In this article, the authors trace the emergence of an institutional discourse of ethical research and interrogate its effects in constituting what ethical research is taken to be and how ethical researchers are configured. They illuminate the dissonance between this regime of truth and research practice and the implications for the injunction to respect others, illustrating their case with instances from their interview study with anorexic teenage girls. The authors propose that conceptualising the regulation of research ethics as an institutional discourse opens up the possibility for asserting counterdiscourses that place relational ethics at the center of moral decision making in research. (Contains 4 notes.)