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.