The Cute, The Bold and the Beautiful: Popular Discourse and Medicalization of Everyday Experience

Abstract

This study examines how the discourses on health that appears on popular health magazines published in the regional language of Malayalam effectuate the ways in which individuals govern their own body.  The study specifically problematizes how these discourses construct ideal bodies of a ‘child’, ’men’ and ‘women’. Whether its men, woman or child, it is risk which was effectively communicated through these discourses. To reduce the potential risk of getting sick in the future, the popular magazines prescribe dietary practices, fitness programs, diagnostic techniques, medicines or Yoga. They also brought in the everyday life experiences of children that were never matters of medical science before, like how to bathe, how to brush, when to smile, when to stand on their own, when to study and how to study, to the domain of medical consultation.  I have also argued that the health magazine is increasingly becoming a site for marketing not just biomedical equipment and its paraphernalia but also an array of products like artificially concentrated food, toiletries, cosmetics, fitness-objects and so on. Though these products are outcomes of politically designed market centered research, it is presented as a result of scientific research and essential for the advancement for the wellbeing of people. Moreover, these magazines help in marketing ‘risk’ and selling healthy lifestyles far more effectively than the health educators.