Looking after yourself:
The cultural politics of health magazine reader letters
Christy Elizabeth Newman
A thesis submitted in fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
National Centre in HIV Social Research / School of Media and Communications
University of New South Wales
January 2004
Certificate of originality
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.
I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.
______
i Abstract
Health is an organising principle of contemporary neoliberal citizenship, particularly evident in the political rhetoric of individual responsibility articulated around the privatisation of public health and welfare systems. The popular culture of these political technologies is expressed via the discourses of self-help and self-care, exemplified by the commercial success of consumer health magazines, and the responsibilising strategies of public health interventions. This thesis investigates the contemporary function of health magazines by examining both the content and the context of reader letters published between 1997 and 2000 in six Sydney-based ‘commercial’ and ‘community’ publications, and incorporating interviews with magazine editors. The three commercial magazines address the health media ‘publics’ of women (Good Medicine), men (Men’s Health) and alternative health consumers (Nature & Health), whereas the three community publications address the ‘counterpublics’ of people living with HIV/AIDS (Talkabout), sex workers (The Professional) and illicit drug users (User’s News). Despite their different social contexts, these six magazines are all exemplary of the advanced liberal health imperatives of Australian popular culture, although the community magazines also empower audiences to facilitate social change. Reader letters are approached via the interpretive lens of cultural studies, in which the specific local characteristics of each text is seen to have wider global implications. Each magazine’s letters are positioned within a complex cultural, political and economic context that includes the rise of consumer culture, the social function of narrative disclosures, the increased validation of exhibitionism and the gendered politics of health and medicine. This research advocates for interdisciplinary dialogue between media/cultural studies, health/medical sociology and political theory, suggesting that health magazine reader letters can help to identify the role of popular and alternative media in constructing ideals of ‘citizenships’ within advanced liberalism.
ii Acknowledgements
The writing of this thesis has been a collaborative project in which I have been blessed to take part. My humble thanks go to:
My inspiring supervisors, Dr Catherine Waldby and Professor Philip Bell, who were consistently kind and rigorous with my endless drafts and made me believe that I was always capable of more each time I was certain I had reached my limit. Thanks also to Cathy and to Alec McHoul for vouching for me in my original application.
All of my long-suffering PhD peers, who have kept me sane, particularly Suzanne Bermingham, Gary Smith, Cari Egan, Adeline Lee, Kane Race and Abi Groves.
The National Centre in HIV Social Research, especially Maude Frances, Joseph Lopes, Jan Knapman, Sarah Behman, Paul Van de Ven and Susan Kippax, for providing workspaces to postgrads and making us feel like a valuable part of the team. Thanks also to Julie Miller of the School of Media and Communications.
Those who gave me the opportunity to be involved in research work during my PhD candidature including Patrick Rawstorne, Juliet Richters, Carla Treloar, Sean Slavin, Henrike Korner, Jeanne Ellard, Asha Persson, Helen Keane, Suzanne Fraser, Erica Southgate, Joseph Jewitt, Heather Worth, Nicole Moore and Martin Holt.
The organisations that agreed to take part in this research, specifically the NSW Users’ and AIDS Association, People Living with HIV/AIDS NSW, Sex Workers Outreach Project, Murdoch Magazines and AIDS Council of NSW.
Our Commonwealth Government for granting me the Australian Postgraduate Award that funded my 3.5 years of research and the University of New South Wales for funding my interstate and overseas travel to take part in international conferences. Also the UNSW Library, Learning Centre and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for providing essential training programs for postgraduates.
My wonderful family who are too plentiful to list but are represented by the key figures of Peter Newman, Jan Newman, Renee Newman-Storen, Samuel Newman, Beryl and Stuart Hogan, Betty Newman and all of my glorious aunts, uncles, cousins and once-twice-thrice removed relatives from the Newman, Hogan, Ingvarson, Mincham, McLaren, Curtin, Carolan and Bradley clans.
My always supportive if a little bewildered friends, especially Pip Newling, Melissa Burgess, Kamala Thomas, Merryn Leo, Mel Norton, Richard Crappsley, Sarah Barns, Angie Fielder, Jane Tsai, Martin Holt, Lena Caruso and Alan Webster.
And most important of all, the person who told me everyday that I could do it even if she didn’t understand exactly what it was that I did, my indefatigable and perpetually enchanting partner, Janna Richert.
iii Table of contents
Certificate of originality i Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of contents iv List of tables and figures vii
CHAPTER ONE 1
Introduction 1 Describing the magazines 4 Conclusion 14
CHAPTER TWO 16
Health, responsibility, and media publics 16 Introduction 16 Social research on health and the media 16 Notes on the cultural conditions of health magazines 19 1. The self-care obligations of advanced liberalism 19 2. The medicalisation of identity and sociality 23 3. The commodification of health and the marketisation of health care 25 4. The proliferation of alternative approaches to wellbeing 27 5. The women’s health movement and the responsibilising of gendered subjects 30 6. The HIV/AIDS epidemic and community health activism 33 7. The reification of pleasure and risk 37 8. The technological capacity to connect information and people 39 9. The public fascination with disclosure, confession and exhibitionism 41 10. The formation of (media) publics and counterpublics 43 Conclusion 46
CHAPTER THREE 48
Researching magazines and reader letters 48 Introduction 48 Collecting the material 48 Analysing the material 50 Content analysis 55 Context analysis 58
iv Evading the ‘problem’ of authenticity 61 Conclusion 62
CHAPTER FOUR 63
Entitled to write: A content analysis of letters, writers and genres 63 Introduction 63 Manifest content 63 Sample size and period 63 Letter word counts and editorial replies 65 Name and address formats 67 Latent content 69 Letter writers: Authorship entitlement claims 70 Claiming identity: The demographics of self-description 71 Claiming readership: Fans, browsers and critics 77 Claiming corporeality: In sickness, health and my professional opinion ... 78 Letter genres: The politics of form 82 Openers and rejoinders as ‘dialogist’ genres 83 Advocacy-endorsements as ‘activist’ genres 84 Commitments and confessions as ‘exhibitionist’ genres 86 Conclusion 89
CHAPTER FIVE 91
Boys doing bodywork: The reshaping of masculinity in Men’s Health 91 Introduction 91 The globalisation of the Men’s Health brand 91 Negotiating the discursive functions of Men’s Health 96 Not being doctors: Contesting the medical function 96 Don’t mess with the mix: Contesting the social function 100 Look better and feel better: Contesting the beauty function 105 Ideal target market: Contesting the consumer function 110 Case study: Men’s body hair removal 114 Conclusion 119
CHAPTER SIX 120
Natural alternatives? Wellbeing, femininity and consumption in Good Medicine and Nature & Health 120 Introduction 120 A ‘new age’ of women’s wellbeing? 121 Modelling the ideal women’s health magazine consumer 123
v The pragmatic consumer: ‘I would like to tell you how I cope’ 123 The public consumer: ‘I believe that society underestimates the effect’ 129 The dissenting consumer: ‘I must, however, take issue’ 133 The cosmetic consumer: ‘I am now happy with the image I see’ 139 Case study: Women’s pathographies 147 Conclusion 152
CHAPTER SEVEN 155
Discriminating audiences: The politics of community in Talkabout, User’s News and The Professional 155 Introduction 155 ‘It’s a balancing act’: Editorial community interventions 155 Integrating a dialogist audience 157 Empowering an activist politics 159 Revealing an exhibitionist reader 161 Discussion 163 ‘Many shapes and forms’: The market, identity and expert repertoires 163 Alternative media markets and the politics of community magazine advertising 164 Representing the diverse cultural identifications of media counterpublics 169 Negotiating ‘expert’ testimonials in media counterpublics 174 Discussion 179 Case study: Profound discrimination and bad poetry 179 Conclusion 188
CHAPTER EIGHT 189
Conclusion 189 References 195 Appendices 222 Appendix I: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form 222 Appendix II: Guidelines for interview structure 224 Appendix III: Content Analysis 225 Appendix IV: List of reader letters 230
vi List of tables and figures
Table 1: Comparative circulations, readerships and (category) market share of commercial Australian magazines------4 Table 2: Annual number of letters by commercial publication ------64 Table 3: Annual number of letters by community publication------65 Table 4: Number of words in reader letters by publication------66 Table 5: Number and length of editorial replies by publication ------67 Table 6: Name format of letter writers by publication ------68 Table 7: Address format of letter writers by publication ------68 Table 8: Claims to gender of letter writer by publication------71 Table 9: Claims to employment position of letter writer by publication ------73 Table 10: Claims to family position of letter writer by publication------74 Table 11: Claims to sexuality of letter writer by publication ------75 Table 12: Claims to marital status of letter writer by publication ------76 Table 13: Claims to age of letter writer by publication ------76 Table 14: Claims to readership of letter writer by publication------77 Table 15: Claims to corporeality of letter writer by publication------81 Table 16: Dialogist letter genres by publication ------84 Table 17: Activist letter genres by publication ------85 Table 18: Exhibitionist letter genres by publication------89
Figure 1: Men’s Health cover pages (left to right) May 2002, June 2000, June 2001 ------5 Figure 2: Good Medicine cover pages (left to right) June 2001, April 2001, January 2003 ------7 Figure 3: Nature & Health cover pages (left to right) October-November 2002, June-July 2001, December 2002-January 2003 ------8 Figure 4: Talkabout cover pages (left to right) October-November 2002, June-July 2001, December 2002-January 2003 ------11 Figure 5: The Professional cover pages (left to right) November-December 1998, Winter 2001, March 1999 ------12 Figure 6: User’s News cover pages (left to right) Spring 2002, Summer 2001, Spring 2000----14 Figure 7: Sample letter pages (left) Men’s Health February 2002 and (right) The Professional August-October 2000------49 Figure 8: Fairclough’s (1992) ‘Three-dimensional conception of discourse’ ------59 Figure 9: Reader letter genres by mode of publicity ------82 Figure 10: Cover pages of Men’s Health international editions from (clockwise from top left) the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany------92 Figure 11: Letter responses to the four functions of Men’s Health ------95
