-based identity apart from disordered desires. We see that even for those recoverers who “started out” going vegan for “all the wrong reasons,” their eventual drift into ethical veganism is their narrative centerpiece. Their past is constructed as a useful contrast to their present, moral correctness.

By understanding eating disorder-driven reasons to pursue veganism

(including focus on body appearance) as being antithetical to the true or “correct” way to be a vegan recoverer, the recoverers distance themselves strategically from potential accusations that their lifestyles are fueled only by disorders and are therefore invalid. It is in these statements, which were echoed throughout the blogs and vlogs, where the transition from medical to moral is made clear in the recoverer’s pursuit of a new narrative. They are no longer eating disordered or medically pathological, as psychomedical institutions would have them be—they are guided instead by moral pursuits, and thus spawn a new recovery identity that severs ties to the eating disorder and fixates on the moral good. Significantly, this process also dangers positing eating disordered behaviors as being immoral and roots a successful recovery in achieving moral clarity or ‘good’-ness. One who fails to achieve the vegan-centric moral enlightenment lauded by the recoverers in this sample cannot, by this logic, be truly recovered. Embracing moral

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understandings of recovery is revealed to be a double-edged sword—as the potentially problematic medical frames of recovery are shed, the opposing problematic implications embedded within the moral framework are secured.

Underpinnings

One must ask, of course, why morality is the benchmark that the vegan recoverers substitute to measure their recovery. The answer lies in the fact that the identity of the vegan ED recoverer rests at the intersection of multiple morality- based narratives. In other words, the vegan recoverer identity is a conglomeration of multiple moralities that operate in tandem. Firstly, morality has been implicated within eating disorders themselves, particularly anorexia. Anorexia and fasting behaviors have been historically understood as signs of piety, purity, and heavenliness, and continues in many ways to be viewed as a sign of “moral rectitude” (Brumberg 2000; Giles 2006:466). Not only does morality play the part in traditional understandings of anorexia, but it is significant in recovery itself.

Researchers emphasize that morality-based identity changes are critical for recovery (Bjork and Ahlstrom 2008; Matusek and Knudson 2009). Thus, two components of the vegan recoverer’s identity—their history of eating disorder, and their new recovery identity—have established bases in moral meaning, such that both underlying factors contribute to the gestalt of the moral vegan recoverer identity. Finally, morality is crucial in the understanding of veganism and health itself, further compounding the moral basis for this new identity. Veganism is frequently framed among scholars and laypeople alike as a moral exercise in

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resisting the ‘temptation’ of animal products, and as a practice marking one’s

(attempted) moral superiority (Wicks 2008; Bresnahan et al. 2015).

Vegetarianism and veganism have been cast as moral-ethical of ascetic will for hundreds of years, as such food practices are central in some religions

(Sheikh et al. 2013) while a more modern health morality dictates a further basis in morality (Conrad 1994). Thus, seemingly diverse literature outlining different moral practices can be married to describe the recoverers’ choice of frame.

Food Moralization

Although restrictive eating practices are not as interpreted as they once were—no longer do people from miles around gather to a girl’s bed to observe as she starves (Brumberg 2000)— the consumption of “good” or “bad” foods is still lent moral weight, meanwhile the moral obligation to pursue health as a sign of good citizenship is ever more embedded in society (Boero and Pascoe 2012).

According to Conrad (1994:385), “Health can be a moral discourse and the body a site for moral action. […] Wellness seekers engage in a profoundly moral discourse around health promotion, constructing a moral world of goods, bads, and shoulds.” The vegan recoverers-as-wellness seekers engage directly with the moral discourse of “good” versus “bad” foods and eating choices, further moralizing their narrative in a way that draws upon dominant discourses of ethical self-care. “Don’t you want to do what’s best for your body?” inquires Hitomi, in a direct bid to the moral implications of choosing unhealthily (in her definition, non-vegan and processed foods). She, like many of the other recoverers, claims,

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“I am eating pretty much the healthiest that I can” (Hitomi Mochizuki). The vegan recoverers define their healthy foods in many ways, contingent on their specific lifestyles (evidently, the raw vegan recoverers prioritize raw foods whereas the

‘regular’ vegan recoverers do not), yet there are many consistencies across the narratives. Almost universally, the recoverers shun processed food, animal projects, high-fat foods, and food describes as having “toxins,” all of which they label “junk” food in broad strokes. Knight (2012:103) explains that a preference for “natural,” or non-processed foods, has “a strong moral dimension,” according with the cultural valuation of nature. Thus, the recoverers craft their claim to morality by reiterating established health narratives (Conrad 1994), including those which privilege natural foods, contributing to health food-ism4 (Knight

2012). The recoverers’ narratives fit with ostensible ease into the current literature on health food morality, demonstrating its continued influence even among groups of eating disorder recoverers.

Food-limited recoveries such as those of the vegan recoverers are seen as antithetical to traditional recovery advice, which states that recoverers must eat a variety of foods without any restriction whatsoever. Often, traditional recovery experts recommend that recoverers incorporate “bad” foods into their diet in order to dismantle disordered food categorization and facilitate full recovery (Bjork and

Ahlstrom 2008). Therefore, it is perhaps predictable that many psychomedical authorities are quick to pathologize the recoverers’ emphasis on so-called “health food.” For example, Musolino et al. (2016:3) warn, “Healthy eating and lifestyle discourses act as ubiquitous cultural signposts for people wishing to maintain

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eating disorder practices […] and often compete with medical and psychiatric advice.” Practices that emphasize ‘health’ discourse are often described as enabling the same qualities that fuel an eating disorder; namely, scholars point out that vegetarianism, for an example, enables the individual to migrate food control from an eating disorder to a “health” context—in other words, vegetarianism, or even , is a socially sanctioned manifestation of disordered eating

(Lindeman et al. 2000). However, the adoption of a new, meaningful, socially acceptable (and in this case, “healthy” identity) is elemental for full eating disorder recovery (Bjork and Ahlstrom 2008). The claims of the vegan recoverers can assist the contradiction that exists within the literature, which struggles with the idea that health-centrism in recovery is pathological, and yet that health is an important goal. The available health rhetoric in modern Western5 culture is food and health-centric, privileges thin bodies, and is constituted by a rejection of

Western culture; it also leaves recoverers with a limited number of tools with which to understand their new, healthier identities. Operating within their

Western societies (none of the recoverers hailed from non-‘Western’ countries at the time the data was sourced), the recoverers must understand their veganism and recovering identities respective to the narrative of health morality, for it is the dominant, prominent alternative to the pathologization of their practices. They use the most culturally convenient frame available to articulate their claim to morality, health, and non-pathological veganism.

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Moral Lapses

Only 19 of the 25 individuals in the sample identify their lifestyle as being helpful for recoverers across the board. The six remaining individuals instead took a more cautionary approach: while still managing to support their choice of veganism, they took the tack of acknowledging its potential to be problematic.

They did so namely by endorsing the belief that for some, a vegan recovery can be a perpetuation of eating disordered behaviors, thereby ceding to a more medicalized framework. Indeed, beyond these six individuals, some who in one breath lauded their lifestyles as being “perfect” in the next acknowledged its potential for harm. Thus, a number of the recoverers expressed sentiments such as veganism “certainly can be used to mask an eating disorder” (Sweet Simple

Vegan). However, even those that took a more cautionary approach did so in a way that supported their veganism and their moral narrative. Take for example the exclamation by one typical vegan: “DO NOT GET ME WRONG, I

ABSOLUTELY AM NOT DISCREDITING VEGANISM—[…]. BUT IF YOU

ARE GOING TO DO IT, DO IT FOR ALL THE RIGHT REASONS. DON’T

DO IT AS ANOTHER MEANS TO KILL YOURSELF” (Crazy Vegan Kitchen).

For this recoverer, her chosen method of recovery is complex and contains two competing possibilities: that it can be a favorable method of recovery from an eating disorder, but that it can also be detrimental. While some of the recoverers grapple with these dual possibilities in their narratives, all come to the conclusion that veganism is beneficial but only when undertaken for the right, i.e. moral reasons, as analyzed above.

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Rich notes this same struggle among pro-ana community members, who have “contradictory relations with anorexia, of feeling both empowered by it, yet also having awareness of it being paradoxically destructive” (Rich 2006:300).

Among the recoverers then, this binary understanding is transferred from their eating disorders to their veganism. A negotiation occurs wherein the individuals must reckon with two competing understandings of their identity, as well as their marginalization in mainstream society. Thus, by acknowledging its potential to be problematic, they address two concerns: they demonstrate to others that they are aware of and are engaging with the duality, disarming in advance potential claims to ignorance of the problem, and they are performing identity work for themselves, understanding that their chosen (and in many cases, idyllic lifestyle6) exists in parallel with harm. By engaging directly with this fact, they are establishing further their moral ground for continuing—they have thought, and they have acknowledged, yet through their reflection and honesty they have continued. While there is obvious heterogeneity in the sample in terms of expressions of this duality, there is a consistent presentation of morality in their lifestyle based on normative social understandings of health and wellness, both historically and contemporarily. Thus, here lies their counterclaim: that their lifestyle is nonpathological and, by its basis in ethical morality, good.

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CHAPTER 3 Vying for Legitimacy

“Everything you see on this blog is a result of hard work and self-taught skill.” (Oh She Glows)

The multilayered claims of the vegan recoverers might easily be relegated to fiction and rejected by onlookers. At the very least, their account might not have any significance for others, remaining instead pinned to the uniqueness of individual experience. However, we see that in the vegan recovery community, this is not the case. Many thousands (even millions) are attracted to the blogs and vlog posts within it, and still many more take the time to comment their support or disdain. It is apparent that viewers take seriously the claims made by the recoverers, whether with a negative approach or a positive one, such as expressed by one commenter: “I can relate to you so much and you have helped motivate me to take the healthy path of a vegan lifestyle” (Emila Panesar, from Hitomi

Mochizuki). Among a heterogeneous mix of responses to the recoverers, a sizeable number believe the story. This enables that we ask the question, also outlined by Spector and Kitsuse (1987), of how they are laying claim to legitimacy. Thus, this chapter deals with the methods by which the recoverers secure their claims and render them valid (even if incompletely) in the face of outside viewers.

Of note is the propensity for the different subtypes of vegans to employ techniques to claim legitimacy. Those who use such techniques most frequently in this sample are the HCLF vegans, followed by the raw vegans, with the remaining subtypes far behind. While more is needed to determine the root of this

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correlation, this potentially demonstrates that those with the most stigmatized, delegitimized lifestyles (i.e. fruitarians and raw food eaters, as compared to more

“traditional” vegans who eat a variety of foods) must increase their efforts to establish their authenticity and defend themselves from naysayers. In seeking to make their claim viable, moreover, the recoverers make appeals to medicalized knowledge while rejecting psychological understandings, a process which challenges the ontology of expertise.

One of the first methods for establishing credibility can usually be stumbled upon in the byline of the recoverers’ website, or in the “About Me” section of their blog. Eight of the recoverers cite degrees or certifications as part of their narrative (see Image 6 in the Appendix for an example). These are qualifications that are potentially verified by a third party, such as an administering university, a fact alone that renders them credible. One recoverer declares, “I have masters degrees in business administration […] and in (nutrition),” (Clean Eating Kitchen) while another assures, “I am a certified plant-based ” (Sweet Simple Vegan). In both of these cases as in the others not named, the provision of authority to speak on topics of nutrition from an outside source (whether in the form of a degree or a certification) is paramount in their ability to validate the claims that they later make.

Not all of the recoverers had certifications or degrees that they were able to cite; however, nearly all of the recoverers used another source to affirm their expertise on the subject of veganism and eating disorder recovery that holds merit based on culturally valued modes of knowledge production. The recoverers

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almost unanimously (in 24 of 25 cases) cited their “research” as evidence of their authentic knowledge, with raw vegans and HCLF vegans having the most instances of research-referencing. Take, for example, this statement by Chris

Henrie, a (mostly) raw vegan YouTuber recovering from anorexia:

So I was reading so much, I did so much research on veganism, I watched so many videos all over YouTube, I watched documentaries, TV shows, just every possible thing I can do to educate myself on the matter and the only effects of veganism are good and I’m just very very inspired by these YouTubers, some that I know, some that are even recovering from an eating disorder. (Chris Henrie)

Chris’ list of his methods of research into veganism and vegan recovery is not unique. According to one recoverer, she “read books, a few scientific journals, watched films, documentaries, testimonials, videos, etc. regarding veganism/plant-based living” (Sweet Simple Vegan), while a prominent fruitarian declares, “I went to libraries, I went to book shops, everything” (Freelee). What these instances of referring to personal researching have in common is this: that for each of the recoverers, it was imperative that they recount their own intellectual and emotional labor in reaching a point of becoming a voice for vegan recovery. Thus they establish that the knowledge they present is “good,” because a perceptively well-researched individual presents it. This is a demonstration of a cultural value that constructs knowledge as being valid if it is backed by

“research,” which rings of scientific rigor. Thus, we begin to see the scientific process implicated in attempts to establish legitimacy here—still, many of the recoverers incorporate scientific and medical authority even more directly.

