Gender, health, and popular culture : historical perspectives /
edited by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh.
- Waterloo, Ont. : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, c2011.
- xvii, 308 p. : ill. ;
Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-295) and index.
Introduction / Cheryl Krasnick Warsh -- I : The transmission of health information. Confined : constructions of childbirth in popular and elite medical culture in late-nineteenth-century Australia / Lisa Featherstone -- Eating for two : shaping mothers' figures and babies' futures in modern American culture / Lisa Forman Cody -- Advice to adolescents : menstrual health and menstrual education films, 1946-1982 / Sharra L. Vostral -- Controlling conception : images of women, safety, sexuality and the Pill in the sixties / Heather Molyneaux -- All aboard? : Canadian women's abortion tourism, 1960-1980 / Christabelle Sethna -- Controlling cervical cancer from screening to vaccinations : an American perspective / Kirsten E. Gardner -- The challenge of developing and publicizing cervical cancer screening programs : a Canadian perspective / Mandy Hadenko -- II: Popular representations of the body in sickness and health. Hideous monsters before the eye : delirium tremens and manhood in antebellum Philadelphia / Ric N. Caric -- From La Bambola to a Toronto striptease : drawing out public consent to gender differentiation with anatomical materials / Annette Burfoot -- Let me hear your body talk : aerobics for fat women only, 1981-1985 / Jenny Ellison -- "The closest thing to perfect" : celebrity and the body politics of Jamie Lee Curtis / Christina Burr -- "Every generation has its war" : representations of gay men with AIDS and their parents in the United States, 1983-1993 / Heather Murray.
Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures, customarily associated with strength in men and beauty in women. Educated or self-styled experts, ranging from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers, offer advice on achieving optimal health. Historically, gendered concepts of health were transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, with media images resulting in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in Victorian Australia and Cold War America, menstruation films, Canadian abortion tourism, the Pap smear, the Body Worlds exhibition, and fat liberation. Masculinity is explored among drunkards in antebellum Philadelphia and family memoirs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Seemingly objective public health advisories are shown to be as influenced by commercial interests, class, gender, and other social differentiations as marketing approaches, and the message presented is mediated to varying degrees by those receiving it. This book will be of interest to scholars in womens studies, health studies, marketing, media studies, social history and anthropology, and popular culture.