vii Figure 12: ‘Health bulletin’ article (left) and ‘Flex appeal’ article with illustrations (right), Men’s Health April 1999 ------97 Figure 13: ‘Where there is determination, a way can be found’ (left) and ‘Life is a challenge, not a spectator sport’ (right), desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website ------98 Figure 14: Contents page and ‘Breasts: A Handling Guide’ article, Men’s Health April 1999 101 Figure 15: ‘Water play’ desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website------103 Figure 16: Desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health South Africa website------106 Figure 17: Illustration from ‘The genius of dumbbells’ article, Men’s Health April 1999----- 109 Figure 18: ‘How to pick the right [golf] club’ article (left) and ‘Essentials: Our guide to what’s happening and what’s new’ article (right), Men’s Health April 1999 ------111 Figure 19: ‘Running Guy’ (left) and ‘Suit in Alley’ (right), desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website------112 Figure 20: Advertisement for permanent body hair removal including ‘before’ and ‘after’ images (left) Men’s Health January 2002; Cover page of University of New South Wales student magazine Tharunka entitled ‘Ben’s Health’ (right) August 2002 ------118 Figure 21: Consumer modes in Good Medicine and Nature & Health------123 Figure 22: ‘Kitchen cupboard cures’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘The best veggies for you’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000 ------124 Figure 23: ‘Gambling with tragedy: Case study’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘Revive your love life: Denise’s story’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000------130 Figure 24: ‘Your alternatives: 12 headache relievers’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘Spirit Guides: Discover your guardian angels’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000 ------134 Figure 25: ‘Discover your skin’s natural beauty: A foolproof guide to gorgeous skin’ article, Nature & Health April-May 2000------140 Figure 26: ‘Looking good: Head to toe’ article (left) and ‘f.y.i. beauty’ (right), Good Medicine May 2000------141 Figure 27: Nature & Health cover pages (left to right) June-July 2003, Aug-Sep 2003------146 Figure 28: ‘Marathon Mum’s Shattered Olympic Dream’, Good Medicine May 2000------149 Figure 29: Cover page theme ‘You’ve come a long way, baby: Women living with HIV’ (left) and ‘Community: A complex uncertainty [the experiences of women living with HIV]’ article (right), Talkabout November 2000------159 Figure 30: ‘Make some noise [Tips on how users can take part in the debate on drug law reform]’ article including ‘Sample letter’, User’s News Winter 2001------161 Figure 31: ‘The SWOP Workshop [training new contributors]’ article with notice for ‘Upcoming Writing Workshop’ (left) The Professional Winter 2001; ‘Love to write?’ advertisement for PLWHA Writing Group (middle) and ‘Got a story to tell?’ request for reader contributions (right), Talkabout September-October 2000------163 Figure 32: Discursive repertoires in community health magazine reader letters------164 Figure 33: ‘Money’ column accompanied by commercial advertisements for community centre, medical practice and AIDS council (left) and commercial advertisements for an employment service and sexual health clinic (right), Talkabout September-October 2000------165
viii Figure 34: ‘No magic bullet: The private rapid detox clinics’ article (left) and commercial advertisement for pharmacy (right), User’s News Spring 2000 ------167 Figure 35: ‘GST ‘n Me’ article accompanied by commercial advertisement for home loan service (left), ‘Money, money, money’ article accompanied by commercial advertisement for sex industry insurance brokers (right), User’s News August-October 2000------168 Figure 36: ‘Light up our lives’ cover and feature article [Contents blurb: Positive people are well represented in the Sydney Olympics torch relay], Talkabout September-October 2000 - 171 Figure 37: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell: Listening to Asian-background users talk about detox’ article, User’s News Spring 2000------172 Figure 38: ‘Carmen: In full circle – the making of a lady [sistagirls column]’ cover and feature article, The Professional August-October 2000------173 Figure 39: Treatment briefs and ‘Dear Doctor’ column (left), Community notice including ‘A PLWHA guide to the Olympics’ from the AIDS Council of New South Wales and NSW World AIDS Day Awards 2000, Talkabout September-October 2000 ------176 Figure 40: Community resources listings (left) and ‘Be Blood Aware’ hepatitis C prevention campaign (right), User’s News Spring 2000------177 Figure 41: ‘Doctor Wendy’ health column and ‘Judge Rudy’ legal column (left) and ‘The femidom files [Your questions answered]’, The Professional August-October 2000------178
ix CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
‘Finally, a magazine that’s full of helpful tips on looking after yourself!’ Gleeson, R 2000, ‘Keep on truckin’’, Men’s Health, October, p. 22.
In the last few years of the twentieth century, after a decade of policy change to ‘de- collectivise’ (Doel & Segrott 2003: 142) health and welfare, the first of several Australian consumer magazines was launched under the rubric of ‘health’. At the same time we saw the development of non-profit magazines dedicated to the empowerment of marginalised groups, again under the rubric of ‘health’. As Burrows et al. have observed, ‘...health is clearly a topical issue at both political and cultural levels...’ (1995: 1). This thesis will consider how three commercial and three community health magazines enact these cultural politics by rendering their imagined audiences as responsible and self-regulating citizens with a pro-active interest in learning how to ‘look after themselves’. These audiences are represented differently in commercial publications aimed at women, Good Medicine, men, Men’s Health, alternative health consumers, Nature & Health and in non-profit publications aimed at people living with HIV/AIDS, Talkabout, illicit drug users, User’s News and sex workers, The Professional. However, all constitute their imagined audiences in part via the genre of letters-to-the-editor (reader letters) and thus, this research conducts a comparative analysis of letters published between 1997 and 2000, accompanied where possible by interviews with magazine editors.
Health magazines present discursive modules of medical knowledge with the proclaimed objective of mobilising ‘informed’ consumer agency. As Robertson has observed: ‘Particular discourses on health emerge at particular historical moments and gain widespread acceptance primarily because they are more or less congruent with the prevailing social, political and economic order within which they are produced, maintained and reproduced’ (2001: 294-95). Thus, in becoming commercially viable, politically salient and culturally legitimate at this time, health magazines indicate the consolidation of an ‘advanced liberal’ (Rose 2001) philosophy of self-regulation, in the context of the contemporary dissolution of the welfare state. Rose historicises these changes:
1 In the second half of the 20th century, a new alliance formed between political aspirations for a healthy population and personal aspirations to be well: health was to be ensured by instrumentalizing anxiety and shaping the hopes and fears of individuals and families for their own biological destiny. The very idea of health was re-figured – the will to health would not merely seek the avoidance of sickness or premature death, but would encode an optimization of one’s corporeality to embrace a kind of overall ‘well-being’ – beauty, success, happiness, sexuality and much more. It was this enlarged will to health that was amplified and instrumentalized by new strategies of advertising and marketing in the rapidly developing consumer market for health – non-prescription medicines, health insurance, private health care, healthy food, vitamins and dietary supplements and the whole range of complementary, alternative and ‘self-health’ practices. By the start of the 21st century, hopes, fears, decisions and life-routines shaped in terms of the risks and possibilities in corporeal and biological existence had come to supplant almost all others as organizing principles of a life of prudence, responsibility and choice (2001: 17-18)
Commercial health magazines represent a market-oriented capitalisation of this will to health, whereas community magazines focus on the advocacy potential of ‘self-health’. Although the latter is less profit-driven, both media industries prioritise health as a key organising principle in the actualisation of contemporary subjectivity. Thus, central to the discursive strategies of health magazines is the notion of individual responsibility, which synthesises the political interest in devolving health care and welfare obligations with the personal goal of optimising quality and longevity of life.
There are three sets of cultural politics ‘at stake’ in health magazine reader letters: the de-collectivisation of health, the utility of media consumption and the embodiment of citizenship. All three can be illustrated in the introductory letter extract: ‘Finally, a magazine that’s full of helpful tips on looking after yourself!’1 This letter prioritises an individual rather than a public responsibility for health and makes an ethical evaluation about the use-value of health magazines, implying that non-health media is somehow superfluous or even contrary to the philosophies of self-care and self-improvement. Central to this evaluation is a dismissal of the ‘pleasures’ of media consumption, which in many ways, is an attempt to distance these new publications from the historic cultural meanings of magazines: Whilst magazines are designed to be enjoyable, [health magazine] readers are perceived to buy them primarily to be informed rather than to be entertained. In the case of Here’s Health, for instance, the editor believed that ‘a lot of people psychologically use a magazine as a bit of a treat ...
2 People don’t buy this magazine for that necessarily. They buy it for the information’ (Doel & Segrott 2003: 139).
The act of publicly declaring an allegiance to health media also evokes a politics of representation that prioritises the embodied character of advanced liberal citizenship: ‘Selfhood has become intrinsically somatic — ethical practices increasingly take on the body as the key site for work on the self’ (Rose 2001: 18). Health magazines negotiate this proximity between the body and the body politic and so health magazine reader letters operate as a social technology for the representation of embodied citizenships: ‘...in the sense of a lived, fleshly, social intersubjectivity’ (Bacchi & Beasley 2002: 325). This certainly does not mean that letters are ‘embodied’ in themselves; on the contrary, reader letters attempt to abstract a textual representation of these politics from an imagined material reality.
This thesis examines the discursive strategies involved in constituting health magazine audiences. This relates to what Hartley has termed ‘Do-It-Yourself citizenship’: ... the practice of putting together an identity from the available choices, patterns and opportunities on offer ... Whether it’s a full ‘fitted’ identity, expensive, integrated and in a recognizable off-the-shelf style, or an identity more creatively put together from bits and pieces bought, found or purloined separately, is a matter of individual difference. The point is, ‘citizenship’ is no longer simply a matter of a social contract between state and subject, no longer even a matter of acculturation to the heritage of a given community; DIY citizenship is a choice people can make for themselves (1999: 178).
In DIY citizenship individuals have ‘choices’ about who they wish to become. Both commercial and non-profit health magazines are structured around this philosophy of consumer agency, offering the reader a series of expert instructions on how to make choices about ‘lifestyle, taste, health, fashion and beauty ... to enhance his or her self- identity’ (Lury 1996: 8-9). Reader letters are particularly interesting in this regard, since they are a genre concerned with passing comment on the consumer choices offered by these magazines. And peculiar to the genre of health magazine reader letters is a corporeal rhetoric that draws on private bodily experiences rather than the abstract public debates associated with newspapers. In this way, reader letters contribute to the embodiment of citizenship, incorporating the visceral within the popular.