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THE DOCTOR SAID SO: Grappling with Medical Authority

Not all of the recoverers are able to cite certifications, or otherwise hope to fortify their research lists. To fill the gaps, a number of the vegan recoverers cite scientists, invoking a socially established authority to support their claims. Of course, given that their primary counterclaim—that veganism is a valid and successful method of recovery from an eating disorder—counters the dominant medical claim that vegan recovery is harmful, the recoverers are selective in their choice of which scientists (or other authorities, for that matter) to reference. One plant-based vegan recoverer discusses in detail the Minnesota Starvation

Experiment to explain that eating at least 10,000 calories daily from plant foods is the most successful way to recover (Alice Olivia), notwithstanding her overly creative interpretations of the experiment’s conclusions. A different blogger cited the American Dietetic Association to remind readers that vegetarian diets, appropriately planned, are healthy (Craig and Mangels 2009) while a third claimed, “there are scientists and researchers who state that if you eat a whole foods plant-based diet there’s literally no way you will not lose weight and just eat until you’re full” (Hitomi Mochizuki). Alternatively, one recover used her personal interactions with medical authority, rather than the vague references to studies as above, to debunk accusations that her vegan recovery is fallible. In response to comments that her veganism would lead to osteoporosis, she states, “I have spoken to my dietician and lots of professionals and they said that I’m doing enough to repair my bones. So clearly it’s fine” (Natashaka). In each of the examples given, the vegan recoverers utilize scientifically privileged knowledge

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and/or “lots of professionals” to back them, though selectively, such that they only consider supportive findings. Their use of medically-based knowledge to establish their own (seemingly anti-medical) viability can be contextualized with

Schneider’s description of mental health counter-claimsmakers, for he states that laypeople often resort to scientific research and other forms of medical authority to “establish the viability of their claims” (Schneider 1985:220). This is even (and especially) the case where claimsmakers have a stance that opposes a medical claim. For example, Schneider relays the example proposed by Spector and

Kitsuse (1977, in Schneider 1985:220) in which activists advocated in the 1970s that homosexuality be decategorized as a mental illness (also referenced in

Chapter 1 of this thesis). These activists leveraged medical voices as “powerful actors in these social dramas” in order to score “definitional” success (Schneider

1985:220). Furthermore, multiple scholars have described the process by which fatness activists, who oppose medical conceptualizations of obesity, nevertheless employ selectively supportive medical research in their claim (Kwan 2009; Saguy and Riley 2005). According to these scholars, this contradictory process is less about a lack of adequate language than it is the result of needing to respond to scientific expertise with a taste of its own medicine. In formulating claims against medical professionals, jargon and research caliber are required to be legible as a source of expertise (Kwan 2009). Finally, because these forms of knowledge are culturally accepted as truth, their employment in the claims of the recoverers gives them merit regardless of whether they have correctly applied them.

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A more specific way in which they deploy medical frames to lend legitimacy to themselves is by utilizing clinical analyses of eating disorders, much like the process described by Boero and Pascoe (2012) in which pro-anorexics employ disorder definitions to assert their authority. For example, pro-anas recount the definition of anorexia to support their claim to the identity; likewise, the vegan recoverers would occasionally report the definitions of different diagnoses to establish their possession of valid knowledge. The recoverers frequently relied on these (diagnostic) modes of understanding recovery, as will be returned to shortly, representing a selective acceptance of scientific frames.

The rejection/selection dichotomy among health claimsmakers is documented by a number of scholars, including Hardey (2002) through his study of health advocates who operate their own web pages. He explains that such advocates

(who are much like the vegan recoverers, in that they advocate for their own alternative solutions to illness experiences) are operating as “reflexive consumers” who evaluate, employ, and at the same time challenge “expert knowledge” (P. 38). In order to construct a seemingly contradictory story involving distance from accepted scientific knowledge, yet constitutive of scientific authority, recoverers like other illness advocates select information pertinent to their narrative and convey both scientific and unscientific advice while maintaining a visage of legitimacy. They thus generate a new form of knowledge surrounding eating disorder recovery, which attempts (and sometimes fails) to appropriate medically legitimate statements.

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Quasi-Science

For the most part, the vegan recoverers in the sample do not shy away from getting into the granules of scientific information to make their claims viable, often risking (and falling into the trap of) spreading misinformation. They use biological concepts and share extensively about and

(the HCLF vegans used these terms the most, which is understandable given the emphasis in their diet on high consumption) and nutrients (the

‘regular’ vegans used this term the most). Freelee the Banana Girl, liberally using quasi-scientific terminology, tells, “I was eating these cacao avocado creations which were just full of fat, phytotoxins, , and basically it was leaving me undercarbed and not feeling my best at all.” Or, in the scientific-sounding words of another recoverer, “literally every cell in your body thrives on glucose and it’s pure energy for your cells” (Claire Michelle). For those that employed this sort of scientific nutritional terminology in describing their foods and the importance of their diets, they display their nutritional expertise with the language of nutritional experts. Finally, the use of biology to present their authority arrived in the way that many of the recoverers cited evolution and other species’ diets to affirm their own. Take this statement from raw vegan ex-bulimic, Happy on Fruit:

There is people in the world who are eating this way, and thriving and loving life and recovering from old issues in the past and it's because we are designed to eat primarily fresh fruit and vegetables. That is what our bodies are designed for. This isn't some crazy diet, this isn't some crazy lifestyle, this is what we are supposed to eat. This is what our bodies are designed for, our digestive tract is designed for plant matter in its raw, natural form. (Happy on Fruit)

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Other recoverers echo similar sentiments. As one fruitarian poignantly points out, “A monkey never thinks to himself oh, I should stop probably eating this banana cuz I don’t want to get fat. We shouldn’t think ourselves as the exception to the rule” (Ellen Fisher), while another states that weight gain is impossible on a HCLF vegan diet because one eats “foods that are biologically designed for your body” (Jenni Lorette). In these instances, the recoverers discuss the biological design of the body to consume vegan foods and use other species as a backdrop of proof against which they assert their claim. The use of biology and some evolutionism here further reflects a deeply ingrained reliance on scientific frames to convey legitimacy when it comes to food and the body. However, the use of scientific-sounding information on its own, while used to demonstrate credible knowledge, does not prevent the spread of incorrect claims. In the above example, for instance, the claim that the digestive tract is “designed” for raw plant matter conflicts with the fact that the digestive tract is far better primed for the digestion of cooked foods1. Once more the literature on fat acceptance activists supplies context; fatness activists, as counter-claimsmakers to their own medicalization, often ‘interpret science’ with what tools they have available, occasionally misconstruing the results of research studies (Kwan 2009; Saguy and

Riley 2005). A pattern emerges in which counter-claimsmakers, despite integrating jargon like “neurotoxins” and “neurotransmitters,” often get it wrong.

Examples of misinformation abound in the recoverer’s accounts and, troublingly, in the advice they provide others, signaling the spread of misinformation. Natashaka at one point claims that D deficiencies have

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“nothing to do with” diet and that the vitamin is only relevant to sun exposure, when this is untrue2. Another recoverer claims that eating “anything under 2000 calories” is “a severe form of restriction” (Claire Michelle)—contrarily, many adult women (and men) require fewer than 2000 calories daily to maintain their weight. One particularly prevalent claim of dubious validity appears in several of the vegans’ accounts, and can be summarized by a description from one raw vegan:

What happens is these old emotions will start to come up, and this can also be from your body clearing out all the toxins, clearing out old waste, and doing all this stuff inside, healing, and kind of old emotions seem to come up. Almost like they’re been locked away in the toxins. (Happy on Fruit)

The process of detoxification that she describes has been called into question by many medical professionals and is liberally labeled a “hoax”3. The point here is not to arbitrarily debunk the many claims of the recoverers; rather, it is to attempt to assess the implications that this has for intracommunity interaction and the shaping of cultural knowledge. A number of researchers have emphasized the potential for the spread of misinformation from Internet-based health advocates, primarily warning of deleterious effects (Burrows et al. 2000;

Hartzbrand and Groopman 2010; Wahlstrom 2000). Resulting from their many techniques to legitimize their claims, it is more than likely (and evidenced by some of the comments) that some viewers and readers come to view the recoverers as subject matter experts. Scholars have pointed to the potential for laypeople acquiring knowledge from Internet ‘experts’ to lead to challenges against the authority of medical practitioners. In the unregulated spaces of the

Internet, advice such as that provisioned by the recoverers is set on a level playing

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field with advice from doctors, with potentially damaging results for observers who are responsibilized to sort out their own medical care and for the practitioners who must then correct any potential wrongs (Burrows et al. 2000;

Hartzbrand and Groopman 2010). What essentially occurs is the non-expert leading the non-expert, veiled in language and medical jargon that hides information sharing across these lines as credible expertise.

What is more likely than the idea that recoverers might be intentionally misleading their audience is the likelihood that they are stumbling into the pitfalls that occur where research is conflated with expertise. As aforementioned, most of the recoverers cite their sources of research (documentaries and vlogs being among the top providers) as markers of credibility. In a post-modern society, it is increasingly expected that individuals claim responsibility for the navigation of their health and their illness experience (Kleinman 1988; Pitts 2004). Therefore, given a variable platform for knowledge-sharing and quasi-scientific information

(the Internet), it is not so surprising that the recoverers would misconstrue fiction for fact in their attempt to navigate the telling of their counterclaim.

THE BORDERS OF KNOWLEDGE: Defending the Credible Claim

Having established their own (scientifically-based) knowledge, the vegans further propel their authority by clarifying that their form of knowledge about vegan recovery is better than other’s. They establish boundaries between themselves and non-vegans, as well as between themselves and other vegan recoverers who choose different forms of veganism. Most often, it is the whole

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foods vegans who disparage raw vegans for their restrictive practices. In doing so, the vegans each attempt to establish the boundaries of recovery knowledge, while positioning themselves as within those boundaries and others as without.

First, the vegan recoverers position themselves as having better and more correct knowledge than those recovering (or even those not recovering) sans veganism. One HCLF vegan clearly establishes the difference between vegan and non-vegan recovery, which she deems “standard”:

I do find that if you're following a high carb low fat plant-based diet, your body will go up to the weight that it would go in nature, versus if you're following a standard American diet and doing this healing process, you are going to go up to a much higher weight because we're not eating our naturally designed foods that were meant for our body, we're eating these hyper palatable foods, and you will likely still go through the same like, gain and plateau but I think the process will take a lot longer and you will go up to a much higher weight than you would on a plant-based diet. (Alice Olivia)

Other vegan recoverers get right to the heart of the matter, separating their knowledge from that of omnivorous recoverers:

Most vegans are not obese, let alone , and I truly believe and accredit this to a level of understanding about how food affects your body – something that many have yet to learn (sorry Omnis, not judging you at all, just saying it as it is). (Crazy Vegan Kitchen)

Not only do both the recoverers above differentiate from regular recovery, but they utilize many of the tools to establish their aforementioned authenticity.

For example, Alice invokes biology to tout “naturally designed foods,” while describing the improbable healing process presented by other (particularly HCLF) vegans. In this way, and in a way performed by many others in the sample, she demarcates a boundary between herself and “regular” recoverers in a way that

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further purports her credibility on the subject and preemptively debases the potential credibility of others. The quasi-scientific statements from above emerge once more, this time wielded as tools of boundary maintenance.

Others distance themselves from recovering vegans who adopt lifestyles that are different from their own. According to one typical vegan, “IT’S REALLY

NOT TRUE THAT RAW FOOD IS ALWAYS BETTER. You can disagree with me on that, but geez, for me, it takes crazy effort to stay on 100% raw only foods.

It’s just not satisfying for me” (Sticky Crunchy Chewy). One woman demotes the raw till four lifestyle in favor of fully raw (Happy on Fruit), while another claims directly, “I do NOT recommend a raw food diet in recovery, there is absolutely no way you could get the right amount of calories or even macronutrients into you by just following a raw food diet” (Life without Anorexia). These vegan recoverers each defended (in some cases heatedly, as evidenced by the presence of all caps text) their own lifestyle specifically by decrying others’. The raw vegans and fruitarians often bore the brunt of the distancing, yet on their own part occasionally dismissed less restrictive diets as being not sufficiently radical. Thus, the boundaries between correct and incorrect forms of veganism—and by extension, correct and incorrect forms of recovery from an eating disorder—are demarcated and defended.

