Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
The piety of optimization: The rhetoric of health awareness in ParticipACTION and Fitbit
Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine ( IF 1.9 ) Pub Date : 2021-02-04 , DOI: 10.1177/1363459320988886
Loren Gaudet 1
Affiliation  

This article uses the tools of rhetorical study to investigate how health awareness, as both a concept and a set of beliefs that reinforce ideals of health, permeates everyday life and affects ways of being. I explore how health awareness is communicated through both public health and commercial marketing campaigns, and argue that as the sources of information change, so too do the ideas of health that we are asked to be aware of. Through an analysis of the websites of ParticipACTION, a publicly funded health and fitness campaign, and Fitbit, a corporation that produces wearable technologies, I show that these organizations provide their audiences with instructions for self-conduct in the pursuit of health through the piety that time is a resource to be managed. Through this piety, ParticipACTION and Fitbit’s websites each reify an altar of health where health is represented as a socially and physically fitter (optimized) self, always just out of reach and attainable in the future. I conclude with a call for critical descriptions of health awareness to move beyond the explanatory power of neoliberalization of health, and turn to the work of Rachel Sanders, Annmarie Mol, and Donna Haraway as possible avenues for resisting optimization.



中文翻译:

优化的虔诚:ParticipACTION与Fitbit的健康意识说辞

本文使用修辞研究的工具来调查健康意识,作为一个概念和一套强化健康理想的信念,如何渗透日常生活并影响存在方式。我探讨了如何通过公共卫生和商业营销活动来传播健康意识,并认为随着信息来源的变化,我们被要求了解的健康理念也会发生变化。通过对公共资助的健康和健身运动 ParticipACTION 和生产可穿戴技术的公司 Fitbit 的网站的分析,我表明这些组织通过虔诚的态度为他们的受众提供了追求健康的自我行为指导时间是一种需要管理的资源。通过这种虔诚,ParticipACTION 和 Fitbit 的网站各自具体化了一个健康的祭坛,在这里,健康被表示为社会和身体上更健康(优化)的自我,永远遥不可及,但在未来可以实现。最后,我呼吁对健康意识进行批判性描述,以超越健康新自由主义化的解释力,并将 Rachel Sanders、Annmarie Mol 和 Donna Haraway 的工作作为抵制优化的可能途径。

更新日期:2021-02-05
down
wechat
bug