3 Describing the magazines
Petersen and Lupton have suggested that ‘while health has always been a preoccupation in nearly all societies, the extent and intensity of health-related concerns evident in many contemporary Western societies are remarkable’ (1996: 1). Likewise, while consumer health magazines have been available both in Australia and overseas for more than a decade (Edmonson 1987), there has recently been a spate of new health magazine launches in Australia. Table 1 offers a comparison of the Australian circulations, readerships and market share of fourteen popular magazines, including the three ‘health’ titles of Good Medicine, Men’s Health and Nature & Health.
Table 1: Comparative circulations, readerships and (category) market share of commercial Australian magazines1
Circulat/n Rank Read/ship Rank Category3 M/share A/2 Women’s Weekly 696,530 1 2,735,000 1 Women’s 50.4% Better Homes & Gds 288,108 7 1,510,000 4 Home/Gard 7.8% marie claire 103,004 22 629,000 17 Women’s 50.4% FHM 101,591 23 462,000 23 Men’s 5.5% New Woman 74,647 35 344,000 35 Women’s 50.4% Inside Sport 64,934 40 263,000 53 Sport 2.0% Good Medicine 63,782 43 332,000 38 Health 0.8% Street Machine 62,835 47 399,000 28 Motor 2.8% Shares 56,706 55 199,000 63 Business 6.7% Vogue Australia 55,072 56 364,000 31 Fashion 5.3% Men’s Health 46,003 66 263,000 54 Health 0.8% Women’s Fitness... 39,953 69 NA NA Health 0.8% Nature & Health 36,500 NA 131,000 86 Health 0.8% A/ Playstation 2 21,325 100 205,000 62 Entertain’t 7.9%
Although health magazines do not even begin to threaten the 50% market share of women’s magazines such as The Australian Women’s Weekly, they nonetheless attract a considerable number of readers, equivalent to the traditionally popular genres of sports, Inside Sport, cars, Street Machine and fashion magazines such as Vogue Australia. The rest of this introductory chapter will focus on the six health magazines analysed in this
1 All figures except Nature & Health sourced from Magazine Publishers of Australia
4 thesis, describing their industry background, editorial and advertising strategies and cultural significance.
Men’s Health was first launched in the United States in 1988 where it now boasts a circulation of 1.7 million copies per month (Rodale 2003). International franchised editions are now also produced in such developed nations as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa. The Australian edition was launched as a monthly magazine in October 1997, heralding the successful entry of Murdoch Magazines into the new market of men’s lifestyle media. This magazine has focused popular attention onto men’s health, cultivating a consumer culture for the ‘new’, body-and-style-conscious Australian man. The most distinctive feature of this magazine is its visual brand, including the use of black and white photographs of partially nude male models, and short tabloid by-lines such as ‘X-rated sex’ (October 2002) and ‘Legs of steel’ (August 2002). Magazine researchers have often claimed that ‘the visual images on both men’s and women’s magazine covers tends to portray what women should look like and what men should look for’ (Malkin et al. 1999: 652). Men’s Health flaunts this rule, proving that heterosexual men will purchase a magazine that features images of bare-chested, muscular and groomed men.
Figure 1: Men’s Health cover pages (left to right) May 2002, June 2000, June 2001
Australian Men’s Health costs a relatively high $8.20 and circulation has been audited at 46,003, ranking at number sixty-six in ‘Australia’s top 100 consumer newsstand magazines (ranked by circulation)’ (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003a). Total readership is estimated at 263,000, ranking this magazine at number fifty-four in the
5 ‘top 100’ readership profile, with an estimated 74.2% male readers, and 25.8% female. The largest (34.2%) group of readers fall into the 25-34 age range, with a considerable number in the 14-24 (28.3%) and 35-49 (26.6%) age ranges (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003b).
Men’s Health links health advice with lifestyle and consumer promotions, placing particular emphasis on fitness and body sculpting. The publisher’s website claims: Contrary to what you would expect, Men’s Health isn’t just about health. We’re not fanatical about tofu and yoga and we realise that beer tastes a lot better than a protein shake. What we are about is making men see that the only person who is going to improve their lives is themselves. It’s up to them to shrug off the couch-potato lifestyle and make a difference. We aim to arm our readers with the motivation and information they’re going to need to do that. Whether they’re after a better sex life, a more interesting and rewarding career, less stress, a better body, more style or general happiness, Men’s Health is their reliable information source (2003).
This quote implies that men have been traditionally irresponsible in ‘looking after themselves’, but will also not accept a men’s magazine that does not fit with the ‘beer- drinking’ model of Australian masculinity. Men’s Health features articles with titles such as, ‘The meal plan for every man’ (Natoli 2001), ‘Who needs to worry about prostate cancer?’ (Turner 2001) and ‘The genius of dumbbells’ (Schuler 2002). Advertising revenue is sourced from the most profitable consumer industries such as fashion, hair-care, sporting and fitness accessories, cars and travel, fragrances and watches. Thus, the competition for this magazine lies not necessarily in the older fitness magazines such as Musclemag and Muscle & Fitness, nor in the traditional magazines for men which focus on sports, cars or women but in the increasingly popular men’s ‘lifestyle’ magazines such as FHM and Inside Sport with circulations of more than 200,000 a month. Chapter five will focus on how Men’s Health negotiates discourses of body-improvement in relation to changing cultural expectations of Australian men.
The most popular health magazine in Australia at the time of writing is Good Medicine: a monthly health-and-beauty publication aimed at women aged 25-54 and priced at $5.50 (Australian Consolidated Press 2003b). Good Medicine was originally launched as a PBL multimedia enterprise, including the Australian Consolidated Press magazine, ninemsn website, and Channel Nine television program. The television show lasted only
6 a few years, but the magazine and website continue to increase in profile. The Good Medicine magazine was launched in April 1998 and has developed from fairly modest beginnings to claim a circulation of 63,782, recently ranked at number forty-three in the ‘top 100’ Australian consumer magazines (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003a). Total readership has recently been estimated at 332,000, ranking this magazine at number thirty-eight in the ‘top 100’ readership profile, with an estimated 74.3% female readers and 25.7% male. Although the magazine is aimed at a large range of ages, the largest category of readers is over 50 (35.4%), although the 25-34 (21.1%) and 35-49 (28.7%) age ranges are still significant (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003b). This magazine promotes a range of consumer health alternatives, including both biomedical and holistic treatments but is predominantly concerned with interpreting ‘health’ as a facet of total wellbeing requiring attention to beauty, career, family and fitness. Good Medicine uses a similar cover design to other mainstream women’s lifestyle titles featuring young, Anglo female celebrities such as (see Figure 2) Kristin Davis, Meg Ryan or Suzie Wilks.
Figure 2: Good Medicine cover pages (left to right) June 2001, April 2001, January 2003
The ninemsn website demonstrates the philosophy behind this publication: Good Medicine is a magazine for the real Australian woman who wants to take control of her health and lifestyle, to feel and look as good as she can, but is basically happy with herself. Our aim is to provide information and options you need to make decisions about you and your family’s health and welfare ... We’re not here to lecture you or make you feel guilty or inadequate. We just want you to be happy, healthy and the best you can be (Australian Consolidated Press 2003a).
7 This quote represents the Good Medicine audience as a population of active women interested in improving the health of themselves and their families, whilst remaining vigilant to the cosmetic obligations of femininity. Feature articles display titles such as, ‘What’s your PMS personality?’ (Garth 2001), ‘Mapping your stress points’ (Sathicq 2002) and ‘When natural = danger’ (Keens 2002) suggesting that health topics can be both instrumental and intriguing. The advertising industries that fund Good Medicine mostly promote health and beauty products, including vitamins, cosmetics, skin care, books, entertainment and specialist services that can be classified as medical, cosmetic, relaxation/travel, educational, fitness and health insurance. Competitors include some other health-related magazines, such as Women’s Fitness & Health Sports but are more likely to fall into the wider category of women’s lifestyle, beauty and fashion publications, such as New Woman or marie claire, which have monthly circulations of around 100,000 in Australia.
Figure 3: Nature & Health cover pages (left to right) October-November 2002, June-July 2001, December 2002-January 2003
Nature & Health is ‘independently’ published by Yaffa Publishing, and is dedicated to disseminating information on ‘alternative’ or holistic health. Originally launched by Blackmores Laboratories in 1979, it has been successfully published bi-monthly since 1994 and now boasts a circulation of 36,500, priced at an accessible $6.95 (Yaffa Publishing 2000). This publication represents a revitalisation of holistic therapies, defiantly marked out in opposition to ‘conventional’ medicine, and is promoted as an encyclopedia of creative, alternative health knowledge. Total readership has been estimated at 131,000, ranking this magazine at number eighty-six in Australia’s Top 100
8 magazines by readership (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003b). Despite its unconventional mission, this magazine employs the visual conventions of mainstream women’s magazines, including the use of female photographic models that are young, white, beautiful and exuding good ‘health’. Therefore, it is interesting to note that this magazine has an estimated 33.3% male readership, with a majority of readers over 50 (43.7%) or between 35-49 (27.5%) (Magazine Publishers of Australia 2003b).
The following quotes are taken from an editorial in the magazine, and the Yaffa Publications website: Nature & Health explores new ways for living well. We aim to help you get healthy in mind, body and spirit – and stay healthy. We bring you fresh ideas on how to get more out of life with exercise, leisure and self- improvement activities ... Our role is to be a forum for contemporary thought on health issues as well as a place where traditional therapies are explained (Allardice 2000)
Nature & Health is a magazine for the rapidly growing number of educated and responsive people who are interested in maintaining a naturally healthy lifestyle. Nature & Health is regularly supported by advertisers looking for a targeted, affluent, health conscious readership of men and women who are striving to stay healthy and positive in the new millennium (Yaffa Publishing 2003).
These quotes demonstrate the different language used in marketing the magazine to readers (‘we bring you fresh ideas’) and to advertisers (‘a targeted, affluent, health conscious readership’). Nature & Health represents the mainstream acceptance of alternative medicine within a markedly middle-class social framework. Feature articles display titles such as, ‘Nature’s answer to arthritis’ (Goldberg 2001), ‘Do-it-yourself remedies for common ailments’ (McCready 2002), and ‘The dangers of home pest control’ (Champagne 2002). Nature & Health advertising is predominantly aligned with alternative health products and services as well as health festivals, spirituality groups, natural health centres and colleges, traditional medicine practitioners and meditation guides. Nature & Health is currently the most successful ‘alternative’ health magazine on the Australian market but it does have competitors, including Wellbeing and Insight. Both Good Medicine and Nature & Health promote a responsible female consumer who is happy, fit and open to a wide range of conventional and unconventional therapies. Chapter six will consider how Good Medicine and Nature & Health negotiate different
9 editorial approaches (mainstream and ‘alternative’) within a framework of the commodification of women’s wellbeing.