Furthermore, much of the boundary maintenance between the groups and between vegans and non-vegans especially was framed around the issue of education. Therefore, correct knowledge, and the labor required to obtain that knowledge, served not only to establish one’s authority alone (as explained

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above) but to then paint others’ lack of knowledge and/or lack of labor to achieve it as delegitimizing factors. Examples abound of vegan recoverers emphasizing the need for non-vegans and other vegans to self-educate in order to obtain correct knowledge. According to one raw vegan, “Some people who are sick, or who are not very educated, they look at veganism as just a way to lose weight, a very restrictive diet” (Chris Henrie, emphasis added), while a whole-foods vegan decried non-vegans complicity in being “blind and ignorant” against the need to become vegan (Hitomi Mochizuki). These and other examples center around the need for others to “educate [themselves]” (Claire Michelle), reflective of the fact that most of the recoverers worked to establish their own research labor and efforts to self-educate. Claiming the lack of education on the part of others debased others’ credibility as non-vegans while uplifting their own. This resonates of a neoliberal impulse to self-action in the service of health (Conrad

1994; Pitts 2004) which has implications for the vegan narrative itself, as was highlighted in the Personal Choice section of Chapter 2.

Maintaining Boundaries: A Pro-Ana Comparison

Boundary maintenance is a well-established technique brandished by various communities and has been the topic of significant pro-ana research.

Internal and external boundary work is a prominent tool of authenticity wielded by members of the pro-ana community online, bearing marked similarities with the methods of the vegan recoverers. Pro-anas, who maintain the ill-supported claim that eating disorders are autonomous choices, face stigmatization from

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outsiders or “haters” as well as contests for meaning from those within the community (occasionally, from “wannabes”4) (Giles 2006:468). This resonates clearly with the ways that the vegan recoverers distinguish themselves from omnivores, labeling them as outsiders to the recovery claim. While the recoverers in this sample make no reference at any point to such “wannavegans”—and, importantly, at no visible points attempt to dissuade pursuant vegans from hearing their stories or engaging in their touted practices—they do attack individuals with different practices who occupy similar communities. For the vegans here, they separated themselves from other vegans seen as lesser (often, fruitarians and raw vegans), which in many ways echoes the slightly different practice established in the pro-ana community in which, for example, anorexics distance themselves from “wannabe” sub-anorexics. In spite of subtle differences, it becomes apparent that both pro-ana communities and vegan recovery communities attempt to facilitate their own credibility by debasing that of others. According to Boero and

Pascoe (2012), this serves to police group boundaries and establishes who ‘truly’ embodies a certain identity. For the vegan recoverers, delineating from

‘biographical others’ who are portrayed as lacking the specific knowledge to fully interpret their claim (Goffman 1963) serves to construct group boundaries on the basis of which individuals practice the ‘correct’ forms of veganism.

Concurrent with the pro-ana community practices are the recoverers’ use of specific “tools of authenticity” to maintain group boundaries such as by providing “examples of experience” (Boero and Pascoe 2012:31). Nearly all of the vegan recoverers did this specifically by giving examples of the severity of

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their past eating disorder. For example, read this litany of past problems by Sticky

Crunchy Chewy:

Trying not to eat this or that, worrying, counting, going over, throwing in the towel and eating everything in sight, gaining weight, losing weight, hiding in my clothes, in my house, in my bed, avoiding all social contact, feeling completely disconnected from my body, depression, hopelessness, you get the picture. (Sticky Crunch Chewy)

By listing the trials she endured during her eating disorder, this blogger paints a clear and intentional picture of hardship. Other recoverers similarly include troubling tails of eating disorder experiences in their narratives: “I was like puking every single day like, just completely submerged in the eating disorder” (Supreme Banana). Many mention hospitalizations as proof of severity.

Furthermore, some are specific as to the severity of their restriction and lend proof to their claim by citing the diets that they heeded in the depths of their disorder.

One claims, “I was a big fan of eating a single sleeve of saltines and a cup of frozen raspberries a day” (Good Saint) and according to another, “I didn’t eat anything in a day but an apple. I once even fasted for two days” (Journey to

Happiness). The effort to provide proof of previous suffering is particularly troubling, given the similarities it holds with pro-eating disorder sites in which members often share their meal plans. While the motives behind sharing food choices are different, it is still possible that doing so could invoke mimicry in vulnerable individuals. These plans also mark similarities to the “horror stories” provided by pro-anorexics, described as hard-endured personal experiences provided to ‘prove’ the existence of a history which lends validity to the claim

(Boero and Pascoe 2012:48). For both the pro-anas and the vegan recoverers,

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then, the sharing of meal plans or even tales of hospitalization is a move to prove the authenticity of the suffering narrative. For the pro-anas, proof of suffering earns them community membership and prestige (Boero and Pascoe 2012;

Overbeke 2008), but for the recoverers, it earns them proof of the extent of their recovery—and thus, legitimizes the claim that veganism helped them heal from their eating disorder. Emphasizing the similarities in technique here means not so much to suggest overall community similarity as it attempts to illuminate how alternative eating disorder/recovery communities police their boundaries, internally and externally, in a way that buttresses their controversial claim.

THE BODY RECOVERED: Writing and Reading the Vegan Body Online

While each of the examples given in this chapter differs with respect to their appeal to the recoverer’s credibility, many share something important that has been overlooked. The body features heavily throughout the recoverers’ narratives, especially where they attempt to make credible claims. In the inherently disembodied space of the Internet (Boero and Pascoe 2012), articulating a vegan recovery narrative, which necessarily centers the body in its analysis, may seem contradictory. However, the vegan recoverers demonstrated myriad creative ways of expressing the body online, thus returning the physical form to the construction of their claim. One of the most striking ways that this appeared throughout all of the v/blogs was where the recoverers used numerical representations of parts of the body. In fact, only four of the 25 recoverers refrained from using numbers (including body weights, calories, BMI, or other

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body-relevant numbers). For example, one raw till four vegan makes ample use of physical numbers to tell her story about having anorexia (before telling her tale of adopting a RT4 diet).

Losing over 40kg in 6 months my body was shutting down on my as I began to have seizures. With a sugar level of 1.5 and a potassium level of 1.7 I was rushed to the hospital. With Iv fluids running through both arms as nurses desperately tried to get my vitals up. (Elle Tayla)

What is visible here is yet another example of creating authenticity through sharing the severity of the past, only here there is a clear emphasis on employing numbers relating to the body, as well as diagnostic physical information (with potassium levels and blood ) to further the story. This pattern is evident throughout the vegan recoverers’ tales, including for one recoverer whose “temperature was really low so as my pulse, blood pressure and my BMI (it was 13 two weeks ago)” (Journey to Happiness). BMIs and weights often appeared, such as in Alice’s narrative: “I plateaued at 140, and I was eating

3500 to 4000 calories” (Alice Olivia) and for Jenni, with “I reached my highest weight of almost 170 pounds when I was 16. BMI: 28.3” (Jenni Lorette).

Scholarship on the pro-ana community once more articulates this tool of authenticity succinctly, explaining that because the internet is disembodied, pro- anas must “find and develop ways to make their bodies apparent online” including by sharing weights and other somatic measurements (Boero and Pascoe 2012:29).

Without tangible physical bodies in online spaces, pro-ana individuals, as well as the vegan recoverers, must seek to embody themselves virtually, often through symbols and language that are codes for the body. For Boero and Pascoe’s pro- anorexics, embodiment is enacted through group rituals like weigh-ins and food

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reports (Boero and Pascoe 2012), practices which are absent among the vegan recoverers, resulting from the fact that among more traditional pro-recovery groups, weight and calorie discussions are banned practices (Aardoom et al.

2014)5. Instead, the recoverers use body weights, potassium levels, and other numerical data to represent their physical body. Although a viewer might not be able to see a recoverer’s body tangibly, they gain a deep understanding of their physicality through numbers, and at finite levels, too. Although a recoverer’s body cannot be fully viewed from a blog post, an intricate understanding of her body at a molecular level and of her physical size can be conveyed through these numbers.

Importantly, because many of the recoverers operate primarily on

YouTube, they are able to overcome one of the major barriers to embodiment in a more static blog or forum. In video format, their body appears, moving fluidly and as if in real time. Some recoverers capitalize on this fact by displaying their bodies in their videos directly, such as with one whole-foods vegan who, after asking who wouldn’t want to have her toned body, spins around in front of the camera to showcase her physique, exposed in only a sports bra (see Image 5 in the

Appendix). In cases like these, embodiment of their current form is streamlined, for video provides a new, accessible mode of embodiment online. However, embodiment of their past, eating disordered body—which, as discussed, is key for establishing previous suffering and authenticity—is more difficult. Therefore, the recoverers are left to represent their past bodies, which hold a great deal of merit in terms of authenticity, through numbers and other less visual methods. By

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discussing past low body weights during a period of anorexia, as an example, the recoverers are able to reconstruct their ill bodies and develop authenticity, from which their expertise on vegan recovery is drawn (for an example, see Images 1 and 2 in the Appendix). Much as the pro-anorexics create authenticity through their embodiment tools, enabling them to claim their particular identity (Boero and Pascoe 2012), the recoverers do so in order to have sufficient claim to the identity of one who is recovered. By embodying an ill self, they can present a contrast to the current ‘well’ self (Riley et al. 2009). It is this basis from which their narrative of health and healing through veganism is constructed.

The Science of Embodiment

It is no coincidence that the recoverers often choose to embody themselves through numbers such as calories, blood sugar levels, and BMIs, each of which is not visible to the naked eye but are instead created by and visible through scientific knowledge. Once more, the influence of scientific authority enters the recoverers’ stories as ways to verify their own legitimacy as claimsmakers, made possible by the cultural value and merit placed on scientific understanding. Even more specific than body weights and calories, many of the recoverers provided lists of their eating disorder-related diagnoses with descriptions to match. One vegan recalls, “I still have Osteopenia (a medical condition in which the and content of bone tissue is reduced), I still have fertility issues from me suffering from 8 years of Amenorrhea (an abnormal disappearance of menstruation due to extremely low body weight)” (Crazy Vegan Kitchen). As

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seen in this and the previous chapter, medical discourse—specifically here in terms of diagnoses and diagnostic descriptions—is wielded strategically. The recoverers appropriate medical authority for themselves, and here it is more specifically through embodiment that this is achieved. We learn the specifics of

Amrita’s body with a medicalized lens—that she has not had a period in 8 years and that her bone density is low—and in this way, she becomes medically embodied in her otherwise disembodied blog. Pitts (2004) notes a pattern of using embodied medical discourse among the breast cancer sufferers that she studied online, saying that the women would use, among other tools, diagnostic descriptions to present “[their] body through the revelations of medical lens” at a

“cellular-level” (45). Like this illness group, then, the vegan recoverers manipulate medical descriptions into their own efforts at embodiment, resulting in the infiltration of medical discourse into their online identities. Evidently, the vegan recoverers bear still more similarities to other online illness groups, their methods fitting squarely within the appropriate literature to render its conclusions supported.

Photographs and the Weight Debate

Luckily, the vegan recoverers do not only have numbers at their disposal as their tools of embodiment; they also have pictures. These are separate from the moving, breathing, talking physical bodies in the videos, and instead are static snapshots of a past body, present in 19 of the 25 vlogs and blogs. Nine of them show pictures of a body that is emaciated, with either a caption or a verbal

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description of the body as a representation of the past eating disorder (see Image 2 in the Appendix). Before and after pictures appear, of two varieties: the first show an anorexic ‘before’ body and a healthier, heavier, yet slender ‘after’ body, while the second show a heavier body and the second a thinner one.

Reflected in these two varieties of photo sequences are the conflicting narratives of the vegan recoverers that appeared in this sample, with some (all anorexic recoverers) touting the benefits of vegan weight gain, and the rest applauding the that is ‘inevitable’ in a vegan diet. Although most of the recoverers emphasized that weight loss was not important and that focusing away from “physical aesthetics” (Claire Michelle) is important for theirs and others’ recovery, a paradoxical focus on weight loss appears, represented through pictures and pounds. One popular raw vegan, moments after discussing the importance of focusing on spirituality rather than body mass, declares, “I was losing weight without even trying!” (Rawvana English), while Freelee tells of her fruitarianism, “I was not gonna give that away for some superficial thing as weight loss! And now, I’m 20 kilos lighter” (Freelee). It appears that for the recoverers, there are dueling conceptions of the importance of weight and specifically weight loss in the lifestyles that they advocate. On the one hand, traditional eating disorder recovery advice demands a lack of emphasis on weight at all (Keski-Rahkonen and Tozzi 2005; McNamara and Parsons 2016), which is reflected in claims made by the recoverers. According to a number of traditional eating disorders researchers, deemphasizing weight and the body in recovery is key, with an ongoing emphasis on the body or body size used as indications of

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ongoing pathology (Fitzsimmons-Craft et al. 2011). However, popular health culture, of which these health and recovery advocates are inevitably a part, demands ever an emphasis on weight loss. Thus, the recoverers often tell their viewers or readers that they should not focus on weight loss, and in the next breath, tell of the “miraculous” weight loss they experienced (Happy on Fruit), and that others can count on.

