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Online Stigma Resistance in the Pro-Ana Community

Media scholars often use concepts from Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to study online communities of stigmatized individuals as “backstages,” spaces where members take refuge from social disapproval. In this study, I extend this view through an examination of in-depth interviews with bloggers from the “pro-ana” community, an online community for people with eating disorders. To explore how this community uses an online environment that is both anonymous and public, I fuse Goffman’s ideas about identity performance and stigma with more recent theories about boundary maintenance. In-depth interviews with “pro-ana” bloggers reveal that to protect this virtual group and resist stigmas associated both with their illness and with their online presence, they construct their own norms and rules in the online realm, and discipline and eject members deemed to be out-group.