The three publications chosen here as representative of Australia’s ‘community’ health media are produced by and for readerships that experience social exclusion due to a health-related stigma. Talkabout is produced by and for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), The Professional by and for sex workers and User’s News by and for illicit drug users. Each of these publications is partially funded by state or federal health departments as a health promotion vehicle with a particular focus on HIV prevention. However, they are produced by non-profit, community-based organisations that focus more specifically on health education as political activism. These magazines attempt to provide a space to celebrate and develop a culture of ‘pride’ while still focusing on the individual responsibilities of avoiding risk and maximising citizenship potential. Chapter seven offers an analysis of the ways in which these three magazines negotiate the complex task of representing marginalised readers, focusing on the politics of community articulated in strategies of audience participation and empowerment.
The current number of cumulative HIV notifications in Australia is 19,674, with around 13,120 estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS in Australia in the year 2002 (NCHECR 2003: 5). The introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapies (HAART) in 1996 meant that an HIV seroconversion was no longer a fatal diagnosis, but instead promised a lifetime of chronic illness that ‘lies somewhere between the dependent sick role and the empowered individual’ (Crossley 1998: 508). Although homosexually active men reported more than 85% of the newly acquired HIV infections diagnosed between 1998 and 2002 (NCHECR 2003: 5), the demographic make-up of the positive community — and it should be noted that the term ‘community’ is energetically debated within both HIV and queer discourses (Ridge et al. 1997) — has become a far more complex mix of sexualities, ethnicities, ages and geographies. An Australian HIV/AIDS organization that primarily works ‘to promote a positive image of people affected by HIV/AIDS with the aim of eliminating prejudice, isolation, stigmatisation and discrimination arising from AIDS’ is People Living with HIV/AIDS NSW (PLWHA (NSW) Inc. 2003c). PLWHA has published a free members magazine, Talkabout, since 1988 and its 3,000 copies are now distributed to gay community outlets along Oxford Street — Sydney’s
10 infamous ‘gay district’ — and to HIV organisations and services around Australia. Talkabout is now a bi-monthly publication featuring articles on topics ranging from new treatments to workplace discrimination, and regular sections on complementary therapies, global HIV news, exercise, nutrition tips and a personals column. Figure 4 demonstrates the unusual range of cover designs used by this magazine.
Figure 4: Talkabout cover pages (left to right) October-November 2002, June-July 2001, December 2002-January 2003
Talkabout is produced by one fulltime editor, aided by a voluntary Publications Working Group (PLWHA (NSW) Inc. 2003a). The PLWHA website claims that: ‘Talkabout aims to provide a forum for people with HIV and AIDS, and those closely affected by AIDS, to express their views and their creativity, to have access to and exchange information, and to represent themselves in a way which is fully within their own control’ (PLWHA (NSW) Inc. 2003c). This quote illustrates the personal empowerment philosophy of this and the other community health magazines, positioned within a culture of political activism. Talkabout includes some advertising, mostly local HIV services, and features ‘stories of positive people’ (Studdert 2001) on the HIV/AIDS WebCentral and in the Talkabout ‘e-zine’ (PLWHA (NSW) Inc. 2003b).
Sex work is defined by Farley and Kelly as ‘a multibillion dollar global market which includes strip clubs, massage brothels, phone sex, adult and child pornography, brothel and escort prostitution’ (2000: 53). Although sex work has now been decriminalised in NSW (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2001a), Weatherall and Priestley observe that ‘views of prostitution as crime, disease, sin and perversity play a role in everyday
11 understandings of sex work as well as in legal responses to it’ (2001: 324). Despite a low HIV prevalence among most sex workers (NCHECR 2001: 19), support organisations continue to be predominantly funded as public health initiatives, expanding their jurisdiction to advocate for legal and social reform for sex workers, as members of a valid ‘consumer service industry’ (Brewis & Linstead 2000a: 86). In NSW, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), ‘focuses on safety, dignity, diversity and the changing needs of sex industry workers, to foster an environment which enables and affirms individual choices and occupational rights’ (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2003). SWOP has published a free magazine for sex workers, The Professional, since 1991: ‘as a closed publication – available for industry workers only, and covers issues from sexual health, legal and tax issues, to personal stories about the “tricks of the trade”‘ (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2003). Figure 5 demonstrates the range of aesthetics employed by the magazine, from collage to ‘zine-style sketches.
Figure 5: The Professional cover pages (left to right) November-December 1998, Winter 2001, March 1999
The Professional is now produced by a fulltime editor and a voluntary editorial committee — ‘an empowered supergroup of workers who are also writers, graphic artists, activists and interested people’ (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2003) — distributing 2,500 copies directly to sex workers at their place of employment. As a promotional brochure states, ‘SWOP uses various strategies to provide information and support for sex workers in brothels, private situations, on the streets, B&D establishments, strip clubs and other areas where commercial sex is available in NSW’ (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2001b). The Professional is a quarterly publication, with
12 features ranging from safe sex information to changes in prostitution laws, and regular sections on legal advice, resource listings, medical advice, global sex worker news, media clippings, entertainment news and word games. The magazine reflects the diversity of the sex worker industry in its audience contributions and its own project divisions, targeting metropolitan women, men and boys, multicultural, transgender, regional and ‘sistagirl’ (transgender women of colour) sex workers (Sex Workers Outreach Project 2001b). The Professional accepts some advertising, mostly from community organisations and the magazine reproduces occasional features on the SWOP website, as long as it does not contravene the ‘closed publication’ policy (Sex Workers Outreach Project 1999).
Illicit drug use is defined by Carlisle Maxwell as the ‘use of marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), inhalants, hallucinogens ... heroin and any prescription-type psychotherapeutic drug used non-medically’ (2001: 41). Further to the prohibition of most ‘recreational’ drugs, illicit drug users are demonised via the discourse of addiction and a conflation of drug use with drug harm, which Laslett and Rumbold describe as ‘deaths from drug overdose and drug offences ... [as well as] social disruption, violence and workplace problems’ (1998: 42). As McAllister and Makkai note, ‘successful health campaigns have been very effective in reducing HIV/AIDS infection through needle sharing’ (2001: 35) and HIV diagnoses in people with a history of injecting drug use in Australia has been contained to around 8% (NCHECR 2001: 18). User support organisations operate around Australia as a harm minimisation mechanism, but also advocate for the rights of drug users, in order to challenge their stereotyping as ‘...ill members of our community in need of treatment’ (Elliott & Chapman 2000: 200). The NSW Users’ and AIDS Association (NUAA) have published User’s News as a free magazine for illicit drug users since 1990, expanding to 18,000 copies distributed quarterly to sexual health centres, methadone clinics, needle and syringe exchange programs and community health centres around Australia and also overseas. A disclaimer published in the magazine reads: NUAA does not judge people who choose to use drugs illicitly, and User’s News welcomes contributions which express opinions and raise issues of concern to drug users – past, present and potential. In light of current laws on self-administration of drugs, however, it should be clear that by publishing the contents of this magazines NUAA does not encourage anyone to do anything illegal (NSW Users’ and AIDS Association 2001: 2).
13 Figure 6: User’s News cover pages (left to right) Spring 2002, Summer 2001, Spring 2000
User’s News is produced by one fulltime editor, with help from a voluntary editorial board and covers topics ranging from fit cleaning advice to drug user activism and regular sections such as community resources, an advice column, detox and rehab centres and international drug law news. Another drug user magazine, the Dutch publication Sister Mainline, has recently become the object of medical and social scrutiny following its makeover into a ‘drug chic women’s glossy’ (Sheldon 2002: 1368). But a key focus of this Australian magazine is the publication of drug user life stories, drawings and creative writing, and approximately seventy-six ‘user stories’ were published across the first thirty-one issues of the magazine (Wye 2000). Government approval for the production of User’s News was temporarily withdrawn in late-2002, after a Sydney talkback radio station claimed that issue number thirty-nine (Spring 2001: ‘The media’s bad habits’) was ‘teaching people how to use drugs’. Guidelines for appropriate magazine content are currently in development and are likely to apply to all three of the community magazines included in this research, since they are each under the jurisdiction of the same government agency.
Conclusion
Health magazines attempt to mobilise an ethics of responsibility in Australian citizens by focusing on different aspects of contemporary subjectivities. Men’s Health represents a shift in Australian masculinity to incorporate attention to issues of body presentation and lifestyle improvement. Good Medicine demonstrates an increasing popular concern with issues of women’s health, risk management and ‘wellbeing’.
14 Nature & Health advocates alternative philosophies reflecting a wider social acceptance of unconventional approaches to health care. Community health magazines, too, focus on advocating for the health needs and citizenship rights of marginalised groups. All of these magazines commonly assume that their readers require better information to aid in the ongoing project of self-health. As Bunton suggests: [A] rational, health-promoting self appears to have emerged in ‘official discourse’ and in magazine’s health cultures, stressing enterprise, body work and self-improvement ... The media cannot engage in other ‘curative’ forms of medicine but focus instead on prevention and the reasoning, reading, autonomous subject. On the face of it then, popular health in magazines would seem to be an ideal location from which to observe the positioning of the contemporary subject of health discourses and the acquisition of techniques for fabricating the healthy self (1997: 238-39).
