Choosing recovery: postfeminist empowerment and the embodied self-brand

ABSTRACT

This paper examines “recovery vlogging” as a mode of postfeminist empowerment, and considers how the public disclosure of one’s recovery from an eating disorder can serve to foster community, while also putting the onus on the individual. Understanding the recovery community as it has emerged on social media platforms helps to unravel the ways in which young women leverage online spaces to support one another, while also navigating the contradictory demands of neoliberal brand culture. Through a case study of YouTuber Jen Brett, a Canadian recovery vlogger, this paper asks: What is at stake as individuals continue to make their bodies their brands? While Brett inspires her viewers to face their fear foods, accept their bodies, and quiet the voices of their disorders, her content still relies on the regular surveillance of her food and her body. As such, progress becomes valuable only insofar as it is visible, measurable, and linear. When recovery is entwined in self-branding and framed as something that can be achieved through self-determination, self-discipline, and choice, we risk obscuring the need to accept, to connect, and to heal.

KEYWORDS:

• YouTube
• content creation
• recovery
• eating disorders
• post-feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Full Day of Eating” videos.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Lee Swan

Anna Lee Swan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Her work is rooted in critical and feminist methodologies and examines the transnational flows of media and immaterial labor in digital spaces. Her work has been published in Communication, Culture, & Critique, and she is currently working on her dissertation research on “foreign” content creators in South Korea. E-mail: [email protected]