‘What eating disorders are really like’ - Dynamics of lived experience and repetitive aesthetics on TikTok

This article presents a detailed qualitative content analysis of eating disorder and recovery videos on TikTok which show young women who proclaim to raise awareness or depict the recovery process. We pay particular attention to aspects of form and content and TikTok's affordances in relation to them. We argue that allegedly showing what an eating disorder and recovery are ‘really like’ is in tension with an aestheticisation of the female body and eating disorders that is present in the videos. While TikTok has been described by scholars as a memetic and viral platform, this aestheticisation points to a tension of authentic self-expression, complexities around body image and memetic visibility. We conclude that the platform is characterised by repetition and imitation, but those aspects are secondary as they relate to struggles linked to eating disorders themselves and their representation rather than primary virality or the memetic.