Gender, Health, and Popular Culture

Description

Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Today, genuine or self-styled experts—from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers—offer advice on achieving optimal health.

Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in Victorian Australia and Cold War America, menstruation films, Canadian abortion tourism, the Pap smear, the Body Worlds exhibition, and fat liberation. Masculinity is explored among drunkards in antebellum Philadelphia and family memoirs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Seemingly objective public health advisories are shown to be as influenced by commercial interests, class, gender, and other social differentiations as marketing approaches are, and the message presented is mediated to varying degrees by those receiving it.

This book will be of interest to scholars in women’s studies, health studies, marketing, media studies, social history and anthropology, and popular culture.

Sujets

• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554582532
• Langue: English

Extrait

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canadathrough its Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gender, health, and popular culture: historical perspectives / Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, editor.
Includes index.
Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55458-217-4
 
1. Human body—Social aspects—History. 2. Body image—Social aspects—History. 3. Women—Health and hygiene—Sociological aspects. 4. Health—Social aspects—History. I. Warsh, CherylLynn Krasnick, [date]
 
GN298. G45 2011 306.461 C2010-905610-8
 
Electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55458-248-8 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-55458-253-2 (EPUB)
 
1. Human body—Social aspects—History. 2. Body image—Social aspects—History. 3. Women—Health and hygiene—Sociological aspects. 4. Health—Social aspects—History. I. Warsh, CherylLynn Krasnick, [date]
 
GN298. G45 2011a 306.461 C2010-905611-6
 

© 2011 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
 
Cover photo by Dodeskaden / iStockphoto. Cover design by Martyn Scholl. Text design by AngelaBooth Malleau.
 
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in thispublication and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions calledto the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in anyform or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from TheCanadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction (Cheryl Krasnick Warsh)
I: The Transmission of Health Information
Confined: Constructions of Childbirth in Popular and Elite Medical Culture in Late-Nineteenth- Century Australia (Lisa Featherstone)
Eating for Two: Shaping Mothers’ Figures and Babies’ Futures in Modern American Culture (Lisa Forman Cody)
Advice to Adolescents: Menstrual Health and Menstrual Education Films, 1946–1982 (Sharra L. Vostral)
Controlling Conception: Images of Women, Safety, Sexuality, and the Pill in the Sixties (Heather Molyneaux)
All Aboard? Canadian Women’s Abortion Tourism, 1960–1980 (Christabelle Sethna)
Controlling Cervical Cancer from Screening to Vaccinations: An American Perspective (Kirsten E. Gardner)
The Challenge of Developing and Publicizing Cervical Cancer Screening Programs: A Canadian Perspective (Mandy Hadenko)
II: Popular Representations of the Body in Sickness and Health
Hideous Monsters before the Eye: Delirium tremens and Manhood in Antebellum Philadelphia (Ric N. Caric)
From La Bambola to a Toronto Striptease: Drawing Out Public Consent to Gender Differentiation with Anatomical Material (Annette Burfoot)
Let Me Hear Your Body Talk: Aerobics for Fat Women Only, 1981–1985 (Jenny Ellison)
“The Closest Thing to Perfect”: Celebrity and the Body Politics of Jamie Lee Curtis (Christina Burr)
“Every Generation Has Its War”: Representations of Gay Men with Aids and Their Parents in the United States, 1983–1993 (Heather Murray)
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Back cover
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
Cheryl Krasnick Warsh
 
H ealth is a gendered concept in Western cultures. 1  The healthy man isstrong, assertive, tolerant, moderate in his appetites, hard-working,adventurous, responsible, and wise. The healthy woman is attractive, youthful-looking, self-sacrificing, empathetic, consciously limiting her appetites,hard-working, careful, mindful of the needs of her loved ones and others inher social orbit, and constantly seeking the wise advice of others to improvethe appearance and health of herself and her family. This advice—wise orotherwise—has been liberally offered for at least 150 years by traditionalsources like older family members and friends, professional channels suchas physicians and other “experts,” and newer venues, including newspapers,advertisements, magazines, exhibits, lectures, websites, and other mass media.
This collection investigates the presentation and reception of genderedconcepts of health from two perspectives. In both perspectives, conceptsof health and gender are viewed through the lens of popular culture. Thefirst section concerns the transmission of health information to womenfor their own consumption and in their customary role as family healers.This information was usually offered by public health officials, physicians,governments, and other authority figures, but also by corporations andadvertisers to sell products as well as to promote healthy lifestyles. The secondsection is more theoretical in nature: gendered concepts of health weretransmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and malebodies. These ideal bodies reflected dominant socio-economic and geopoliticalideologies: they were overwhelmingly white, young, slim, prosperous, andfree of disabilities. The prevailing discourse, therefore, assumed a racialized whiteness, and the Others, if cited at all, were presented in opposition to andconfirmation of the dominant/healthy ideal. A persistent bombardment ofsimilar images through a variety of media—fine art, advertising, movies,billboards, television, and magazines—resulted in the absorption of universalstandards of beauty and health, and in generalized desires to achieve them.
Both sections have been influenced by the theoretical perspectives that havefallen under the rubric of cultural studies, perspectives that have, since the1980s, cast a giant shadow not only upon literary studies, sociology and culturalanthropology, and social history but also upon the study of women and gender,and, more recently, the study of the socio-cultural and historical determinantsof health. As will be shown in these chapters, expert advice concerning healthis proffered within an ideological framework. Ideology is a concept that hasbeen employed in explaining the maintenance of power relations beyond class.Feminist theorists describe patriarchal ideology as a tool in the concealmentand distortion of gender relations. Studies in popular culture outline various“ideological forms,” such as television programming, fiction, or popularmusic, as texts that “always present a particular image of the world.” 2
Two influential definitions of ideology stress the way in which weunconsciously experience it. Roland Barthes considered “myth” (ideology)to operate at “the level of connotations… that texts and practices carry.”Barthes’s insight, which is especially relevant to these chapters, was thatmyth is “the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partialand particular: an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanlymade) as something which is natural (i.e. just existing).” 3  Post-structuraltheorists, such as Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Derrida, introduced theconcept of discourse; 4  all texts and actions are seen by post-structuralists asnot having inherent meaning but a meaning that is “articulated” within acertain set of circumstances and power relationships. Derrida emphasizesthe power relationships that underlie binary oppositions such as black andwhite, sickness and health, female and male, in that these oppositions arenever equal but reflect the domination of one over the other. 5  Finally, thework of Michel Foucault has been extremely influential in interpretations ofhow the production, transmission, and acceptance of knowledge—throughcourts, medical schools, academic institutions, and the media—is subjectto the operation of power structures. Within the context of these chapters,medical discourses concerning what is “healthful” behaviour for women andmen are underwritten by what is considered “acceptable” behaviour. Sexualityand reproduction are highlighted because, as Foucault noted, the Victoriandiscourse over sexuality re-invented sexuality as a construct with its binary oppositions of what constitutes male and female, normal and abnormalsexual expression, and created the corresponding regulatory experts andagencies, such as asylums and reformatories, to deal with the transgressors. 6
To be beautiful is to be healthy: this is an axiom of Western cultures.“Health and Beauty” remains a popular section in newspapers and magazines,a section that is mostly female-oriented. Yet the achievement of the latter isoften at the cost of the former. Throughout the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, and continuing today, standards of beauty that were difficult, ifnot impossible, for most women to adhere to have left many uncomfortable,debilitated, deformed, or even dead from the attempt. Victorian womenavoided protein and laced their corsets tightly to fit into their gowns; twenties“flappers