From Suet Pudding to Superhero: Representations of Men’s Health for Women

Abstract

Men’s health has been receiving increasing attention in recent years, both in the media and in academic literature. In February 1998 a British Sunday newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, ran a three-week special feature on ‘A woman’s guide to men’s health’. Linguistic representations of health in popular media are revealing of social concerns regarding both the control of health and health care, therefore we critically analysed these texts using post-structuralist, discourse analytic techniques. Men’s health was constructed as ‘in crisis’ and men tended to be aligned with culture (and work) and women with nature (and health). Paradoxically, certain traditional gender dichotomies were both challenged and reinforced within the texts. However, within the five patterns of discourse we identified (men’s health in crisis, woman as nature/man as culture, the risk-taking superhero, man as infant and health for productivity), women’s current position in society was negatively portrayed and functioned to persuade women that it is in their interests to be responsible for men’s health, although without taking overt control. We conclude that the main representations of men’s health for women in this series reinforce unequal social relations which does little to benefit women or men.

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