Eating our words: How museum visitors and a sample of women narratively react to and interpret Lauren Greenfield's 'THIN'

The fulcrum of this dissertation is the exhibition, THIN---a collection of photography from the renowned chronicler of girl culture, Lauren Greenfield. THIN is a powerful assemblage of Greenfield's work, compiled while she documented the lives of in-patients at an eating disorder recovery facility. Greenfield spent over six months at the Renfrew Center, earning the trust of the hospitalized women, so that she could tell their stories through photography and shed light on the deadly mental diseases that are eating disorders. THIN is a testimony to the struggles of these women as the exhibition details their experiences. Greenfield includes the women's narratives as didactic labels for THIN and, in this way, this dissertation mirrors the exhibition by using narrative and auto-ethnography as research methods.;In the first part of this dissertation, I examine how visitors experience THIN at the University of Notre Dame and at Smith College, two locations where the exhibit was displayed. At each site, the public was encouraged to write comments about THIN in a logbook. I analyzed each logbook, looking specifically at visitors' remarks on the socially educative nature of THIN and in how community learning was a part of the exhibition. I also write, auto-ethnographically, about my experience as a witness and participant in the two different stagings of THIN at Notre Dame and Smith. In my narrative writing, I continue to ask how these university art museums have encouraged or discouraged social education and community learning.;Part Two of this dissertation is a more personal examination of THIN's impact. With the help of nine other women and myself, we write our narrative interpretations of three works of art from THIN. Using the semiotic tools of denotation and connotation, we express what we see versus what we know by looking at the photos, which have been stripped of their explanatory labeling. The result is a blank photo that is ripe for our own decoding. Through these narratives, I was able to explore how THIN was or was not an idiomatic exhibition and could generalize about how women empathize with the images.;Throughout the dissertation, I suggest ways that museums and art educators might make use of this study of THIN and eating disorder photography. My emphasis on socially just education and on community learning is food for thought when considering how we can educate our students and the public about the danger of eating disorders and how to encourage positive body image.