ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a theoretical investigation for the understanding of anorexia as a social phenomenon, starting with a historical and sociological approach. Waller and Shaw propose three explanatory theories drawn from social psychology: social identity theory, social learning theory and social comparison. The chapter presents feminist perspectives about body, identity and eating disorders. It proposes an empirical analysis of media representations of anorexia nervosa in Romania on a corpus of 102 online press articles selected from the news aggregator www.ziare.com www.ziare.com covering a period of seven years from 2007 to 2014. Within the selected corpus of articles, the Romanian media obviously give the largest space to the theme of anorexia in connection with international or national famous persons. The medical discourse is also well represented. For further investigation, a discursive framework could better show the articulation of the media representations and social constructions of anorexia nervosa as eating disorder and as media glamour themes.
