"Fifty-two easy steps to great health": representations of health in English-Canadian women's magazines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation I examine representations of health in Chatelaine, Canadian Living and Homemaker's magazines published between 1997 and 2000 to understand how these "handbooks on femininity" define health issues for their readers. I argue that by examining health articles discursively, the rules, patterns and structures which create and privilege certain definitions and meanings over others can be scrutinized to identify the social meanings about women and health created by the magazines. However, I also assert that this dissertation is a critical reading of texts within a specified historical/social context with an understanding that the subjectivities and forms of governance constituted in the discourse are taken up by individuals with various degrees of acceptance, negotiation and resistance. I found that women's magazines fulfilled their self-defined service mission by continually asserting their expertise and authority in health matters and their role in educating women about the latest health information. Reflecting and reinforcing the discourse of healthism, the articles consistently present health as an important individual responsibility and a moral imperative, to be pursued through continual self-assessment and acquisition of information, and by practicing the "prescriptions for healthy living" provided by the magazines. This discourse creates an 'entrepreneurial' subject position for women, meaning one's identity as a rational health-seeking subject is an on-going project requiring particular forms of self-discipline and self-surveillance. The moral goodness of healthist subjects is further reinforced through depictions of irrational, unhealthy others who lack the valued qualities of self-control and personal determination---women who risk illness, disability and disease through their failure to engage in the healthist prescriptions provided by the magazines. These women are portrayed as requiring further education and encouragement in health matters, and are viewed as irresponsible citizens for failing to follow healthist dictates. These representations of health also silenced a number of important issues including recognition of the structural determinants of health and the work of feminist/political groups. Also, women's magazines assume a shared "woman's experience" reinforcing dominant/ideal notions of femininity which fail to address the diversity of women's experiences and the complexity of women's lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".