Reader Letters to Women's Health Magazines

Abstract

Women's health magazines emerged as a new cultural industry at the end of the twentieth century, representing a commercial application of the “will to health” developing in neoliberal societies. This paper explores recurring discourses in reader letters published between 1997 and 2000 in two Australian health magazines targeting white, middle-class women. Both GoodMedicine and Nature & Health are engaged in a similar cultural politics, tempting their audiences away from the established women's lifestyle, beauty, and fashion publications by representing health magazine content as natural, practical, and generally “good for you.” Reader letters published in these magazines deploy the discourses of pragmatism, authenticity, and critical engagement as new cultural imperatives for performing the “normal, healthy woman.” However, they offer little recognition of the social determinants of health, or the connections between individual practice and global biopolitics. Reader letters inscribe both the successes and failures experienced in performing the “will to health,” and have considerable potential to facilitate new ways of negotiating these cultural imperatives.

Keywords:

• women's health magazines
• reader letters
• “will to health”
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Martin Holt, Maude Frances, and the two anonymous reviewers from Feminist Media Studies for their insightful advice on this manuscript. Many thanks also to Catherine Waldby and Philip Bell for their supervision of the original postgraduate research project from which this paper was developed.

Notes

1. GoodMedicine is currently published as Good Health & Medicine.