Feminine Visions: Anorexia and Contagion in Pop Discourse

Immaculate consumption: negotiating the sex symbol in postfeminist celebrity culture

“…This paper has provided an analysis of women's negotiations of these new forms of (hyper)sexualised celebrity. Rather than the view of celebrity as contagious, one where women uncritically incorporate images of celebrity into their own psyche [as is often done in the case of anorexia (see Burke 2006)], this paper has presented a discursive analysis predicated on the assumption that women can make use of the figure of female celebrity, but only within wider social constraints and power constructs.…”

Women's Mental Health

“…Paradoxically, EDs have been sensationalized in both mass media and in critiques of media representations alike, portrayed as things that women can catch (Burke, 2006 ). A discourse of contagion is evident, too, in obesity epidemic rhetoric, wherein obesity is now understood as a communicable disease, out of control and rapidly spreading (Gard, 2011 ;Gard & Wright, 2005 ).…”

'@ the doctor's office': Pro-anorexia and the medical gaze

“…Eliza Burke (2006) elucidates these tensions further and in particular relation to the gaze. Exposing again the irrationality historically consigned to women and the female body, Burke suggests that 'contagion constructs the female gaze as a vulnerable and disorderly space which is not just 'suspectible to media images' (Probyn 1988: 203) but effectively prone to their embodiment' (318).…”