Radio Food Disorder: The Conversational Constitution of Eating Disorders in Radio Phone-ins

This paper focusses on the discursive practices through which agency is constituted in accounts of disordered eating within a corpus of UK radio phone-ins and discussions recorded between 2004-2007. Data includes a range of participants with eating disorders as well as various professionals and radio hosts. The paper focusses on how accountability for problematic eating behaviours is negotiated, focussing particularly on constructions of 'illness'. Discursive psychology is drawn upon to explore the way 'psychologising' (producing psychological characteristics or dispositions) is done using technical or medical language; how the concept of 'illness' is made relevant and negotiated in talk using technical or lay psychological notions; and how constructions Of 'illness' are fitted into narratives to reassign agency from the individual to the eating disorder. Analysis illustrates that participants frequently orient to behaviour in pathologised ways, thereby reducing their own accountability, but are still faced with a dilemma of moral blame as pathology is located within the individual. The analysis then demonstrates how this moral accountability is attended to by shifting agency from the person to the 'disorder', using various grammatical and metaphorical practices. This analysis is used to Support a broader consideration of the way major eating disorders appear in an important public forum. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley &, Sons, Ltd.