Scholars have previously attempted to examine the dual nature of weight loss focus and anti-weight loss focus in ED recovery communities, revealed in the provision of before-and-after pictures and descriptions of the amount of weight gone. According to researchers, on both recovery and pro-ana sites, body talk

“constructed a particular ideal body”—a thin but recovered body—which failed to

“challenge the ” (Riley et al. 2009:354). As the vegan recoverers describe their weight loss and depict images of their thin, recovered, vegan bodies

(see Image 4 in the Appendix), they similarly privilege an ideal of eating disorder recovery involving thinness. Neither emaciation, nor soft averageness, but fit thinness. In none of the recoverers’ narratives do they allow for a recovered body that is not thin, and in fact only reference an overweight version of themselves as transitory. It is the second half of the story begun earlier, in which the recoverers demonstrate process knowledge and promise their viewers that despite initial weight gain, they will definitely lose weight in the long run. A body that has gained weight is not permissible as an end goal in these narratives, and thus the thin ideal underpinning eating disordered behaviors is propagated in recoverer’s stories.

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It must be emphasized that the vegan community is heterogeneous in terms of embodiment strategy—yet without exception, all individuals in this sample engaged in some form of embodiment techniques, whether with or without numbers, in order to fortify the credibility of their counter-claim. As evidenced by the similarities with the pro-ana and other communities, the techniques for establishing legitimacy in the recovery community embed it within the much larger illness and online communities literature, in which counter-claimsmakers and health advocates vie for legitimacy in the face of scientifically dominant modes of understanding (Barker 2002; Brown et al. 2004; Ferreday 2003; Reich

2016; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). Further, in the vegan community as in other illness or advocate communities, the categorized and numerical embodied self reasserts the medical discourse, though it services the fundamentally subversive claim that veganism is a viable recovery route. In effect, scientific authority breaches even the boundaries of the communities that seek to challenge it.

When an alternative tale is told, in part, using the language of the dominant frames, to what extent is the tale really alternative? Couched within the medical and psychological frameworks that they resist, the vegan recoverers voice their counterclaims using the molds for legitimacy that are available to them and in so doing, forfeit some of their separation from the norms of recovery knowledge. To conclude, the previous chapters have explored the what and the how of vegan recovery; in the final chapter, questions of why and who will be explored, concluding a comprehensive look at the semi-counter-claimsmakers.

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CHAPTER FOUR Forging Community: Networking against Multiple Stigmas

“The stigma around veganism is so bad and I don’t really know why. There honestly isn’t anything wrong with it.” (Natashaka)

MYRIAD STIGMAS

If the vegan recoverers disagree with psychomedical claims, why don’t they simply write letters, or perform other private activities, to express their counterclaim? What drives them to specifically leverage digital platforms in a way that makes their claim public? As this chapter will posit, it is broad-spectrum stigmatization that drives the vegan recoverers to create community as a measure of resistance. This analysis is largely drawn from recoverers’ own accounts, for they frequently use the word “stigma” themselves in the colloquial sense—even where their experience might better reflect harassment or critique rather than stigma itself. According to Goffman, stigma can be described as an attribute or behavior that is both socially discrediting and that causes an individual to be socially sanctioned (Goffman, from Bresnahan et al. 2015). Publicity via the

Internet facilitates community creation more quickly than would offline networking—thus, the recoverers present their stories digitally, gathering like others around and creating a network to refute and resist stigma. The vegan recoverers’ many component identities are stigmatized, as will be explored shortly, which meld to create a multiplicative experience of stigmatization.

Goffman (1963) notes that stigmatized individuals will identify, and create an in- group with, others who suffer the same stigmatization. Thus, narrative publicity

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enables different vegan recoverers to quickly locate each other and to identify their own stigmatized experience within others. The community grows, in part, out of the various breeds of stigma that drive its participants together.

Vegan Stigma

First and foremost, the vegan recoverers face stigma according to their diet practices alone, regardless of their eating disorder or recovery status. This fact is widely acknowledged by the recoverers themselves, which can be summarized by the quote given at the head of this chapter. Others refer to the stigma “associated with a plant-based diet” (Vegan ED Recovery) and question, directly or indirectly, the reasons for this stigma. In Western society, vegan (and vegetarian) diets, not to mention raw, whole foods or HCLF vegan diets, mark practitioners as having “discreditable identities” (Goffman 1963) for a number of reasons relating to food, power, and culture. For example, Western diets are traditionally meat- centric—although not all traditional diets are centered around meat, and some are even vegetarian, such as those practiced by subgroups of Hindus (Sheikh et al.

2013), the Western diet is privileged and hierarchized above others culturally

(Bresnahan et al. 2015). Thus, vegetarian diets which exclude meat, and to an even greater extent vegan diets, which banish all animal products, are relegated to the bottom ranks of acceptability.

According to some scholars, this is furthered by the fact that vegetarianism and veganism challenge Western cultural values of patriarchy, in accordance with the masculinization of meat eating. Moreover, vegetarians and vegans “breach

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‘the edifice of cultural denial’ needed societally to eat meat” (Wicks 2008:273).

In other words, the presence of a vegetarian alone can challenge ’s implicit acceptance of the violence of meat eating (Wicks 2008; Bresnahan et al.

2015). According to Link and Phelan (2001, in Bresnahan et al. 2015), the labeling of an unfavorable practice precipitates direct exclusion, and even overt discrimination, within the process of stigmatization. If the accounts given by vegan recoverers are taken at face value, it must be interpreted that they experience some discrimination due to their vegan diets. It also must be noted that the vegan discrimination faced by those in the sample often shapes around the labeling of their diets as “dangerous”—and this is more so the case for the raw, raw till four, and HCLF vegans, whose more extreme food practices (such as eating several pounds of fruit daily, and little else) mark them as behaviorally deviant. However, the form of their stigmatization is more complicated than this, and goes beyond the stigma accorded to vegans, instead coupling with stigma against eating disordered individuals to produce compounded stigma.

Eating Disorders Stigma

Eating disorders researchers have long described the stigma directed at eating disordered people, most prominently as a result of the physical markers

(extreme underweight) of anorexia (Rich 2006). Anorexics who are severely underweight (or bulimics or binge eaters, for that matter) encounter the stigma attached to “abominations of the body” (Goffman 1963:20); having non- normative bodies, they are marked as “other.” Other aspects of ED stigma often

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hinge on assumptions that eating disordered people are attention-seeking rather than ‘genuinely’ ill, or that they are personally responsible for their illness

(McNamara and Parsons 2016). Doubts about the legitimacy of ED sufferers’ claims to illness lead to their labeling as illegitimately ill, paving the way for social sanctioning. This labeling-and-doubting process also appears where the vegan recoverers are concerned, given their implicit identity as eating disordered

(even though this identity might be stated in the past tense). A brief (and nonsystematic) review of some of the comments from the viewers of the vlogs and blogs reveals this to be the case, with several accusing the recoverers of being attention seeking and choosing to prolong their illness under the guise of health.

Take this illustrative comment by ‘Sharon’, who commented on a video that told one HCLF vegan recoverer’s eating disorder story: “People with a history of eating disorders are attracted to veganism because it's an acceptable expression of control of food so really you aren't cured, you're just expressing your ED in a different way” (Sharon, in Happyandhealthy96).

This statement reflects many of the other negative comments that are directed towards the vegan recoverers in the sample. The evidence that the comments could provide requires a thorough and systematic review, for which this thesis lacks space, in order to determine the extent of doubt towards vegans’ stories and potential stigma. Nevertheless, even through one comment it becomes clear that some viewers doubt the legitimacy of the vegan recoverer’s lifestyles and identities, and even accuse them of propagating a “dangerous” and false ideology. Thus we see emerging a complex stigma in which vegan recoverers are

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accused of illegitimacy and of falsifying narratives, similar to how ‘typical’ eating disordered people are labeled, coupled with the fact that their lifestyle (in this case, HCLF) is labeled as deviant and dangerous.

Vegan Recovery Stigma

Not only must the recoverers contend with vegan diet-specific stigmatization, but they must cope with stigma leveraged towards their specific use of a vegan lifestyle to recover. One blogger reveals this reality when she states, “Because veganism is traditionally discouraged for those in recovery, there’s a tendency for those of us who have found happiness, freedom, and peace in living a vegan lifestyle to feel as though we need to apologize for, defend, or stay quiet about our choices” (The Full Helping). According to this account, vegan recoverers such as herself feel shame due to this perceived stigma. Further, a raw vegan recoverer reveals why, in his opinion, this is so: “I thought it was kind of odd too, becoming vegan if you’re recovering. Because it kind of looks bad, because people view it as a restrictive kind of thing” (Chris Henrie). For this vlogger, the reason for the stigma is that outsiders misconstrue vegan recovery as a guise for disordered eating habits, and therefore as a dangerous method of recovery. In a sense, what occurs here is a transfer of the stigma accorded eating disordered individuals to the vegan recoverers who are assumed to be continually disordered, and who thus have the disordered identity constantly superimposed over their narratives.

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Intracommunity Differentiation of Stigmatized Identity

As might be expected, some of the recoverers deflect stigma by redirecting it to others in the community. Those that do so attribute the stigmatization surrounding vegan recovery to the more ‘extreme’ practices of raw or HCLF vegans. One woman states:

Most eating disorder recovery experts do not recommend being vegan and I can understand why: in today’s world veganism is rather confused with being a raw foodist or a fruitarian, doing juice cleanses and detoxes, or wanting to be “healthy”(orthorexia-obsessively) and lose weight. This kind of veganism can, indeed, be disordered. True veganism is not about ‘Who has the cleanest diet in the world and who can lose the most weight’. (Follow the Intuition)

This vegan recover situates the blame for stigmatization with diets that she views as more extreme, including the raw and fruitarian lifestyles. She effectively separates her own ‘standard’ vegan diet from the other food practices in an act of careful differentiation. From within the community a hierarchy emerges, constructed externally and verified internally, in which the more extreme vegans

(e.g. raw and HCLF vegans) are more heavily stigmatized for their practices.

We see similar levels of intracommunity hierarchy in the pro-ana community, which once more serves as a template against which the vegan recovery community can be compared. Within the pro-ana groups, there are

‘macro-levels’ of inclusion where all can claim membership, yet within those there are also ‘micro-levels’, or subgroups, with different orders of influence

(Giles 2006:471). Among the pro-anas, the macro-level consists of all pro-ana individuals, while the subgroups are made up of anorexics, bulimics, binge eaters, and others. Within the community, anorexics are positioned at the top of the

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hierarchy due to the esteem of their starvation practices, whereas bulimics and binge eaters (who are stigmatized both within and without the community due to the infraction of their purging behaviors) fall below (Giles 2006). In the vegan recovery community, those with more extreme foodstyles are regularly pinned as deviant, dangerous, and radical by ‘typical’ vegans. For the pro-anas, extremism

(equated with anorexia) is touted as supreme akin to their seeming embrace of pathology—for the vegan recoverers, comparatively, extremism is stigmatized, falling in line with the community’s rejection of pathologization (see Chapter 2).

Seemingly, the vegan recovery community reveals the reverse of the pro-ana hierarchy.

Delineation of diets within the vegan recovery community is often referenced by individual participants—in essence, the presence of an implicit hierarchy of vegans does not go unnoticed by the community at large. While one can extrapolate from the vegan’s statements that the reason for this hierarchy is to demarcate the more ‘extreme’ vegans, Goffman’s stigmatization theories elucidate the mechanisms by which this occurs. He explains that stigmatized individuals who are more in line with normative standards may partition themselves from those in their group who are more outwardly stigmatizable, or from those whose stigma is more difficult to hide, leading to social stratification

(Goffman 1963). The less concealable the stigma, the more problematic for the stigmatized (Goffman 1963; Adler and Adler 2008). The extreme vegans (raw, raw till four, and fruitarians) sit further from typical omnivorous eating patterns than “typical” and even whole-foods vegans, in part because their practices are

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more difficult to hide. At a restaurant with omnivores, a typical vegan might be able to choose nondisclosure, assuming there is as least one vegan menu item

(often, a garden salad will do the trick); a raw or HCLF vegan, on the other hand, might find nondisclosure nearly impossible, because their foodstyles are more difficult to accommodate. Therefore, with an eye to the stigmatization of such practices, it serves the typical and whole-foods (less extreme) vegans to separate themselves from other groups, such that they may lay claim to normativity and reject pathologization. Despite efforts to stagger different types of vegans within the community, by members of the community, many still face a unique form of stigmatic labeling which demands their pathologization.