The following chapters will consider how the ‘contemporary subject of health discourses’ is represented in health magazine reader letters and in interviews with magazine editors. Chapter two will frame this analysis with reference to the cultural conditions behind health magazines, including the self-care obligations of advanced liberalism, the medical differentiation of gendered health needs, the marketisation of health care and the rise of exhibitionism. Chapter three then outlines the methodological approach taken in this thesis, and the remaining chapters offer the body of the analysis. Chapter four offers a content analysis of letter writers and letter genres in all six publications and this chapter’s examination of the use of ‘entitlement claims’ and ‘political genres’ in reader letters will lay the groundwork for the more exploratory analyses presented in chapters’ five to seven. These three chapters take a more discursive approach to the analysis of letters and interviews, focusing firstly on Men’s Health (chapter five), then on the comparative connections between Good Medicine and Nature & Health (chapter six) and finally the specifically local context of the three community health magazines (chapter seven). The magazines have been grouped in this way to mirror the three separate industries of men’s, women’s and community magazines but also because the total number of three hundred and sixty-four reader letters can be fairly evenly split into these three categories: one hundred and thirty-six letters in Men’s Health; one hundred and eighteen in Good Medicine and Nature & Health; and one hundred and ten in the three community magazines. It is hoped that distinguishing the various parts of the material in this way will lead to a more complete picture of the cultural politics of health magazine reader letters.
15 CHAPTER TWO
Health, responsibility, and media publics
Introduction
Health magazines can be described as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Negus 2002: 501) in so far as they arbitrate and translate between the quite different social domains of medicine, commerce and the ‘public’. Health magazines are ‘infotainment’, designed to be easy and enjoyable to read, whilst offering specialist reviews of a wide range of medical and lifestyle issues. They are based on the premise that an individual is responsible for their own health and that engaging in a project of lifestyle improvement is not only beneficial to the self, but reduces the level of reliance on medical and welfare services. The history of health magazines lies between the fields of media history and medical history and although there has been little research on this particular media culture, there are several conditions that have led to health magazines becoming a viable cultural form in contemporary western nations. This chapter will review some recent social theory regarding ten of these conditions, but will begin with a brief overview of social research on health and the media.
Social research on health and the media
Historians trace the origin of popular periodicals to the invention of the printing press but most agree that the first of the modern format magazines dates back to the 1660s (Encyclopedia Brittanica 2002). British magazines began to appear in the early 18th century, including the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-), identified by Porter as the first magazine dedicated to providing health and medical information to a popular audience: ... the most cursory glance at its pages shows a high density of medical insertions, covering an impressive range of topics (many reprinted from other sources). Medical books were listed and reviewed; case histories appeared; readers wrote in with complaints about their own health, and replies were printed, giving advice and remedies; the proceedings of medical societies were scrutinized, and the founding and progress of new medical charities claimed much space. Medical ‘news’ was also published (Porter 1985: 140-3).
16 There are very few, if any, other studies on the history of health (in) magazines prior to the 19th century, but as Horrocks suggests, ‘the growth of medical journals in the early decades of the nineteenth century can be seen as part of a larger process whereby the emerging profession attempted to assert its identity and self-assurance’ (1995: 115). For example, the Journal of Health, which, although short-lived (1829-1833), demonstrates a turning point in medical history, as: 1) medicine became established as an expert profession, in direct contrast to ‘botanical doctors, homeopaths, animal magnetists, and purveyors of various panaceas’ (1995: 132); and 2) physical health was being increasingly bound up with moral virtues, such as ‘the benefits of hard work, domestic happiness, and frugality’ (1995: 124). Another study that examines the role of the periodical press in the advancement of public health movements in 19th century America, concludes that ‘gleanings from folk medicine and the lore of home remedies bulked much larger in the pages of Harper’s Weekly than did reports of medical research’ (Young 1986: 166). This suggests that contemporary health magazines follow a long line of publications that validate ‘natural’ therapies and lay expertise as complementary to the traditional authority of biomedicine.
In the 20th century, health media have been of predominant concern to the discipline of public health, which focuses on whether or not media distort the health doctrines of the day. This approach is based upon a medical anxiety that ‘consumers will likely seek an increasing amount of medical information through alternate sources’ (Wofford et al. 1995: 489), outside of the rigorous standards required of biomedical practice. Public health literature tends to employ quantitative methodologies to measure the presence or absence of health information in the media, and to evaluate whether this medical knowledge has been reproduced accurately (e.g., Elliott 1994). For example, a US study found that the health issues covered in a popular women’s magazine did not reflect the issues prioritised in medical journals nor those raised by the clients of a women’s health centre (Moyer et al. 2001). Similarly, a content analysis of health-related articles in the Dutch press over an eight-week period found that this form of media was ‘incongruent in many important ways with the central tenets of health promotion’ (Commers et al. 2000: 330). Associated with this public health approach is the field of health communications, which expands the analysis of health information to consider how it is framed and represented in various media genres, acknowledging that ‘interpretation is a
17 process that inevitably pervades the whole research process’ (Arksey & Knight 1999: 169). Some of the topics covered by health communications include media bias in representations of women’s health (Beaulieu & Lippman 1995; Andsager & Powers 1999; Whiteman et al. 2001), under-representation of minority ethnic (Hoffman-Goetz 1999) and age groups (Edwards & Chapman 2000), media stigmatisation of conditions such as HIV (Dworkin & Wachs 1998) and physical disability (Auslander & Gold 1999), and media bias in the reporting of environmental health risks (Brown et al. 2001; Driedger & Eyles 2001).
The field of health communications is explicitly concerned with the context of health media, and although more interpretive and exploratory than public health research, these studies continue to frame the media as incompatible with health promotion objectives. There is also a disciplinary tendency to publish health communications research in health — rather than communications — journals. Therefore, as Kitzinger has noted: Writers in this area ... have approached ‘media analysis’ in a very simplistic way, with no apparent knowledge of existing debates around notions such as ‘objectivity’, ‘bias’ and ‘balance’. Often people seem to feel equipped to analyse television or newspaper reports without any special training in a way that they would rarely dream of doing about other issues. For example, content analysis findings are often accompanied by implicit or explicit assumptions about the impact of such reporting, yet few studies include any analysis of readers’ and viewers’ actual reactions. Although they draw on the psychological literature in this area, some researchers display little knowledge of the extensive debate within media studies about media effects and audience reception processes (1999: 57).
Although providing undeniably important insights into the social and political bias of some media texts, health communications research can perpetuate a conceptual divergence between medicine and the media. Appropriate health media research needs to expand the parameters of its focus to consider how media texts are constructed within and contribute to wider discourses on health and wellbeing, consumer culture, political philosophy, gender and body cultures. This kind of analysis may be informed by public health and health communications and by social histories of the media. And indeed, a more comprehensive attempt to engage with the discursive interplay between health and media has begun to develop in recent years. The resulting literature from authors such as Seale (2001; 2002b; 2002a; 2003), Petersen (1994; 1996; 2001; 2002), Lupton (1996;
18 1998; 1999b; 1999a), Tulloch (1992; 1997; 2001), Bunton (1997; 2002), Bonner (1998; 2002) and McKay (1999; 2000; 2002) will be drawn upon throughout this chapter.
Notes on the cultural conditions of health magazines
The remainder of this chapter will identify ten cultural conditions that have contributed to the development of health magazines as socially and politically resonant media forms at this time. Each of these conditions will be briefly examined using theoretical literature drawn from a variety of disciplines, including medical sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, gender studies, critical public health, social theory and the sociology of consumption. This chapter’s review of the theoretical context of health magazines will also incorporate any available media studies scholarship that is related to each condition.
1. The self-care obligations of advanced liberalism
Health magazines assume that audiences have a personal responsibility to engage in preventive health practices. Therefore, the first cultural condition of health magazines is the political obligation that active citizens take all due effort to care for themselves to ensure long-term independence from government welfare services. This is one element of a complex project of social governance that Rose describes as ‘advanced liberalism’: Central to [the rationalities and technologies of government that I have termed ‘advanced’ forms of liberalism] are the revised ambitions of political government, the aspiration to govern ‘at a distance’, the fragmentation of sociality and subjectivity into communities and identities, the emphasis upon creating active individuals who will take responsibility for their own fates through the exercise of choice, and the organization of socio-political concerns around the management and minimization of risks to lifestyles of contentment and consumption (2000: 337).
As Petersen has also observed, ‘since the mid-1970s, there has been a clear ideological shift away from the notion that the state should protect the health of individuals to the idea that individuals should take responsibility to protect themselves from risk’ (1997: 194). Thus, advanced liberalism impacts on the experience of health by, as Aldridge puts it, ‘creating a culture in which active enterprising consumers will take responsibility for their own welfare’ (1998: 2). This shift from a collective to an individual responsibility for health care has been widely researched with most success
19 in cultural studies (Rimke 2000; Howell & Ingham 2001), sociology (Beck-Gernsheim 2000; Galvin 2002) and political philosophy (O’Malley 1996; Rowlingson 2002).
The ‘responsibilising’ of neoliberal citizens dissolves the state’s obligation to provide universal health care (and other previously public services) through ‘conceiving the subject as rational, autonomous, choice making and responsible’ (Kelly 2001: 29). Dixon and Kouzmin write: The neoliberal advocates of market reform have sought to shift the prevailing social security paradigm away from community solidarity through risk pooling towards individual (not to mention family) responsibility through work and savings, with a view to divesting government of its statutory social security responsibilities. The market reform pressures that have blossomed over the last two decades drew strength from the spirit of liberalism and the apparent virtues of the marketplace, particularly individual responsibility, contractual rights, efficiency and depoliticization. The policy dream is that the marketization of mandatory social security will allow governments to limit tax and contribution burdens and thus prevent these burdens from penalizing future generations (2001: 30).
These political changes have necessarily impacted on the moral ordering of health and illness. As Galvin has observed, ‘the healthy person is, in effect, symbolic of the ideal neoliberal citizen, autonomous, active and responsible and the person who deviates from this ideal state is, at best, lacking in value and, at worst, morally culpable’ (2002: 117). This model of health assumes that ‘all active citizens have a right and a duty to maintain, contribute to and ensure (or should that be insure?) their health status’ (Nettleton 1997: 208, parentheses in original). However, as Greco has observed, this also establishes a causal connection between citizenship rights and health status: A health that can be ‘chosen’ ... represents a somewhat different value than a health one simply enjoys or misses. It testifies to more than just a physical capacity; it is the visible sign of initiative, adaptability, balance and strength of will. In this sense, physical health has come to represent, for the neo- liberal individual who has ‘chosen’ it, an ‘objective’ witness to his or her suitability to function as a free and rational agent (1993: 369-70).
