White Girls, Eating Disorders and Tumblr: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls Meets Audre Lorde and Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

A site of increasing inspection, criticism, and attention, young adult literature has the power to shape eras of adolescent life. This paper centres Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Wintergirls (2009) as a case study for representations of disordered eating in literature aimed at young cis–women from the white, Western world. Specifically, I deconstruct the poetics of food and eating as consumed by the young readers of Wintergirls, alongside analyses of images from the oft–forgotten era of “pro–ana” Tumblr communities. By putting Anderson’s poetics in conversation with, for example, the haptic, sensory language of consumption in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Valerie Loichot’s analysis of Caribbean writer and poet Edwidge
Danticat, I aim to explore not only the deep relationship between language and eating, but also the connections between eating and pleasure, and between food and diaspora. To examine the phenomenon of American YA literature’s preoccupation with adolescent disordered eating and the suffering body, I employ Sabrina Strings’ study, Fearing the Black Body: A History of Fatphobia. The Western literary canon neither centres on the role of pleasure in eating nor acknowledges the role that food can play in repairing the harms of diaspora. In an effort to provide a transversal analysis of the adolescent disordered eater from the Western world, the pan–Africanist Black American author, and both visual and historical research on American attitudes toward the body, I argue that Loichot’s analysis of Danticat’s oeuvre holds true regarding food as a language, social binder, and symbolic tool for community–building-an ethic greatly lacking in contemporary American society.