She’s Orthorexic

One of the many popular affronts wagered against the vegan recoverers, as appear in the comments sections, is the accusation that a recoverer is orthorexic.

Numerous recoverers in the sample cite their labeling as “orthorexic” as confirmation of their stigmatization. Orthorexia, though not formalized within the current version of the DSM, is culturally recognized as a form of “disordered” eating which differentiates itself from anorexia in that the restriction occurs not with amounts of food, but with types of food, where most orthorexic-identified individuals eat only limited types of foods deemed acceptably healthy (to a pathological degree). For example, for an orthorexic person, being made to consume a food that has been self-labeled as “unhealthy,” such as pasta, might cause extreme distress. Where vegan recovery is concerned, this statement by an

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anti-vegan recovery blogger is exemplary: “The clean eating fad often mirrors this restrictive behavior as well, and can lead to a more recently discovered eating disorder, orthorexia. In fact, completely avoiding one food group in the interest of being healthy isn’t actually healthy at all”8 (emphasis in original). By the logic of these critics, exclusion of food groups (whether that be animal products alone for typical vegans, or whether than include cooked food for the raw vegans) is a signpost of pathology.

Given the cultural conception of orthorexia as relating to limited foodstyles, it is unsurprising that the vegan recoverers are labeled orthorexic, since their food practices involve necessary restriction to a limited number of

‘acceptable’ foods. This is especially true for the raw vegans or the HCLF vegans; for example, HCLF vegans do not consume grains, oils, dairy, or animal products in any form, and nearly all of the vegans in the sample emphasized a lack of flexibility in their practices, stating that under no circumstances would they (or should others) break from the diet. Because these vegans are labeled orthorexic, which holds tremendous cultural weight despite a lack of official verification, they are essentially re-pathologized in service of stigmatizing their practices.

Thus, they must negotiate with these stigmatizing claims and work within a non- verified system of knowledge about what does and does not constitute disorder.

Efforts to deflect accusations of orthorexia appear frequently in the vegan recoverers’ accounts, represented by this excerpt from a fruitarian who tells,

People tend to label this lifestyle as "orthorexic", but for me this could not be further from the truth. Orthorexia is an addiction to the concept of being and being perceived as "healthy". But on the low-fat raw vegan lifestyle, I am only addicted to loving life and living vibrantly. I

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eat an abundance of raw fruits and vegetables everyday. And I will NEVER starve myself ever again. (Jenni Lorette)

This recoverer attempts to dismantle orthorexia accusations by citing her own definition of the disorder, to demonstrate knowledge, and then by laying out her lifestyle as a contradiction to that definition. For this and a number of other recoverers, disproving their alleged orthorexic label is crucial in the fight against stigmatization. When one declares that a vegan recover is orthorexic, the vegan recovery lifestyle itself is labeled as illegitimate due to its pathology by proxy.

One of the most striking components in this process is that the vegan recoverers are forced to counteract an accusation of disorder that is not verified by accepted authority, namely the DSM-5. What ensues is a complex stigma negotiation not only against medical authority, but against a form of cultural authority which presents itself as medical. The presence of orthorexia in the conversation generally suggests that it is recognized as pathological despite a lack of formal backing, which begs the question of whether a similar process might occur in the case of vegan recovery. Given that vegan recovery is pathologized culturally (yet less so medically, evidenced by its lack of mention in the DSM-5), one must question whether it will eventually be formally pathologized in the DSM-6.

Furthermore, orthorexia is routinely described as an illness within lay networks— might the same become of vegan recovery lifestyles? The conversation around whether vegan recovery constitutes orthorexia, and even whether it might perhaps merit its own disorder category, lends evidence to the argument that vegan recoverers face myriad stigmas, compounded by their complex vegan and recovering identity.

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Reassessing Moral Meanings: Stigma

In light of the many ways that stigma impacts their identities, I return to the question of why a vegan recoverer would choose to be public with their counter- narrative, seemingly risking stigmatization and discrimination by a plethora of online viewers. To help answer this question, I bring in Goffman’s concept of the moral career, which ties tantalizingly into Chapter 2’s discussion of the vegan’s moral narratives.

According to Goffman (1963), individuals with a certain stigma tend to have “similar learning experiences regarding their plight, and similar changes in conception of self” which he describes as a “moral career” linking stigmatized persons developmentally (32). As a person with stigma progresses in their relation to their own stigmatized identity, they eventually may achieve a place where they embrace and connect with stigmatized others; this is described as attaining a level of maturity in the moral career (Goffman 1963). This phase, according to

Goffman, can manifest as a voluntary disclosure of stigma, alongside the transformation of stigma markers to markers of community membership.

For the vegan recoverers who choose to present their eating disorder stories online, the final phase of the moral career is represented—as “well- adjusted” individuals, they disclose to others in service of the community

(Goffman 1963:102). Furthermore, what are originally described as symbols of stigma (for example, the public denial of animal foods, marking one as a vegan) are reframed at this stage as symbols of prestige (Goffman 1963). With this knowledge, we are able to revisit the argument that vegans spin a moral tale in

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lieu of a medicalized one, and it is revealed that creation of the moral tale marks the remaking of stigmatized symbols in the moral career. The meaning of “moral” itself is a double entendre here, in which the process pertains to individual moral development against stigma, while the result produces a new moral/ethical frame.

Simply, stigma informs the development of the moral tale, just as it necessitates public disclosure and community connection.

NETWORKING RESISTANCE

Because the recoverers possess multiple stigmatized identities, they contend with overlapping stigmas. As a result, they seek to forge community to resist this stigma, and indeed, in order to spread their counterclaims to a wider audience. This next section deals with the specific ways that online community affords the recoverers protection against these stigmas. According to Rich

(2006:295), some eating disordered individuals seek communities on the internet which present alternative eating disorder narratives, for within an internet context, these individuals are provided “alternative spaces” to “voice their experiences without the threat of feeling pathologized.” For some, online community becomes a reprieve from possible stigmatization, for within them they have more liberty to experiment with their identities and to share their narratives in a disembodied, largely anonymous space (Miller 2016). Because the community interaction occurs online rather than off, the recoverers are afforded the benefits of Internet space often studied in reference to stigmatization, including disinhibition and the ability to quickly build deep relationships (Miller 2016). Keeping in mind the

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efforts to counter the disembodiment of the Internet discussed earlier (see Chapter

3), it can be added that the disembodiment online also privileges the recoverers with the ability to spread their embodied narrative without the imperative to bring their ‘real’, physical bodies into the foray, thus allowing them increased room to explore alternative (albeit stigmatized) identities (see Miller 2016).

In examining the b/vlogs of the recoverers, it becomes evident that stigma resistance is not only a goal, but a central aim, in their creation of online narratives, summarized neatly by this excerpt: “I dedicate this blog to anyone who is vegan or vegetarian recovering from an eating disorder and fighting the negative stigma associated with a plant based diet” (Vegan ED Green). For this and other vegan recoverers, “fighting the negative stigma” is a key selling point their blogs: by sharing their lifestyle stories in a positive light and by linking to like others in a joint community, they buttress their claim across individual lines.

In this respect, the vegan recovery community shares a number of similarities to other deviant Internet communities in the way that it resists external stigmatization. For example, the pro-ana community labors to resist stigma, told through individual narratives of discriminatory experiences and ostracization, and through sharing those narratives with a community of similar people who might understand (Boero and Pascoe 2012; Giles 2006). As a marginalized group, the pro-ana community creates its own online alternative spaces to try on pro- anorexic identities without the threat of being stigmatized by those in the out- group. Alternatively, the online community of self-injurers studied by Adler and

Adler (2008) engages in similar efforts in order to create a place free from the

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stigma experienced in ‘real life.’ Self-injurers, like pro-anas and even vegan recoverers, are marginalized for their socially deviant practices, driving them to create cyber forums to communicate with others and, potentially, to renegotiate the incorporation of stigma into their identities (Adler and Adler 2008).

Community formation for stigma resistance is also a common practice among illness groups, both on and offline. It can be located as an intention of group formation among online support groups for contested illness (Barker 2002;

Hardey 2002), for example: for sufferers of fibromyalgia, support group formation is key for iterating alternative narratives in a so-called ‘safe’ space.

Thus, the vegan recovery blogs and vlogs mark the same process that occurs among other contested illness and deviant communities in which a group of marginalized and stigmatized individuals seek out alternative space online in which they can find support, camaraderie and freedom from judgment. In this respect, the vegan recovery community can be added to the ranks of marginalized groups whose communities serve as protective entities, expanding the reach and depth of both illness and Internet groups and literature bodies.

Notably, however, the vegan recovery community is different in nature from either the pro-ana or the self-injury community. Both the latter communities are not publicly accessible, and require membership, a crucial barrier to the threat of outsiders who might stigmatize; conversely, the vegan recoverers’ blogs and vlogs are all fully exposed to the public (a fact which in itself facilitated this research; see the Methods section). Unlike pro-ana and self-injuring individuals online, the vegan recoverers purportedly convey their narratives so that almost

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anyone can listen. Also, pro-ana and self-injuring online communities often leverage forums, which serve as sounding boards and a platform for the community to converge upon. The vegan recoverers in the sample instead operate their own individual blogs, websites and YouTube channels, and though like- minded individuals might leave comments or reach out directly to express shared ground, the platforms used are not compatible with dynamic community interaction. Inevitably, the vegan recoverers’ interactions with stigma differ from the pro-ana and self-injury communities: by making their narratives more public and by presenting them in individualized (read: isolated) platforms, they form a less cohesive community with more permeability for critical voices to leak through. This resolves the reason for the ample negative comments attached to most of the recoverers’ blogs and vlogs, whereas for the pro-ana or self-injuring community, detractors (and thus the possibility for negative, delegitimizing comments) are typically barred. While an open community increases the visibility of the vegan recovery narrative, it also permits comments like, “HAHAAHAH you overcame it? hell no. you still have a big giant eating disorder” (by Sakuems, from Freelee) to seep through the cracks.

Asserting Community: Emotional Techniques

Indisputably, community construction serves the purpose, for the vegan recoverers, of supporting participants within their stigmatized experiences.

Therefore, it is useful to explore some of the more finite techniques with which the recoverers establish intracommunity connection online. Two primary

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emotional techniques for community building are noted in this sample, including expressions of affection and displays of self-deprecation. The employment of these emotions within the narrative structure serves to connect the leading vegan recover voices with their invisible (and presumptively recovering, perhaps vegan) audience, creating emotional tangibility between speaker and listener. They also serve, as do emotions within any counternarrative, to texture the story itself, enabling insight into the illness experience (Kleinman 1988). Through these techniques, the vegan recoverers become not only storytellers and provisioners of detached advice, but link themselves to others emotionally to service the creation of a unified, emotionally bonded community of allied participants. Across the narratives, wherever such emotional techniques are utilized, the illusion of a

“cohesive cultural experience of illness” (Kleinman 1988:49) is enabled, despite the fact that individuals are virtually disconnected. They thus establish the all- important collective identity necessary to enable community cohesion (Koski

2014), facilitating their transformation from a disjointed group to a legible unit.

Affection

First, the vegan recovers often create displays of affection towards their invisible audience as a way of supplying emotional bonds and to connect with other vegans in the community. Examples include multitudinous expressions of love and affection, such as in these examples: “I love you guys so much and I’ll see you tomorrow” (Claire Michelle); “You all are so beautiful” (Claire

Michelle); and “Thanks again for watching and…I love you all” (Supreme

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Banana). Many even used abbreviations or shorthand to conveniently pepper affectionate expressions throughout their narratives, using “XO” (hugs and kisses) and “<3” (a heart symbol) to sign off on their blog posts. These methods are less an expression of originality and more of a draw on popular modes of emotional technique online. As such, this style of affection has been documented formidably among online groups. Among self-injurers that participate in the cyber support community, displays and declarations of intimacy, such as through symbols of affection, facilitate participants’ ability to forge “bonds of trust and understanding,” aiding in the deconstruction of the “wall of secrecy” serviced by

Internet anonymity (Adler and Adler 2008:44). Due to the disembodied and anonymous nature of the Internet—including, for the recoverers, the fact that their audience is essentially invisible—they endeavor to break the barriers of anonymity and establish a brand of superficial intimacy, expressed symbolically, which might feasibly fill the gap. Similar methods have also been traced on pro- ana sites, where members demonstrate their support and love for one another through symbols (including hearts and XO’s) (Overbeke 2008). Pro-ana individuals, with an understanding of mutual stigmatization between members

(McNamara and Parsons 2016), express empathy for each other in this way, creating a common sense of shared community rooted in positivity. The vegan recoverers do the same, also enabled by group stigmatization. With the understanding that other vegan recoverers likely face discrimination due to their practices, they use the communal roster of vegan experiences to express their

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empathy, and solidify a base on which a supportive illness community can develop.