Personal responsibility for health should not be claimed as specifically contemporary (Minkler 1999: 122). As Galvin has suggested, ‘the idea that health and illness are matters of personal responsibility ... [is] embedded in traditional notions of illness and sin’ (2002: 108). However, what is contemporary about the current political association
20 between good health and good citizenship in first world economies is the associated ‘ideology of healthism’ (Crawford 1980: 368).
Healthism assumes that every citizen is engaged with an imperative to ‘ceaselessly maintain and improve his or her own health by using a whole range of measures’ (Bunton & Burrows 1995: 208). As Petersen explains: Healthism posits that the individual has choice in preserving his or her physical capacity from the event of disease ... The disciplinary self- improvement demonstrated in the pursuit of health and fitness has become a key means by which individuals can express their agency and constitute themselves in conformity with the demands of a competitive world (1997: 187).
Health magazines are just one of many commercial applications of this culture of healthism, including the weight loss, physical fitness and cosmetic industries. Rather than being constrained within the traditional parameters of public health and medicine, health has instead ‘become a central plank of contemporary consumer culture as images of youthfulness, vitality, energy and so on have become key articulating principles of a range of contemporary popular discourses’ (Burrows et al. 1995: 1). This public dimension to health behaviour is linked to the wider surveillance of those who have ‘failed’ in their moral obligation to behave appropriately. Radley has suggested that the ‘new health consciousness ... affirms the necessity of members of the [healthy] in-group to engage, as selves, in manoeuvres to reassert continually their moral credentials in order to counter the ever-present threat of stigma’ (1999: 168). In short, the neoliberal obligation to be healthy apportions blame to those who are sick, effectively absolving governments from an unbiased obligation to provide universal health care. The implications of this shift are wide ranging, from discrimination in the labor market (Beck-Gernsheim 2000: 124) to stigmatisation of the ill or disabled (Galvin 2002).
Health is self-evidently situated within a complex network of social, economic, political and environmental factors, including cross-cultural, ethnic, gender, sub-cultural, class- based and geographic differences (Pierret 1993). As Minkler observes: ... an overriding emphasis on personal responsibility blames the victim, by ignoring the social context in which individual decision making and health- related action takes place ... It instructs people to be individually responsible at a time when they are becoming less capable as individuals of controlling their health environment ... [which] is particularly problematic in the case of
21 the poor, since poverty itself is now widely accepted as among the most significant risk factors for illness and premature death (1999: 126).
In response to critiques of this kind, ‘many public health researchers have returned to public health’s origins and reconsidered the role of the environment’ (Frohlich et al. 2001: 777). The study of health context challenges the assumption that people are entirely responsible for their health status, taking up the broader framework of a ‘new public health’, to address the ‘multicausal’ determinants of health (e.g., Australian Institute for Health and Welfare 2002).
A few media researchers have focused on the implications of this contemporary culture of ‘self-health’. For example, in a historical study of Good Housekeeping magazine, Bunton traced a generational change in ‘health care regimes’ over the first half of the 20th century, from an unquestioned acceptance of medical authority, to a prioritisation of ‘an active subject who is enterprising and self-caring’ (1997: 224). Bunton is also concerned with positioning popular magazines as sites of political change: ‘If under advanced liberalism the relationship between expertise and politics becomes increasingly subject to realignment with rational calculation and the market, then magazines present this process in a radical form’ (1997: 242). And in a study of the ‘archetypes of infection’ portrayed in mid-90s Australian press representations of PLWHA, Lupton suggested: [The] distinction between innocent and guilty people with HIV/AIDS is underpinned by the strong emphasis upon the association between ‘lifestyle choices’ and health states that has emerged in medical and public health discourses over the past few decades. These discourses have identified certain illnesses as the outcome of personal choice and therefore support the notion that such conditions are in some way deserved, the price paid for having neglected one’s duty of care to oneself (1999a: 38).
Bonner (1998; 2002) and McKay (1999; 2002) have also published widely on the topics of health information and health narratives in women’s magazines, arguing that although magazines rarely challenge the rhetoric of individual responsibility for health, they also do not simply blame the individual for becoming ill (2000: 43). Instead, women’s magazines focus on how individuals respond to these difficult situations: ‘their response is what shows their moral character’ (Bonner & McKay 2000: 143). This raises the question of how reader letters negotiate the self-care obligations promoted by
22 health magazines, which may have an even greater emphasis on ethically informed behavior.
2. The medicalisation of identity and sociality
Health magazines assume that audiences are self-reflexively concerned with the health status of themselves, their friends and their family. Therefore, the second cultural condition of health magazines can be described in broad terms as the ‘medicalisation’ of identity and of sociality. Used in this way, medicalisation can be defined as ‘the idea that medicine is expanding its scope to include aspects of life previously deemed outside medical knowledge’ (Seale 1994: 116). And the recent identification of ‘new’ medical conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (Conrad & Potter 2000) or Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (Kroll-Smith 2003) demonstrates the broadening of medical jurisdiction to include such socially ‘inappropriate’ behaviours as hyperactivity and fatigue. However, this cultural condition also involves the inclusion of biology within the fabric of contemporary subjectivity and socialisation, inspiring new modes of relating to the self and to others such as ‘somatic individuality’ (Novas & Rose 2000) and ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow 1996).
Novas and Rose (2000) argue that a ‘somatic individuality’ is created by the technological capacity to identify genetic risk which configures otherwise healthy people as pathological agents. Rose has conducted a variety of research on the relationship between biology and identity, positing that ‘selfhood has become intrinsically somatic’ (2001: 18), and that new technologies, such as genetics, ‘render novel aspects of human vitality visible, reshaping “experience”, not only making sense of it in new ways, but actually reorganizing it in a new way’ (2001: 18). Rose links this reorganisation to the politics of advanced liberalism, in which “biological identity generates biological responsibility” (2001: 18), particularly for those identified as carrying the risk of transmitting medical conditions to others, as in inherited genetic disorders. In this way, medicalised identities are implicated within a network of medical relations involving the constitution of new collectivities that transgress traditional roles for the sick patient: While many critics see the new biomedicine as individualizing, we can already see new forms of collectivization emerging ... ‘at risk’ individuals
23 are joining into groups and organizations, not merely demanding public provision and rights, but making their own claims on the deployment of biomedical technologies and the direction of biomedical research – as, for example, in the case of families of those with muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease or breast cancer ... As somatic individuals engage with vital politics, a new ethics of life itself is taking shape (Rose 2001: 18-19).
A similar position has been articulated by Rabinow, who proposes the term ‘biosociality’ to describe ‘the likely formation of new group and individual identities and practices’ (1996: 99) arising from genetics. And as Waldby has observed of ‘tissue transfer’ (i.e., the medical transfer of blood, organs and other tissues between places and people), ‘biotechnically-mediated intercorporeality creates new circuits of relationship in ways that are often neither anticipated nor recognized by medical researchers or liberal bioethicists devoted to the defence of an autonomous self’ (2002: 251). This suggests that new medical technologies can influence the ways in which we understand ourselves as self-regulating and independent subjects, free to act out our social relationships outside of medical expectations. Instead, new ‘medicalised’ forms of identity and sociality situate health as central to normative life expectations.
Although there has been very little work in media studies that directly engages with these new theories of the subject of medicine, a recent paper argues that the media play an increasingly important role in the ‘medicalisation’ of identity: Excessive daytime sleepiness is a ‘disease’ fashioned by popular media, and communicated directly to ordinary people outside the institutional encounter between physician and patient. Coached and informed by a persuasive rhetorical authority, ordinary people are claiming to know something valid, that is, medical, about the nature of the body (Kroll-Smith 2003: 640).
The only other related research tackles the media treatment of new scientific technologies, such as genetically modified foods (Tulloch & Lupton 2002) and the media ‘biofantasies’ around gene technology: As new genetic technologies become more and more integrated in preventive medicine and public health – in screening, testing, counselling, and treatment – genetics will radically alter the way we view our bodies, and our ability to manipulate and control our environment. Given this, it is important to investigate how gene stories selectively present facts, themes, and claims, and thereby help limit what can be known about health, disease, and embodiment (Petersen 2001: 1267).
24 This work recognises the media treatments of new medical technologies, but does not displace the possibility that patients negotiate with that technology in relation to a wider range of cultural frames than is authorised by media discourse. New media industries such as health magazines must surely contribute in important ways to the popular appropriation of medical knowledge, and the ongoing constitution of new forms of ‘medicalised’ identity and sociality that are occurring in relation to this knowledge.
3. The commodification of health and the marketisation of health care
Health magazines assume that their readers can be predominantly characterised as health care consumers. Therefore, the third cultural condition of health magazines is the commodification of health associated with the marketisation of the health care industries in the context of public sector reform. Marketisation can be defined as ‘employing the mechanisms of markets within government’ (Lane 1997: 5) which in the case of health care services implies the discursive translation of the ‘patient’ into the ideal model of a pro-active health ‘consumer’: Whereas the former term suggests passivity and diminished capacity for independent decision-making, the latter implies a capacity for independent decision-making, and a readiness to put information to use. Consumerism is often presented in terms of personal empowerment and freedom of choice. However, behind the rhetoric of ‘freedom of choice’, ‘right to know’ and ‘entitlement to participate’, that has recently come to dominate discussions in health care, lie compulsions surrounding the exercise of choice and an array of predefined and limited options for action. The ‘good consumer’ of health care is compelled to make choices, to exhibit appropriate ‘information-seeking’ behaviour, and to behave in certain prescribed ways (consulting ‘relevant’ expertise, taking the ‘right’ medicine, engaging in personal risk management, and so on) (Henderson & Petersen 2002: 2-3).
The commodification and marketisation of health and health care have also led to the increasing influence of consumer advocacy groups across the spectrum of medical decision-making. This includes consumers being drawn into the medical sector, to participate in policy and research processes (e.g., Consumers’ Health Forum of Australia 2001; Boote et al. 2002; Chopyak & Levesque 2002)
The involvement of lay consumers in the ‘democratic’ management of medical research is generally presumed to be advantageous for all involved. However, the rise of
25 consumer activism can also encourage a distancing between consumers and their ‘choice’ of medical expertise and intervention. As Novas and Rose have suggested: ... relations with professional expertise are increasingly conducted at a distance ... Knowledge comes to be regarded as residing in multiple sites, which are to be actively sought and assimilated for purposes of the care for the self and the care of others. Somatic individuals ... engage with this knowledge as interested and avid consumers, aware of the range of knowledge products on the market, and demanding that their choice is constantly expanded ... The patient is to become skilled, prudent and active, an ally of the doctor, a proto-professional – and to take their own share of the responsibility for getting themselves better (2000: 506, 482).
