Confession and Branding of Anorexia and Bulimia in My Eating Disorder Story YouTube Videos

Abstract

When Googled “My Eating Disorder Story YouTube”, over 4,000,000 million results come up, depicting the growing popularity of the videos. The My Eating Disorder Story genre on YouTube draws attention to the self and the act of confession by making the face the central focus of the screen, and uses scrolling text, photographs, editing, and music to dramatize and create suspense regarding the words of confession. The videos’ creators are engrossed in the essentialist ideology and culture of branding on YouTube. YouTube is a business that profits from the success of YouTube personalities and the more popular a personality the more revenue YouTube will earn from views and advertisements. Because YouTube is about the “You” of the video by showing the “You” through the actual appearance of the YouTuber in the video or the appearance of the YouTuber through the personality of the videos and channel, YouTube is then about creating a specific personality or brand where the self is what is branded and sold to the public. The brands or narratives on eating disorder are presented in identical ways, whether consciously or unconsciously by the YouTubers, which then presents disordered eating in an essentialist way and therefore brand. By presenting the stories in an essentialist way or brand the similar narratives of disordered eating suggest that there is one way to tell the story of one’s eating disorder, imposing a truth in what it means to be anorexic and how one chronicles that experience. This paper will argue that through the aesthetics and content of the videos the My Eating Disorder Story videos are acts of confession that essentialize and brand disordered eating into a singular experience that then marks the uploader of the video themselves as subjects to disordered eating, branding, and YouTube.

Keywords

• YouTube
• anorexia
• branding
• confession
• shame