Feeling Healthy: Media, Affect, and the Governance of Health

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of media technologies in the emergence of new forms of health governance over the course of the past century. Even as “feeling healthy” has become a desirable affective state associated with wholeness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, discourses and practices of health continue to serve as the basis for regulating race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. In chapters on WWI-era sex hygiene films, midcentury women’s televised fitness programs, 1980s’ safer sex videos created by gay and lesbian AIDS activists, and contemporary interactive technologies designed to confront the obesity “epidemic,” I demonstrate how media technologies have enabled the management of bodies and populations by linking new techniques of health governance to individual desires to feel better. While important historical and sociological studies of health and medicine have brought attention to the role of public health in regulating race, gender, and sexuality, this work has rarely considered the relationship between popular media in not only reflecting but actively shaping individuals and populations around practices of health. I suggest that we need to look beyond institutional histories of public health as a site of discipline to explore the role of film, television, video, and new media in the emergence of what I call the “affective governance” of health: a system of biopolitical regulation that appeals to individuals’ desires for their own well-being, producing affective investments in normative practices of “healthy living.” Intervening in a larger set of theoretical and political debates that cross disciplinary boundaries to ask what makes a “livable life,” this project questions what is at stake in the pursuit of health as a normative ideal. I argue that “health” has historically been promoted as the condition of possibility for greater freedom, happiness, and fulfillment at the same time that it justifies ever more insidious forms of surveillance and control.