This quote introduces the notion of the modern consumer as self-advocating, technologically literate, and media-savvy; acting ‘most often on what is perceived by them to be in their best interests’ (Lock 2001: 481). This is a necessarily idealised model of the medical/media consumer and in many ways, is an explicit challenge to the traditional notion of the passive ‘sick role’ as developed by Parsons in 1951 and much discussed and critiqued in the sociological literature since that time (e.g., Frank 1991; Greco 1993; Bunton & Burrows 1995; Fahy & Smith 1999; McKay 2001).
This rendering of the patient as a rational and responsible consumer has radically altered media representations of health and illness. For example, Lupton has argued that images of ‘medicine and health care in popular media’ imply that consumers have the ‘responsibility to deal with risks, to seek out knowledge about them and deal with them individually by engaging in self-regulation’ (1998: 205). Kelleher, Gabe et al argue that this is a positive move, claiming ‘the creation of a more critical journalistic perspective may be providing a counterweight to medical power, empowering readers, listeners and viewers to challenge medical decision-making and reducing the esteem in which doctors have been held’ (1994: xvi-xvii). Similarly, as Williams and Calnan suggest: ‘Not only do the media contribute to this de-mystification of science and technology, they also contribute to the growth of a critically informed lay populace, and in doing so act as important ‘cultural intermediaries’, arbitrating between the competing claims of social and scientific rationality’ (1996: 1618). However, much media research continues to focus on the dominance of normative representations of medicine and health care, concluding, for example, that ‘in spite of its potential to invoke challenge, the active consumer role does not detract from the primacy of medicine in health coverage’
26 (Hodgetts & Chamberlain 1999: 331). It can even be argued that the presence of the active consumer role supports the traditional authority of medicine. As Irvine suggests: Consumer rhetoric has furnished officials with the discursive conditions, and a moral vocabulary, to intensify the scrutiny of health care institutions and professional practices and extend bureaucratic authority in the social, psychological and moral lives of self-regulating, but far from autonomous, professionals and patients (2002: 43).
Perhaps, therefore, the role of active consumer is not empowering for every patient. As Lupton suggests: The privileged representation of the patient as the reflexive, autonomous consumer simply fails to recognize the often unconscious, unarticulated dependence that patients may have on doctors ... It may be difficult to adopt the ideal-type consumer subject position, to think clearly and to calculate costs and benefits, if one is suffering from pain, distress and illness and the attendant emotions of fear and anxiety (1997: 380).
Since health magazines are so dominated by the model of the active, self-advocating health consumer, it is interesting to consider how reader letters take up or resist these separated positions of consumer and patient.
4. The proliferation of alternative approaches to wellbeing
Health magazines assume that audiences are interested in a diversity of health information, including both conventional and unconventional therapies. Therefore, the fourth cultural condition of health magazines focuses on their holistic conception, achieved through physical, emotional and spiritual balance. The increasing presence of such ‘whole-person’ explanations of health is linked to a wider turn away from the conventional authority of allopathic medicine. The social validation of alternative philosophies of health care include ‘such health salient foci as nutrition, psychological and spiritual well-being, interpersonal relations and influences emanating from the environment’ (Lowenberg & Davis 1994: 581). In some ways this shift is associated with the consumer critique of medical authority, suggesting, as Siahpush has argued, that ‘people turn away from orthodoxy not because of its failure to deliver the promise of good health, but because of the way they are treated by doctors’ (1998: 67). Indeed, alternative medicine can be seen to operate in deliberate contradistinction to the ‘critical’ distance between doctors and patients:
27 By way of encouraging a more activist stance toward one’s health as for its inherent democratic value, holistic health aims at reducing substantially the status distance between practitioners and clients. The traditional expertise- based authoritarianism of the former and ignorance borne acquiescence of the latter are eschewed in favour of a more egalitarian exchange between the two. The attainment of greater symmetry in the relationship is seen as instrumental in sustaining and strengthening the client’s commitment to self-responsible health care (Lowenberg & Davis 1994: 581).
However, conventional medicine cannot be accused of being unresponsive to the consumer demand for a more reflexive approach to health. As Eastwood has observed, ‘increased consumer demand for alternative therapies is a universal trend in contemporary Western industrialised societies ... [And for this reason, some] GPs provide for the incorporation of alternative medicine into their daily practice’ (2000: 150-151). Even the British Medical Journal, a stronghold of orthodox biomedicine, has published a series of articles on the medical and consumer value of some alternative health approaches (Zollman & Vickers 1999c, 1999b, 1999a).
However, across the range of celebratory claims made about alternative health, the themes of personal responsibility, medicalised identity, and consumer advocacy are rarely challenged. In fact, it has even been suggested that these cultural conditions are at their most intense in this rapidly proliferating sector: In its pronouncements, holistic health places great emphasis on persons assuming responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. Indeed, the demonstration of a sense of responsibility – through health information seeking, dietary monitoring, behaviour modification, stress reduction, spiritual exploration etc – is seen as inseparable from the very condition of health to which one aspires, i.e., it is at one and the same time both means and end (Lowenberg & Davis 1994: 581).
The various industries grouped around the ‘emotionally expressive body’ (Williams, S 1998: 444), are most often described as ‘New Age’, and although this sector is often dismissed as a minority interest, there is increasing evidence that ‘the purchase of New Age materials (books, magazines, tapes, and so forth) (a) is [both] surprisingly common, and (b) is distributed rather evenly across most segments of the population’ (Mears & Ellison 2000: 308). In many ways, the genres of ‘self-help’ and ‘New Age’ have become interchangeable, both prioritising the cultural primacy of the active, enterprising and self-caring individual. As Redden puts it: ‘...the self becomes an individual’s primary resource for effective positive outcomes in life’ (2002: 37). The development of
28 an ‘oppositional’ consumer sector can be seen as further evidence of the expansion of advanced liberalism. As Bunton has proposed, ‘...rather than challenging medicine, [such phenomena] are integral to liberalism’s own self-questioning of the right to govern, which incites active citizenship’ (1997: 230). That is, consumer dissatisfaction is entirely compatible with the neoliberal objective of mobilising self-advocacy and self-care in responsible citizens.
While there has been a considerable amount of media research on the construction of biomedical authority in the media (e.g., Fursich & Lester 1996; Lupton 1998; Entwistle & Sheldon 1999), less attention has been paid to media representations of alternative medicine. Some exceptions to this include a discourse analysis of media treatments of the medical ‘problem’ of menopause, grouped into pharmaceutical, ‘alternative’ and feminist emancipatory texts (Coupland & Williams 2002). Another recent study considered how antioxidants were represented in the Finnish print media, polarised into conventional and unorthodox medical positions (Uusitalo et al. 2000: 77). And Kirkman has examined the portrayal of health experts in New Zealand women’s magazines, concluding that ‘in a number of magazines, alternative health practitioners are gaining equal recognition’ (2001: 756). However, the majority of media studies tend to conclude that although the media, as Seale puts it, ‘have exploited the “fall” of the professional hero that has become a growing feature of modern life’ (2002b: 186), this has not constituted an overall challenge to the authority of medicine. Instead, as Lupton has consistently observed, ‘while doctors’ professional practices may come under an intense spotlight of public scrutiny ... the medical profession as a whole appears to enjoy significant cultural and social authority’ (Lupton & McLean 1998: 957). This suggests that patients are not unduly influenced by a media bias towards consumer scepticism, and instead ‘appear likely to engage in strategies of media processing that privilege representations which bolster their trust’ (Lupton 1996: 46), and ‘to invest their faith and trust in scientific medicine and doctors’ expertise’ (Lupton 1998: 205). Finally, a recent article from Doel and Segrott offers a timely investigation of British health magazines and the close associations between gender and health within the industries of complementary and alternative medicine: The connections that these magazines forge between gendered femininity and health are by no means unproblematic. The fact that most health information within the mass media is communicated through women’s
29 magazines reinforces the idea that it is a predominantly female issue. Despite their discussion of supposedly generic, non-gender-specific illnesses such as stress or asthma, these concerns are typically refracted through women’s bodies and familial space. At the same time, the achievement of health for oneself and one’s family is presented as a highly individualised project (2003: 142).
This article will be considered in more depth in chapter six’s analysis of the associations between ‘nature’, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘femininity’ in women’s health magazines but for now, this research draws attention to the important role that alternative health plays in popular health magazines, and indeed, in the close social and political relationship between health, gender, and the genre of women’s magazines.
5. The women’s health movement and the responsibilising of gendered subjects
Health magazines assume that audiences are primarily defined by gender and are particularly interested in the health needs of gendered bodies. Therefore, the fifth cultural condition of health magazines relates to a more explicitly political movement than the previous four sections. The health needs of women were a focal point of the women’s movements of the 1960s and 70s in developed nations (Manderson 1998) and the current normalisation of the notion of ‘women’s health’ is a clear testament to the success of these movements in bringing this political issue to popular consciousness (Eckman 1996). The address to an audience of predominantly female readers of health magazines can be seen as a result of this feminist campaign to challenge sexist presuppositions in biomedical practice. Much recent gender research is aligned with what has been described as ‘third-wave feminism’, which ‘works explicitly toward understanding difference and respecting its importance to feminist thought’ (Riordan 2001: 280). This generation of gender research focuses on, for example, the way medical interventions are experienced by younger women, lesbians, or women of different ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Denenberg 1995; Banister 2001; MacDonald & Wright 2002). But much women’s health research is still premised on the assumption that men are permitted a more privileged position within the social economy of health. For example, in a Foucauldian analysis of the social construction of femininity, Bartky writes: ‘...since it is women themselves who practise this discipline on and against their own bodies, men get off scot-free’ (1997: 149). There is increasing evidence that such a statement is simply not appropriate and public health research has begun to examine the
30 ‘inequalities’ that men face in accessing appropriate health care services and being effectively targeted by health promotion campaigns (Williams 2003).