Self-deprecation

While appearing less often than displays of affection, examples of self- deprecation also arise in the vegan recoverers’ stories. For example, one recoverer declares, “I still wonder what it is about me that makes me so undesirable, and so much of a second, or rather, last thought in everyone’s heads – my friends, my family etc” (Crazy Vegan Kitchen). In another instance, a separate recoverer tells,

“When I was young, I was very chubby and I always had (and still have) a low self-esteem. I thought I was very ugly, that I had very ugly hair, face and I thought I was disgusting” (Journey 2 Happiness). For these and a few other recoverers, self-deprecate either occurs directly, demonstrated when Amrita calls herself “undesirable,” or indirectly, exemplified when the second blogger lists negative attributes about herself, even if in the past tense. This technique serves a number of functions, but most significantly for this analysis, it promotes community cohesion. By debasing themselves in front of their audience, these recoverers are, instead of expressing empathy as with affection techniques, inviting empathy from others. Thus, the result is similar to that when affection is used, though the words itself have a darker tone. By inviting empathy from others, the vegan recoverers attempt to forge emotional connections and a sense of sameness from their audience, a strategic approach documented thoroughly in the social problems literature (Schneider 1985; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). There is,

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in some respect, an effort at “humanization” in a dehumanized, disembodied

Internet space. They bring themselves to ground level, so to speak, in order to present themselves as being on a comparable level as their viewers. No longer are they authorities on vegan recovery while using this method; instead, they are comrades in the struggle against eating disorders, low self-esteem, and a system which largely prohibits their vegan recovery. Conspicuously, most recoverers refrain from using this method, as it disturbs the prevailing message of positivity otherwise exhibited.

Loosely Cohesive and Largely Invisible

There is an important distinction not yet addressed, which is that the online community recognized by the vegans in the sample is the vegan community, rather than the vegan recovery community. The community is structured such that the vegan identity is absorbs the limelight, while the eating disordered or recovering identity resides backstage. The majority of the blogs and vlogs were expressly oriented around the vegan lifestyle, and only secondarily included eating disorder recovery narratives. Thus, it would be wrong to say that there is a unified and acknowledged vegan recovery community—rather, a semblance of such a community exists buried within the broader vegan lifestyle one online. Regardless, the eating disorder recovery stories still appear frequently within the broader vegan lifestyle posts, drawing widespread attention to the perceived correlation between eating disorders and veganism. Although the recovery narrative cannot claim its own pillar in the way that the vegan narrative

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can, as the vegan narrative is transmitted across the Internet, the recovery narrative that it encapsulates is carried along with it. More and more, the vegan recovery narrative is expressed as a unified whole—for the time being, however, it continues to lurk beneath the vegan community at large. With that said, it is still possible to extrapolate to the vegan recovery community based on knowledge of the wider vegan community. This is principally true when considering that since the close of data collection for this thesis, prominent vegan YouTubers who were not initially included in the sample have since disclosed their history with eating disorders1.

The sample studied can be further marked as belonging to a community in reference to statements that form links with other community members.

Examples include, “I’m just very very inspired by these YouTubers, some that I know, some that are even recovering from an eating disorder” (Chris Henrie) and

“I have several favorite channels of mine that really explain this healing process really well […] and I can link those channels in the description down below”

(Alice Olivia). By alluding to other YouTubers and linking to other community members’ content, the recoverers quite literally create hyperlinked connections within the community, whereby they de-isolate their narratives and generate new understandings of available lifestyles. Crucially, the community formation present also represents the beginning of a more collective effort to resist the medicalization and pathologization of vegan recovery. The success of the community as a whole is contingent upon the formation of a collective illness

(and recovery) identity (Giles 2006; Koski 2014), which the techniques

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referenced above service. This collective identity serves to shape individual experience, as well as enable new language for interpreting recovery (Koski

2014).

The process of networking here enables the rapid spread of the counterclaim itself, which grants outsiders exposure to the alternative recovery narrative. To revisit the statement at the beginning of this chapter, the recoverers’ counterclaims would function poorly were they ineffective at recruiting others to support it. Explicating the group of vegan recoverers as an interactive, productive online community explains why their claim has reached so many people, and attracted many more to their lifestyle. A message set forth by a vegan recovery community is more palatable than one propelled by a lone individual—after all, if so many are able to recover from their eating disorders with raw veganism, why shouldn’t it be a viable way to heal? With this knowledge, we set one of the final pieces in place for understanding how the vegan recoverers make their controversial claim viable, for their legitimacy techniques and moral framing can let them travel so far. It is by piecing together a loose-knit community that the vegan recovery counternarrative truly transforms into the vegan recovery counterclaim, one which is presented as operable in the face of the dominating cultural frames.

Noting this, we gain context for how the eating disorder recovery subgroup is able to articulate its narratives within the broader vegan community as a whole, without being drowned out. As scholars have foretold, the price of group visibility is threats from out-group members; thus, individuals band

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together to resist the out-group, despite internal hierarchal differences (Giles

2006). In other words, despite differences within the vegan community online regarding eating disorder histories and recovery status, the common threat of stigma unifies, such that diverse individuals can cultivate a unified vegan identity.

However, to suggest that the vegan recovery identity is unified is not to suggest that it is representative: a wide variety of voices are almost totally excluded.

EXCLUSION

As reviewed in the Methods section, the majority of the recoverers in the sample are white, six are Asian-descended, and none are black/African- descended. All spoke English in the blogs or videos and hailed from Western nations (with 16 from the United States followed by 4 in Australia, 3 in the UK, and 2 in Sweden). This demographic spread points to a number of underlying trends, some of which speak to differential access to the tools of knowledge described in Chapter 3. It has been well documented that eating disorders primarily strike white women in Western countries, although there is evidence pointing to the fact that women and men of many races are affected but that eating disorders in white women are more readily recognized and treated2. Herein lies the first problem—the eating disorder community itself is still comprised of white women in the majority. Secondly, individuals who are of a lower (SES) may have decreased access to the types and quantities of foods needed to follow these diets. The HCLF or fruitarian diet has been one labeled particularly for its expensiveness, for the purchase of mass quantities of fresh

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fruits and vegetables does not come cheap. Even within more typical vegan diets, fresh produce and vegan substitutes are often important for the success of the lifestyle, which are expensive food choices that dissuade many from purchasing them. Thus, already the sample of vegan eating disorder recoverers is whittled down to a narrow population of financially able, mostly white, and almost totally female individuals.

The final piece of the picture rests in the fact that the Internet, though it has historically been lauded as an equal-access and opportunities space (Pitts

2004), is not. Non-white and other marginalized individuals are excluded from many online spaces (Sobieraj 2017). Additionally, Internet access, the ability to use a private computer (mostly necessary for producing blogs and vlogs) and even the time to dedicate to online personal use is not available for many. Creating an online blog or vlog involves further a certain level of technical know-how and education, which limits some still from using the Internet in as engaged a way as most of the vegan recoverers do. In the words of Burrows et al. (2000:118),

“wired welfare may tend to advantage a middle class who have the time, the reflexivity, inclination and resources to best exploit it, and in so doing gain systematic advantage.” In other words, the privileges in the middle class enable a deeper engagement with the benefits available in Internet usage, including here the creation and operation of personal sites through which to tell narratives and advocate illness lifestyles.

Given each of these potential parameters, it is less surprising that the sample here consisted of mostly white women and in general, individuals of

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middle or upper classes3. It is these privileges that further afford these individuals the ability to negotiate with medical knowledge and to create their own.

Education and a middle-class ethic of personal autonomy (Pitts 2004) allow the recoverers to question medical understandings of veganism in eating disorder recovery and to engage in alternative lifestyles in ways that lower class individuals may not. Evidently, and as described, this sample is not representative of the ways that a broader population would necessarily engage with medical authority or even perform embodiment online, nor should they be. Instead they represent a trend coursing through American culture, transgressing the classed and raced boundaries of the Internet to all who experience illness. As one researcher describes, it is the “unraveling” of a certain degree of medical authority

(Hardey 2002:45), the transfer of professional health to lay knowledge, and a reconfiguration of the very ways that society understandings health and wellness.

It is conceivable that these recoverers are participating in changing the way society also understands recovery from eating disorders, and the rhetoric of individual autonomy to choose ethical healing offers a new kind of ontology of health. It functions by moving beyond the individual (mostly female, mostly white, mostly wealthy) to the diverse public, spreading the counterclaim of alternative knowledge. The vegan recoverers themselves are not a particularly representative group; however, their counterclaims, broadcast on the Internet, reach and are shared by a wide swath of people.

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Where Are the Men?

A number of groups are excluded from the online spaces of the vegan recoverers; however, for the time being, some of the exclusions shall be set aside in order to focus on the issue of gender4. A higher prevalence of eating disorders among females has been hugely documented, which explains some (but not all) of the gender disparity (as a reminder, only one of the 25 recoverers presented as a male, given best estimates). The historical exclusion of women from digital public space has been documented by Internet scholars. Sobieraj (2017:2) tells, “digital publics are rife with male resistance to women’s involvement” in a “steady drumbeat of sexism.” The prevalence of women in this sample, therefore, might seem to contradict what digital scholarship tells us about gender online, but this pattern cannot simply be read as a result of eating disorders being a criterion for participation. There are many male eating disorder sufferers, and the numbers may be underestimated due to resistance to treatment for a disorder seen as female5. This begs the question of whether male voices are actively or unintentionally excluded from the community, and whether boundaries are created that prevent male recoverers from participation.

The covert exclusion of men from vegan recovery communities is inevitably difficult to track, thus it is necessary to defer to existing scholarship to investigate this possibility. A pocket of research has indeed noted the exclusion of men in female-dominated spaces. In research on self-harm communities, Adler and Adler note that some men disguised themselves behind female avatars to fit into the dominantly female subculture (2008), while pro-ana community scholars

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find comparatively that members of the community may attribute masculine pronouns to an abusive contributor, demonstrating that even the suggestion of male participation counters in-group norms (Giles 2006). In these cases of active resistance, it may be suggested that the resistance occurs in order to preserve the perceived ‘safety’ of the female-only Internet group (Wahlstrom 2000). In the sample of vegan recoverers, there were no such instances of active exclusion identified, although that does not mean they do not exist; in any case, the issue of the lack of men in vegan recovery spaces may be even more complicated than space guarding.

There a number of factors at play that potentially explain the lack of men in vegan recovery spaces, beyond those commonly explored by either eating disorders research or deviant communities scholarship. Much understated is the fact that eating disorders are largely feminized conditions, leading to the stigmatization of men who exhibit symptoms. Controlled eating and control of the body is a practice historically and culturally associated with women and feminine performance. Furthermore, the underweight and emaciated bodies often associated with the low-weight eating disorders contradict many traditional

(Western) masculine ideals of largeness and musculature. Thus, an underweight man with an eating disorder faces particular stigmatization, in some ways even beyond that which is experienced by women with eating disorders. This may factor into the lack of visibility of men with eating disorders, and may help explain the lack of men in the sample overall. Interestingly, the one (assumed) man in the sample, Chris Henrie, describes himself as a gay man and engages

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with a feminine gender presentation—while more research and data collection is needed to thoroughly assess the impact of this individuals’ gender and sexuality on his participation in a female-dominated community, it does not seem insignificant that the one man in the sample does not ascribe to aspects of more traditional (heterosexual) masculinity.

Furthermore, vegan men, particularly those who live in industrialized and

Western cultures, face additional stigma. Gender is intricately tied into eating practices, for the consumption of animals is enmeshed in masculinity and patriarchy, and the exclusion of meat from the diet equated with femininity and framed as a subversive (Adams 2002, in Wicks 2008). This is reflected in rates of vegetarianism between men and women: two to three times as many women as men are vegetarian (Wicks 2008). Because vegetarian diets may be implicitly associated with a rejection of masculinity, it is conceivable that men who choose to follow vegan diets are additionally deterred from publicity, due to the possibility for increased stigmatization resulting from the subversion of gendered norms. Thus arise at least two additional reasons for the lack of men in the vegan recovery space—the fact that fewer men are vegetarian/vegan, and the fact that even among those who are, there is additional potential for stigma based not only on the diet itself, but on its gendered implications. In revisiting the myriad stigmas faced by the vegan recoverers above, we could then add another category for men: their gender.6

Clearly, there are a number of underlying barriers to men’s participation in the vegan recovery space. This is troubling in that the experiences of male vegan

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recoverers are potentially excluded—however, the significance of a female- dominated recovery space should not be understated. Female-only and female- dominant spaces tend to be few, and where they appear, they are often undermined by influences that devalue their significance. A female-dominant space like that appearing in the vegan and vegan recovery communities can provide an increased sense of safety for the women involved, which might be decreased in different settings (Wahlstrom 2000). There is clearly a tension between the value of a female space and the necessity of hearing all available voices in a community that is already contested and compressed by cultural stigmatization.

