The Cancer on Your Coffee Table

Abstract

Women's magazines are a significant resource for information about women's health, but there are important variations in how they address health issues. A discourse analysis of 148 health articles and coverlines that appeared in nine top-circulating US women's magazines reveals how the magazines configure health problems of all types and how these messages engage with various feminist discourses. By looking at how agency, autonomy, and subjectivity are constructed, and identifying whether health problems and solutions are cast as individual or collective, the paper found reflections of postfeminist, liberal-feminist, and radical-feminist discourses. Findings indicate that health emerges as a metaphor for life in control through individual-oriented postfeminist wellness mandates, which dominate health coverage. Health as a decontextualized individual issue is especially suitable within the contexts of a consumerist reading environment and of the broader US neoliberal health policy. Alternately, women who suffer from disease confound the “will to health” and thus are allowed liberal-feminist agentic subjectivity and can question the system from a radical-feminist perspective. There are also a few examples of articles that deal with political health issues, reflecting radical-feminism. Text that engages with liberal- and radical-feminist discourses is much less prevalent than text that espouses postfeminist hyperindividualism.

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