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The purpose of this paper is to analyse pro-anorexia from a discursive, metaphorical standpoint in order to enable an understanding of how pro-anorexia functions as political resistance through technological bodies.

Techno-metaphor is used to reveal how pro-anorexic communities online function through technology.

Six techno-metaphors work to construct pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment through technology. This pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment offers relief from the tensions of patriarchal femininity and provides control over troublesome embodiment. Technology enables women experiencing anorexia to resist the dominant interpretations of their lived experience that subjugate them.

This research offers an understanding of pro-anorexia as resistance to intolerable femininity and reconstructed female bodies through technology. By exploiting technological political space, pro-anorexics are claiming positions and forms of embodiment previously off-limits to women and their biological bodies.

Pro‐eating disorder websites are online communities of individuals who do not consider eating disorders to be serious mental illnesses requiring treatment. People visit these websites to meet other like‐minded individuals, to share tips and tricks on how to lose weight and how to otherwise maintain the symptomatology of the disorder. This paper aims to review what is actually known about the risks associated with visiting these websites and provides recommendations for dealing with pro‐eating disorder material.

Relevant peer‐reviewed papers were located by means of searching three online journal databases (SCOPUS, PubMed, Web of Knowledge), and through carrying out reference checking. Key words for the search were: pro‐anorexia, pro‐ana, pro‐bulimia, pro‐mia and pro‐eating disorders.

Pro eating disorder websites are common and visited by a significant proportion of patients with eating disorders and non‐patients. The sites may be perceived beneficial, as they provide support and a sense of community. Although there is evidence for the harmfulness of pro‐eating disorder content on the internet, there is no clear indication that such sites promote the development or maintenance of eating disorders. Therefore, banning pro eating disorder websites seems inappropriate and unpractical, but measures for web‐hosting companies should be in place allowing them to remove such content. Instead, bodies creating alternative websites for young people should be supported. Clinicians and parents should be made aware of the existence of pro eating disorder websites and how to deal with them.

This paper provides an overview of the research in this field and discusses possible ways in which health professionals and the general public may respond to the existence of these web sites.

Family, media and peer pressure seem to influence adolescent development activating the perception and internalisation of thin ideals that may trigger dieting, bingeing and other self-harming disorders. The proliferation of problematic online content consumed and produced by young people, such as in the case of pro-anorexic web sites, seem to worry not only parents but also young people. The aim of this work is to analyse content produced by a group of Portuguese speaking pro-anorexic adolescents in order to better understand how social and cultural pressures may influence their disruptive behaviours and how they seem to cope with them.

A qualitative exploratory content analysis examined 11 Portuguese-speaking blogs written by teenagers (boys and girls) between 13 and 19 years old who use these environments to validate their pro-anorexic lifestyle, share body and image issues or search for diets and support from like-minded others.

Blogs content analysis suggest that peer pressure, need for acceptance, and conflicts with parents denote the power of subliminal messages, revealing that, even at very young ages, stereotypical messages may be easily understood and internalised. The authors organised the collected evidence into three categories: common shared content found in the pro-anorexic blogs; celebrities and fashion models that young people worship as thinspiration; how youth deal with parental, peer and social and cultural pressures.

Although this is a very small group of blogs, this work offers a research contribution about pro-anorexic dangerous content consumed, produced and disseminated online by Portuguese speaking young people. This exploratory study is a starting point for further research. This is a field the authors intend to explore deeply using more child centred and participative research techniques in order to fully understand the issues at stake and to get the actual young people's point of view and experiences.

Provisional findings trigger the authors' concern and scientific interest in learning more about pro-anorexic and other self-harming disruptive online content produced and consumed by young people. With this study they aim to help to raise awareness among parents, caregivers and teachers about problematic eating and self-harming contents as they may affect adolescent development and well-being.

This study illustrates how youth and young adults use boundary-making processes to create a regulated community online.

Ethnographic methods are used to compare deviance models of internet participation with work on digital youth culture.

This paper finds that digital youth draw boundaries around three categories of participation (n00bs, trolls, and idols) to identify new people who need help, ward off bullies, and uphold community ideals.

Contrary to deviance perspectives, this study finds that digital youth use boundary-making processes to cultivate a civil online community.

Paul J. Bryan is currently employed with Bromley Communications, the largest U.S. advertising agency with a focus on the Hispanic consumer. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1996, where he studied under Richard J. Harris and Juanita M. Firestone.

Over the last decade, there has been a substantial rise in the popularity of tattooing in the UK, and a subsequent increase in tattooed female bodies. As explored by Walter (2010), key for the women of today is that they have a choice, to conform to stereotypical constructions of femininity, or resist them. However, tension lies in the ways that these choices are already constrained by socially imposed boundaries. In exploring constructions of tattooed female bodies, a stratified sample of 14 tattooed women were interviewed, with the transcripts being analysed using a discursive–narrative approach. Reflexivity forms a key part of the analysis, as I research a tattooed woman, with some of the insider–outsider intersections informing the analysis. Here, the discourse of unwritten rules and social norms is explored, with a specific focus on how tattooed women construct ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices in respect to the tattoos they and others get, the expectation and the normalisation of the pain of getting and having a tattoo, and finally, the generational difference in respect to how tattoos are accepted and understood.