In both the case of the vegan recovery community and in review of deviant, Internet, and illness communities, one of their common purposes is to prevent stigmatization in an environment, virtual or otherwise, that is somewhat insulated from detractors. This allows alternative narratives like that of vegan recovery to take root before they are squashed by dominant the cultural narratives that deny them. Given such commonalities, it is unsurprising that the vegan and vegan recovery communities share similarities with illness and deviant communities regarding which voices are privileged over others. Notably, especially in the pro-ana community, it is a female voice that takes precedent.

However, there is one key difference: the vegan recovery community, subset as it is within the broader vegan lifestyle community, is a fledgling group of recoverers whose unique stories are embedded within larger vegan narratives. It may be argued that the vegan recovery community is less established than, say, the pro-

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ana community. This leaves additional room to wonder whether this community will solidify or disintegrate, as well as whether the provisions of the vegan recovery subcommunity might be elevated to a larger, louder context and spread to a broader audience (for example, to a news media platform). With its boundaries more permeable than those of the pro-ana, self-injurer or other illness recovery communities, the question of whether the vegan recoverers will ever achieve solidification like the others is left for debate—and its reception of excluded voices will no doubt be a contributing factor.

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CONCLUSION Scrapping Definitions

The first of its kind, this investigation into the online vegan recovery community reminds us of an important fact: this story is an old one. It lays its roots in an ever-deepening history of illness counterclaims-makers, drawing on a common toolbox of techniques shared by groups as diverse as pro-anorexics, fatness activists, environmental illness advocates, and self-injurers. At its core, these counternarratives are manifestations of communal dissatisfaction with psychomedical authority, and resist with the culturally salient frameworks of health and individual autonomy. For the vegan community, this discontent orbits the issue of eating disorder recovery. Specifically, they posit this question against the dominant recovery model: who has the ability to purvey cultural definitions of what constitutes viable recovery from an eating disorder?

Additionally, one all-important distinction has not been presented until now: when it comes to the reification of eating disorder recovery, counterclaims- making is not the sole delegation of the vegan recoverers. Those that the vegans disparagingly describe as “normal” recoverers (omnis, for omnivores) have fought for the right to self-definition and for a reevaluation of medicalized eating disorder recovery for years (Bjork and Ahlstrom 2008; Bowlby et al. 2015; Darcy et al. 2010; Garrett 1997; LaMarre and Rice 2016; Matusek and Knudson 2009;

Musolino et al. 2016; Rich 2006; Shohet 2007). It is their efforts that have spurred ample sociological research into the world of recoverers, on which this thesis rests.

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With that said, there are a few key factors separating the vegan recoverers from their non-vegan counterparts, and the difference goes beyond their diet. The vegan recoverers, uniquely, craft a newly moral presentation of recovery that has been scarcely seen in other platforms. While the struggle for demedicalization is not new, the fashioning of the recovery narrative into a moralistic one is. This process provides further insight into the specific tools, for example, that these recoverers opt to employ for the sake of legitimacy. One cannot view the recoverers’ tools of embodiment, boundary maintenance, or stigma resistance without tending to their moral meaning-making. Moreover, part of the reason for this narrative difference can be tied back to the differences in stigmatized identities. In addition to the eating disorders stigma with which non-vegan recoverers contend, the vegans (especially those on the extreme end of the dietary spectrum) must navigate a treacherous field of stigma against veganism, their recovery method, and for men, their gender4.

Finally, the structure of the vegan community itself relegates it to a semi- separate stage than that of regular recoverers. Among non-vegan recoverers, individual isolation across place, disorder status, age, gender, race, and religious beliefs largely prevents the conglomeration of a recognizable community that would rival the Internet’s vegans. Arguably, the recoverers’ relative progress in fortifying a community, connected and quickly publicized online, is their signaling success. Catalyzed by stigma and the pathologization of their lifestyle choice, the vegan recoverers have founded an online community which at a glance appears attractive, and which expedites the spread of their subversive

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counterclaim. These distinctive features alone merit the study of the vegan recoverers as a unique body of claimsmakers, whose activities and moralized narratives provide us with novel information about how recovery is being redefined.

At the entrance of this research, I viewed the vegan community with as much objectivity as possible, in light of a bit of skepticism regarding whether consuming, for example, pounds of dried dates in a meal could truly allow one to feel “light” and “eating-disorder free.” Towards the end of the process, however, my perspective began to meander, and just as I finished writing the last of my analysis, I began to consider more thoroughly the prospect of embodying the experience that I had studied at a distance. Drawing very loosely from principles of carnal sociology and the ethnographic methodologies of Black Hawk

Hancock,1 keeping in mind that my research had been more or less completed, I decided I would try this vegan diet for myself.

Having experienced the often cyclical process of eating disorders and recovery from them for nearly half my life, I had some trepidation about the way that going vegan would impact my own health. Was it true that “This is NOT a way to recover from an eating disorder. It will ONLY keep around the negative feelings and obsession with food and control and likely lead most people to relapse” (Titania Dixon, from Freelee)? Suppressing my hesitation, I chose the whole-foods, plant-based vegan diet, (feeling that a fully raw or fruitarian method would be too limited for me), stocked my pantry with lentils and sweet potatoes,

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and embarked on a brief journey with veganism that ended after about three weeks.

Having embodied the experience of being a plant-based vegan myself, however briefly, I returned to my writing, curious whether it would change the way I viewed my own analysis. The place where this was most definitely the case was in my exploration of vegan stigma; in just three weeks, I found myself often having to struggle internally with whether or not to disclose my short-lived vegan identity to others and found that, when I did, I was met with skeptical surprise and, from family members, concern. The phrase “vegan stigma” took on new meaning that it had never had for me previously, even as a long-time vegetarian.

While I continue to incorporate vegan practices into my diet today, I cannot in good faith call myself a participant within the vegan community, despite my short-lived excursion. This inevitably calls to the fore questions of my position as a sociological researcher who can claim a recovery identity, but not the vegan one that is the cornerstone of this work. With an element of partial membership, I was privileged access to certain types of language and illness experience formats used by those in the sample, and not others. I was quickly able to internalize terminology from the recoverers’ stories, having already had a mental glossary from my own experiences, yet was less well positioned to understand their references to vegan practices like monomeals2, banana islands3, and . Naturally, in my research I had no direct interaction with the recoverers that I chose for my sample—nevertheless, I remain an actor in constructing definitions of vegan recovery and in positioning the community’s

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claims, situated against my partial membership. Spector and Kitsuse point out that sociologists often fail to implicate themselves as actors within their research, reminding readers “Sociologists are members of a society […] and participants in the definitional process” (1987:63). They point out the underrepresented fact that

“Whether the sociologist will be treated as a scientist by other participants in the process and accorded the special status of a disinterested and unbiased expert is a problematic, empirical question” (Spector and Kitsuse 1987:70). Therefore, I have sought to position myself within this process as an interested partial-actor and full definer, keeping an eye towards the fact that disclosure of identities as a researcher allows me some elements of access while interrupting the perception of unbiased credibility, in the tradition of other sociologists who study, even peripherally, their identity groups (Davis 2015).

Reflecting on my own embodied experience, and particularly my anxiety over the impact of my diet adventure on my recovery status, I propose a consideration not yet voiced in this thesis: that the vegan recovery narratives, and their complex counterclaims, have significant implications for those who are seeking to begin, or continue, ED recovery. Without stumbling too far into the trap of qualifying the practices in the context of their impact, as has occurred with much of the pro-ana investigations (Overbeke 2008), it must be emphasized that more research is needed into the concrete experience of vegan recovering individuals, both those who post and those who read the posts. One of the limits of exploring vegan recovery through a social claimsmaking framework results in the understudy of the ways that the claims are interpreted by other laypeople, with

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an overreliance on the construction and content of claims. Counterintuitively, considering further how readers are interpreting the vegan claims will, in future work, reveal many more intricacies about the claims themselves.

As previewed in Chapter 4, it must be wondered whether the recoverers’ claims will be translated into the next edition of the DSM. My interrogation boils down to this simple query: given that psychomedical and vegan claimsmakers symbolically fight for the institution of their definitions, who will succeed? A medically entrenched model might further see vegan recovery pathologized, with specific descriptions of veganism included within the “Eating Disorders” chapter of the DSM, whereas the influence of the vegan claim might institutionalize vegan recovery across an array of recovery settings. This might manifest in the institution of vegan options for recoverers across treatment contexts which, given my own positioning, I staunchly advocate. Several vegan recoverers in the sample relay experiences of rejecting formal treatment due to the lack of acceptance of their veganism. Delayed treatment at the disposal of what is currently viewed in

Western society as “correct” versus “incorrect” recovery is a cultural travesty.

This necessitates an interruption of the cultural stigmas against veganism, eating disorders, and vegan recovery, such that the chosen foodstyles of the recoverers can be honored, and appropriate supports offered.

Having spent nearly a year researching the vegan recovery community online, and enriched by my own embodied investigation into their practice, I have come to two competing conclusions regarding their impact, which I share for the purposes of encouraging further scholarship. First, as I have amply discussed, the

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recovery narratives are alternatives to the medical model—and the presence of alternatives can be, for the masses of recoverers who have been failed by the dominant narrative, a saving grace. The reason that the vegan recoverers are initially drawn to their alternative foodstyles is the same reason that it appeals to recoverers across the board: it supplies flailing recoverers with a new plan, often ending in success. Thus, rather than ask whether consuming only raw fruit is

“healthy,” we ought to ask this: why are so many people voluntarily eating so many bananas? The answer, which drives this thesis, is that for many who feel they are faced with a limited palette of recovery options, the promise of full, healthy, ethical recovery, even if it demands an extreme diet, is irresistible.

However, we cannot assess the more productive impacts of the recovery claims without revisiting those that are harmful. The damage of spreading misinformation throughout the vegan community cannot be understated. A quick glance at the recovery community uncovers a swath of disenfranchised past- vegans, who claim that eating a fruitarian diet caused them to gain weight, lose their hair, or relapse into disordered eating. This group has been set aside for the intentions of this thesis, a major limitation of this study, yet must be investigated in the future to flesh out the underbelly of the vegan recovery claims. At the very least, what their retorts reveal is the potential damage of informing people that eating 10,000 calories a day is necessary, or that cooked food is “toxic.”

Crucially, such misinformation is not an indication of the inherent fallibility of the vegan recovery claim—rather, it is a product of a group of individuals pursuing an

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un-trodden path, and attempting to fill the gaps with their interpretations of scientific fact. But, such misinformation is no less pernicious for this fact.

I suggest that nutritionally correct information must be provided people who pursue (or are considering pursuing) a vegan diet in eating disorder recovery.

Rather than make vegan recovery unavailable (this includes fruitarianism to a degree), these food practices should be presented as options, with appropriate medical signoff, psychological and spiritual support, grounded in a non- stigmatizing community. Fruitarianism and raw veganism are nutritionally contentious topics—however, the argument is weak to blanket these practices as pathological without providing alternatives to recovering individuals who feel disenfranchised by the medical recovery model. A far more productive conversation can be had as to how the concept of recovery might be expanded to take vegan recoverers’ accounts into the fold in the context of institutional treatment settings, such as in recovery centers and in support groups, at which point nutritional guidance might be implemented.

One more question remains to be asked: just how alternative are the claims to vegan recovery? This thesis has presumed the claims as counternarratives, positioned against a psychomedical paradigm; however, it has been revealed that the claimsmakers employ recognized strategies in their dialogues, from moral framing to citing medical authority, which impede upon their radicality. Emerging from a culture deeply embedded in healthism, personal choice, financial ability, and patient responsibility, it must be asked to what extent the vegan recovery counternarratives can be qualified as counter. Inevitably, as products of their

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society, the recoverers’ stories reassert neoliberal narratives of autonomy and the privileging of formal education, among other multilayered, troubling outcomes.

With that said, we are able to question the alternativity of the narratives while still asserting that they are attempting an alternative story. Whether, or moreover how, that story is achieved may be even less significant than the fact that the attempt to try something different is occurring at all. More and more vegan recovery stories are published online every day, reflecting the continued resistance by recoverers to disrupt the molds of recovery that they have been given. It is, at its core, a profound expression of the ability of the ill/recovering individual to reconceptualize their life story in the face of powerful systems of medical meaning.

Thus, the vegan recovery community can join the ranks, so to speak, of alternative illness communities and social health movements, in support of a growing tradition of literature that gives voice to marginalized illness groups

(Brown et al. 2004; Pitts 2004; Rich 2006; Barker 2002; LaMarre and Rice 2016;

Gailey 2009; Kwan 2009; and others). While various groups differ in their claim, method, and presentation, they each beget a nucleus of community support, and display striking webs of linked voices that call for their respective change. No more a fledgling cluster of banana-eaters, the Internet’s vegans are reinventing recovery from eating disorders. Whether their new definitions will be accepted is a narrative yet to be told.

