"Nothing Makes Me Hate Myself More Than a Skinny White Person on Tumblr": Evaluating Exclusionary Ideals and Racial Discimination in Online Pro-Eating-Disorder Communities

Pro-eating-disorder internet communities extend hegemonic standards of health, beauty, and fatness to inform their cultural ideals, producing a racialized subculture in which marginalized communities are stereotyped and excluded. I present qualitative content and discourse analyses of pro-ED communities on Tumblr, TikTok, X, and Facebook to examine how they reproduce the domination of racialized bodies, providing serious health risks to marginalized users. BIPOC are predominantly excluded from pro-ED communities, lacking representation or being displayed in explicitly discriminatory presentations. The primary pro-ED ideals are: whiteness, youthfulness, sickness, and emaciation. These exclusionary ideals, reinforcing class distinctions, are also evidenced by the production of idealized subject positions that are informed by racial hierarchies: The Girl Who Has It All, The Beautiful Bag-of-Bones, The Phenom, and The Little Doll. Racialized users are found to internalize the thin white ideal and are enmeshed in moral health discourses which situate them as non-ideal biocitizens, reinforcing structural oppression.