This project aims at exploring the metaphorical imagery that hides in the folds of anorexia nervosa (henceforth AN) and to provide a digest of its most frequent metaphorical conceptualizations.
AN is a psychopathological disorder characterized by a fluctuant bodily perception usually reinforced by dysfunctional food routines. At the psychological level, inflexible thinking, rigid behavior, and disconnection from bodily experience represent core features of the disorder. Patients are also characterized by a strong sensitivity to praise, anxiety, and perfectionism.
Over the last years, the most virtual side of AN has been unveiled by the alarming proliferation of blogs and social networks in which pro-ana communities (i.e., web-based groups of anorexic or aspiring anorexic users) promote the maintenance of their eating disorder.
We aim at defining the linguistic profile of pro-ana communities by starting from those metaphors used to narrate these individuals’ eating disorders and bodily images. In particular, we will investigate the phenomenon of concretized metaphors (Skårderud, 2007), i.e., concretistic uses of words in which desymbolized bodily associations are experienced in terms of concrete reality (Enckell, 2002).
In AN, concretized metaphors seem to result from the direct correlation between the concreteness of symptoms and the reduced capacity of making mental representations (Bates, 2015).
From a methodological perspective, we will build a balanced resource of texts produced by online pro-ana communities, and we will proceed with a topic modeling analysis and the qualitative annotation of the data. The domains more frequently recurrent will be identified and evaluated according to more general conceptual metaphors in literature.