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APPENDIX

Table 2: An Assortment of Recovery Foodstyles Lifestyle Other Names Practices Omnivore Standard Emphasis on restrictionless recovery; that meat American diet, and other animal products, processed foods, standard diet cooked or raw foods should be eaten in any quantity without restriction. Vegetarian None Does not consume any meat, , or poultry, but may consume eggs, dairy. Subcategories include lacto-vegetarian (consumes dairy as only animal product), pescatarian (does consume fish), and semi-vegetarian (consumes poultry and fish). Vegan None Does not consume any animal products (typical) including meat, fish, dairy, eggs, or honey. No restrictions placed on processed foods or macronutrient composition. Plant-based Whole-foods Consume mostly plant foods including fruits, vegan vegan, “clean” vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and whole vegan, holistic grains; no specific restrictions on how much vegan cooked food to eat, or how much fat and protein to eat. Excludes all processed foods, unlike 'typical' vegans.

Raw till 4 RT4 vegan Consume only raw plant foods until dinnertime; vegan then consume a large, cooked, carbohydrate heavy meal, typically pasta, rice, or potatoes.

Raw vegan None Only consume raw foods; fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Unlike a fruitarian, there are no restrictions placed on amounts of fat to be consumed. HCLF Fruitarian, 80- Described as a subset of raw veganism; only vegan 10-10, high carb includes raw fruits, with smaller quantities of vegan raw vegetables

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Images 1

Caption 1 From Chris Henrie’s video “My Anorexia Story (Through Pictures).” With text he describes his weight during hospitalization as a means to understand his experience. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo2f2FGDMdk

Image 2

Caption 2 This image was presented with Image 1 to give a dramatic representation of Chris Henrie’s anorexic body at the time of hospitalization. This shows an example of embodiment of the ill body through both image and weights.

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Image 3

Caption 3 “I had finally found the answer to never having to go on another DIE- T”: Famous raw till four fruitarian Elle Tayla, or Frutiarian Elle, shows in her video titled “My Eating Disorder Story” that eating a fruitarian diet saved her from her severe anorexia. She is shown here holding a box of bananas. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjm3XTMEUAM

Image 4

Caption 4: Popular raw vegan YouTuber Rawvana is shown holding a plate of fruit towards the end of her eating disorder video, “My Eating Disorder Story.” The recovered identity she portrays here is a joyful one, with attractive food and a thin body. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lts33Zc9Rwc&t=3s

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Image 5

Caption 5: Hitomi Mochizuki, a plant-based vegan YouTuber, explains the moral underpinnings of her vegan recovery from binge eating disorder, saying of animals, “It’s like I feel their spirit.” Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsCRSzHa9XI

Image 6

Caption 6: The “About” section from the blog Clean Eating Kitchen. This blog author lists her certification to establish credibility; we also see reference to “real” food (see Chapter 2). Source: https://www.cleaneatingkitchen.com/about/

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Liddon, Angela. 2018. “About — Oh She Glows.” Oh She Glows. Retrieved March 16, 2018 (http://ohsheglows.com/about/). Lorette, Jenni. 2016. My Eating Disorder Story. Retrieved (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NqchvBviIs). Natashaka. 2015. Why I Am Vegan! Retrieved March 16, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sSOYetg_A). Olivia, Alice. n.d. How Veganism Cured My Binge Eating Disorder. Retrieved March 15, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQiEeQeH7kM). Oras, Elisa. 2016. “Being Vegan In Eating Disorder Recovery.” Follow the Intuition. Retrieved March 16, 2018 (http://followtheintuition.com/being-vegan-in- recovery/). Rawvana English. 2015. MY EATING DISORDER STORY. Retrieved March 16, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lts33Zc9Rwc). St. Peter, Amber. 2017. “Good Saint About.” GOOD SAINT. Retrieved March 16, 2018 (http://www.good-saint.com/about.html). Supreme Banana. 2015. My Eating Disorder Story. Retrieved March 16, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MB15CG0JEA&t=2s).

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NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1. There are no reliable, regularly collected data on the rate of veganism in the

United States or in other nations. This data, replicated across a number of

websites, was located on https://www.statisticbrain.com/vegetarian-statistics/.

2. The DSM has been criticized for its oversimplification of mental illness and

for its limited attention to specifications for other cultures (see Alan Horwitz

2003, Creating Mental Illness).

3. Eating disorder diagnoses often shift over time within one individual;

however, the DSM-5 currently demarcates eating disorders into distinct

categories, which is not necessarily reflective of the illness experience

(American Psychiatric Association 2013).

4. Mirasol is an eating disorder treatment center located in Tucson, Arizona.

Information about their policies on veganism were drawn from the FAQs of

the Mirasol website: https://www.mirasol.net/why-choose-mirasol/frequently-

asked-questions.php

5. Center for Hope in the Sierras is a residential eating disorders treatment

program for men and women in Nevada. Information on their vegan policies

was found on their website: http://www.centerforhopeofthesierras.com/

6. The Emily Program, a residential treatment center for eating disorders, is

located in several states. They have information about their policies on

veganism and vegetarianism on the FAQs section of their website:

https://www.emilyprogram.com/programs/24/7-residential-care/residential-faq

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7. Walden Behavioral Care is a major eating disorders treatment center in

Waltham, MA. Information about their vegetarian policies was found on their

website: http://www.waldenbehavioralcare.com/

8. Canopy Cove residential treatment center is located in Tallahassee, Florida

and has detailed information about their vegetarianism policy on their website:

https://www.canopycove.com/eating-disorders/vegetarianism-and-eating-

disorder/

9. Peter Conrad (1992; 1994; 2005; other works), a major voice in the study of

medicalization, describes the process by which non-medical behaviors come

to be described as medical. Many health concerns and illnesses, other than

eating disorders, are medicalized, including alcoholism and ADHD. Brumberg

and other scholars draws upon these theories to understand the progression of

eating disorder conceptualizations in Western society over the past 150 years

from a spiritual occurrence to a disease process.

10. Evidence for this was obtained through the major pro-anorexia website,

myproana.com/

11. This quote was taken from an article on Psychology Today, a major source of

pop-cultural psychology and a space for the public to engage with current

psychological research. It is taken from a 2012 article titled “Vegetarianism

and Eating Disorders” written by a leader in public health nutrition.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-

healing/201211/vegetarianism-and-eating-disorders

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CHAPTER TWO

1. This quote was also drawn from an article in Psychology Today, a popular

pop-psychology website. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-

healing/201211/vegetarianism-and-eating-disorders

2. Eating disorders and substance abuse share high levels of comorbidity in the

patient population. Researchers have found that drug and alcohol addiction

share similar genetic and biological pathways with eating disorders, and use

this knowledge to explain the comorbidity. As a result, eating disordered

individuals are often directly compared to alcoholics, and treatment frames are

increasingly taking into consideration the need to address eating disorders in

the way that addiction is addressed. For reference, see Wilson, Terence. 2010.

“Eating Disorders, Obesity and Addiction.” European Eating Disorders

Review 18(5):341–51.

3. Importantly, the issue of doctoral choice is a classed one. Scholars suggest

that people with lower sociocultural status may have fewer tools to negotiate

against cultural authority, so the analysis here must be taken with a of

salt, or better yet, framed against the fact that the recoverers have relatively

high social positioning (see Chapter 4: Exclusion). For reference, see Annette

Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods.

4. Health food-ism, as described by Knight (2012), is the practice of over-

valuing certain foods deemed as “healthy.” It is the process by which

specifically foods that are labeled healthy (say, kale) become symbols of

cultural capitol.

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5. “Western” culture refers to the similarities across the cultures of modernized,

industrialized countries, which include those where the vegan recoverers were

sampled from: the United States, Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

This term is used in this thesis with recognition of the fact that “Western” is a

heavy-handed geographical way to describe countries that are linked by the

structuring of their society rather than by their physical location.

6. Many of the recoverers not only represented their lifestyles as useful, but

portrayed it as the best, or an idyllic, way to recover. Discussions of this

exuberant framing were excluded from this thesis due to space.

CHAPTER THREE

1. emphasizes that the human body has evolved to digest cooked

foods since the discovery of fire. For reference, see his book Cooked (2013).

2. In fact, levels in the body are contingent on intake and

overall dietary profile. See for reference Cashman, Kevin D. et al. 2014.

“Dietary Vitamin D– a Potentially Underestimated Contributor to Vitamin D

Nutritional Status of Adults?” British Journal of Nutrition 112(2):193–202.

3. Researchers have debunked the broad cultural myth that the human body is

involved in any type of “detox” process wherein waste is discarded, beyond

the normal processes of the human body. It was been shown, for example, that

drinking detox tea does not facilitate renewed ‘toxin’ cleansing, as some

Internet advocates claim. For reference, see Klein A. V. and Kiat H. 2014.

“Detox Diets for Toxin Elimination and : A Critical

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Review of the Evidence.” Journal of and Dietetics

28(6):675–86.

4. “Wannabe” anorexics, as described in the pro-ana literature, are marked as

those who are not legitimately anorexic. These individuals are typically

labeled as outsiders or invaders and are socially excoriated from the pro-ana

community (Giles 2006).

5. In traditional recovery support groups, both on and offline, it is common

practice to state a ban on number-sharing, including the posting or describing

of weights, calories, and food amounts. This is due to the belief that sharing

these numbers can be triggering to a recovering individual and could

encourage mimicry (Aardoom et al. 2014).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. A number of high-profile YouTuber vegans who, at the time of data collection

had not disclosed eating disorder pasts, have since disclosed through eating

disorder story videos. This includes popular YouTuber Elise from Raw

Alignment (a raw vegan), High Carb Hannah (a HCLF vegan), and Kate

Flowers (a raw vegan).

2. It is an oversimplification to say that eating disorders are a white women’s

illness. While indeed, many more white women than other groups are

diagnosed, particularly with anorexia, in the U.S. (Mansuri, Z., M. Rathod, P.

Bansal, U. Mansuri, and S. Shambhu. 2016. “Trends of Hospitalization for

Anorexia Nervosa in USA: A Nationwide Analysis.” European Psychiatry

33:S164.), the racial gap is increasingly understood to be resulting not from

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inherent susceptibility to eating disorders, but from a lack of culturally

available frames for understanding the eating disorders of non-white

individuals, especially black/African American women in the U.S. For a more

thorough treatment of this discussion, read Beaubeouf-Lafontant’s “Strong

and Large Black Women? Exploring Relationships between Deviant

Womanhood and Weight” (2003).

3. While it is impossible to truly glean one’s class through video or blog content

alone, due to the extensive descriptions of eating disorder treatments and

, and the expensive diet lifestyles undergone by these individuals,

one can assume a relative ability in class/wealth for the purposes of this

analysis.

4. This analysis has presumed a gender binary, which is in itself problematic, for

it further excludes the potential for nonbinary gendered voices to be included

in the discussions of the vegan recovery community; however, given the

current sample, in which no individuals identified themselves as transgender

or gender nonbinary, and given an overall lack of research about nonbinary

people with eating disorders, we are left with a limited set of options for

discussing gender in this context. Further research is required to determine the

experiences of nonbinary people with eating disorders, who are recovering,

and who are recovering with vegan diets.

5. Eating disorders are usually depicted as feminine illnesses; this may lead to a

reluctance among eating disordered men to seek treatment, in accordance with

misogynic undertones of illness differentiation. For evidence of a gendered

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divide, review Shingleton et al. 2015, “Gender Differences in Clinical Trials

of Binge Eating Disorder: An Analysis of Aggregated Data.” Journal of

Consulting and Clinical Psychology 83(2):382–86.

6. It is unique that men would be stigmatized for their gender—in dominant

culture, it is the reverse. Therefore we might trouble the assumption that what

they experience is true ‘stigmatization.’

CONCLUSION

1. For reference, review Black Hawk Hancock’s “Learning How to Make Life

Swing” (2007). He describes his own engagement with carnal sociology and

embodied ethnography.

2. Monomeals, practiced mostly by the HCLF vegans, consist of one type of fruit

eaten in mass quantity. For example, a monomeal might consist of several

pints of strawberries consumed on their own. It is believed by community

members that consuming monomeals benefits health.

3. Banana islands, described by Freelee the Banana girl and other fruitarians,

refers to the dietary practice of consuming nothing by bananas for extended

periods of time. This is believed to “detox” the body and to promote physical

and spiritual healing. Freelee and other high-profile fruitarians describe

embarking on month-long banana islands.

4. Women also face stigma by nature of being online to begin with (Sobieraj

2017)—stating that vegan, eating disordered men face a unique breed of

stigma in this case intends by no means to obscure this reality.

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