A recent report into contemporary forms of urban masculinity in Australia stated: Epidemiological data show that Australian men have consistently higher rates of exposure to risk factors, including depression and suicidal ideation, and they die from all non-sex specific leading causes at much higher rates than women ... These data have helped create a sense of crisis in Australian men’s health among medical professionals, health department officials, and academics (Lambevski et al. 2001: 1).
This sense of a ‘crisis’ (Lyons & Willott 1999) in men’s health has also led to a series of social research studies on the particularities of male body politics and risk behaviour. As White has claimed, ‘men’s health is a social issue, with implications for all sections of society’ (2002: 268). Historically, this shift began as a development from the feminist appraisal of women’s health and the subsequent dismantling of the social, linguistic and legal certainties about the social roles and behaviours expected of men, whereby ‘men are now less certain of themselves than ever before’ (Buchbinder 1994: 1). Masculinity studies has been a recent scholarly development, led by theorists such as Connell (1995), and Petersen (1998). Although, as Hayes has outlined, ‘men’s health has been “mainstreamed” in Australia since 1995 through media attention, government activities, professional advocacy, and association with women’s health’ (2003: 141), the responsibilising of this ‘risky’ population offers an interesting opportunity to observe the gendered imperatives of advanced liberal citizenship: The discourse of men’s health [suggests] that men as ‘healthy’ citizens should adopt the range of bodily regulation, monitoring and surveillance activities emerging from the state with which women have routinely been asked to engage for decades. As such, the men’s health movement is both gendering and pathologising men’s bodies, representing them as emphatically ‘male’ in relation to disease and death – rather than as a degendered, ideal-type ‘healthy’ body – and as subject to the medical gaze (Petersen & Lupton 1996: 87).
An important recent book on this topic is Watson’s (2000) Male Bodies, which focuses on lay narratives of health, self and body by men in different socio-cultural contexts. Watson found that the men he interviewed tended to resist these new health imperatives, interpreting their obligations to be ‘in shape’ as a requirement not of medical convention but of social participation as an employee, father, husband and so on.
31
Most media research on gender and health has focused on the role of women’s magazines in communicating health information to women readers. Although many of these articles are published in medical, rather than media, journals, much of this research does adopt a critical approach to media texts and audiences. For example, Nursing Inquiry published a study of menstrual advertisements in four Australian magazines targeted at young women, which concluded that the competing discourses of ‘idealised’ and ‘tainted’ femininity established a confusing blend of allusion and description (Raftos et al. 1998). Women & Health published the results of a study of twenty one years of US and Canadian women’s magazines, suggesting that breast cancer is represented as ‘caused by everything, particularly the inherent “pathologies” of the female body such as early menstruation or late menopause’ (Clarke 1999: 126). Preventive Medicine published a study on the ‘over-representation of breast cancer in popular magazines’ (Blanchard et al. 2002) and in the Australian Journal of Primary Health, Shugg and Liamputtong Rice concluded that a survey of representations of women’s health in Melbourne’s print media unduly emphasised the role of women as mothers, which they asserted was ‘limiting not only their access to information on other health issues but also adding pressure on them to display their womanhood by bearing children’ (1999: 723-24).
Bonner and McKay remain at the forefront of research into the cultural context of health in magazines, and in one particular article on the history of Australian women’s magazines since 1949, they trace a ‘paradigm shift ... away from a solely biomedical model and towards one emphasising an individual’s personal responsibility for their own well-being’ (2002: 54). This analysis demonstrates the role for magazines in shifting popular expectations of gendered health responsibilities: The new paradigm fails to change the responsibility of a mother for her children’s health: they remain extensions of her body (though her responsibility for her husband’s wellbeing has diminished), but her responsibility for her children, very much in keeping with her responsibility for herself, is no longer founded in her simply seeking and following professional medical advice. She is now encouraged to be much more proactive, engaging in a wider range of preventative matters (hygiene is no longer enough) and seeking out information about varying approaches to the treatment of illness (Bonner & McKay 2002: 54).
32 Unfortunately, there has been very little research published on men, medicine and the media. Two exceptions include a qualitative study of the discourse of ‘machismo’ in print media representations of testicular cancer (Clarke & Robinson 1999), and a quantitative study that claims men’s sport and fitness magazines may create ‘pathological’ body image disorders in young men: ‘adolescent boys take steroids and other pills, powders and supplements in order to gain muscle, thereby doing irreparable damage to their bodies in much the same way adolescent girls vomit, abuse laxatives, and stop eating’ (Botta 2003: 396). This thesis hopes to expand important recent research on men’s lifestyle magazines (e.g., Jackson et al. 2001) to consider how Men’s Health magazine constructs a popular culture of health responsibility in men, and how women’s health magazines commodify the links between natural health, femininity and the discourse of ‘wellbeing’.
6. The HIV/AIDS epidemic and community health activism
Health magazines contribute to consumer health activism regarding medical risks such as breast cancer (Cartwright 1998) or even ‘Mad Cow Disease’ (Kitzinger & Reilly 1997) but in many ways, HIV/AIDS has been the most enduring and ‘organising’ force behind both commercial and non-profit health magazines. Therefore, the sixth cultural condition of health magazines is specifically linked to one particular health ‘event’: the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developed nations. The spread of HIV through western nations in the 1980s marked a defining moment in the development of a community-based response to the politics of health care, and a subsequent shift in health decision making from medical and government bodies, towards community groups and affected individuals. Although the social research on HIV and AIDS is widely diverse, the work of most use to this thesis pertains to the ‘responsibilising’ of risky subjects that occurred during, and as a result of, the epidemic. The populations most affected by HIV are those prioritised within the epidemiological mapping of the virus (e.g., Waldby 1996): gay or homosexual men; intravenous drug users; and to lesser extent, sex workers. Therefore, those identified with one (or more) of these three risk categories are subject to a series of responsibilising strategies, whereby the HIV epidemic is personalised to the level of individual choice around sexual and drug-use behaviours. There are many ways in which these strategies are enacted, but one particularly evocative example is outlined by Race in a study of the social implications of HIV testing and treatment technologies:
33 [HIV medicine, a] complex social technology of medical management (involving compliance, regular testing, and so on], where instituted, made it possible for the new therapies to prolong the lives of people with HIV. Naturally this is to be welcomed. However, in so doing, it creates new emphases on different types of personal responsibility. The capacity to identity the non-compliant as a source of risk or pollution is a good example of this (2001: 176).
Race traces a temporal shift in the dynamics of safe sex practice from a time before effective testing methods became available, when gay men were forced to assume every sexual partner was HIV positive, to a post-HAART (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatments) and post-testing environment in which individuals were invested with the technological capacity to be able to judge risk situations for themselves: ‘...risk management now began to be reconfigured as an individual, self-driven responsibility (and not as a community practice)’ (Race 2001: 174). Fuqua makes a similar conclusion in her study of direct-to-consumer HIV/AIDS prescription drug advertising: ‘...the rhetoric of individual agency or activity enables HIV/AIDS to be reframed as a treatable illness ... [in which] those who are ill “choose” to be’ (2002: 663).
A similar approach can be taken to the second category of HIV risk — intravenous drug use — to reframe the debate around the risks of addiction to consider how the increasing obligations of neoliberal citizenship influence the legal and political rendering of the drug user. Although drug use has been the subject of much research within the disciplines of criminology, medicine and sociology, there has been a recent attempt to fuse an interdisciplinary approach that contextualises the ‘harms’ of drug use (i.e., risk of death and disease, links to crime and social ‘dysfunction’) within a critical appraisal of social context (e.g., Singer 2001). As Rhodes has suggested: ... behaviours which are, for public health reasons, considered epidemiologically ‘risky’ may be viewed in different terms by drug users themselves ... For this reason future theories of risk behaviour in the field of HIV and the addictions need to consider risk as a social, rather than individual, phenomenon (1997: 223).
This approach has been similarly voiced in relation to the third category of HIV: the profession of sex work. Sex workers have been associated with the spread of HIV despite little evidence for this in developed nations such as Australia. In fact, HIV prevalence is extremely low among Australian sex workers (NCHECR 2001: 19) and yet, this industry remains subject to public health interventions, in the form of
34 responsibilising strategies for safe sex. This process appears to have been so successful that, as Brewis and Linstead have observed, ‘Western prostitutes have also often played an active role in getting the safe sex message across to the wider community, not just to clients, but by campaigning publicly for safe sex practices’ (2000b: 173).
The development of a discourse of consumer activism is in many ways indebted to the community response to HIV, a phenomenon that has been widely observed (e.g., Brashers et al. 2000) and which is partly responsible for the existence of these three community health magazines. As Hilton has argued, consumer culture: ... is both liberating and restricting, positive and negative, broad and narrow, and it will continue to be so. Consumerist language was used to introduce an internal market into the health services which was criticized for actually failing to serve patient-consumer needs. Yet at the same time it enabled certain groups to find a voice, assert their rights and gain notable successes in terms of health provision (2002: 256).
Likewise, although consumerist language is central to the politics of community health, an ethics of consumer behaviour necessarily accompanies its use. So, as this quote from Brewis and Linstead demonstrates, high-risk behaviours such as sex work is evaluated as either positively pro- or negatively anti-consumption: ... the prostitute’s identity may vary from one which clings by its fingertips to life, heavily addicted, barely able to escape debt, involved in drug dealing and petty crime, in and out of court and subjected to the constant threat of violence from unstable partners, possibly with children in care and which sees itself as either [a] hapless or guilty victim, to one which enjoys a high level of income, planned with proper financial advice, builds a secure business (in and out of the sex industry), pursues a health-conscious lifestyle, develops and shares caring and wisdom, provides a service distinguished by its quality, educates others, is active in the promotion of women’s rights, and is assertive and positive in its self-regard (2000b: 177).
Although these authors are attempting to critique the polarisation of sex worker identities within prostitution literature, they nonetheless demonstrate how the notion of social deviance is closely associated with both consumer incompetence (debt, business failures) and citizenship irresponsibility (crime, violence, welfare). As Higgs has observed, ‘...the new citizen learns to engage with risks constructively because if he or she doesn’t there is no collective security net waiting to make good the damage’ (1998: 193-94). Community health magazines advocate for the empowerment of marginalised
35 groups implying that these audiences face greater impediments to the fulfilment of citizenship obligations.
Although there has been very little research published on community health media, there has been some interest in other forms of community and activist media. For example, there is some research available on the social functions of local community newspapers (e.g., Koeppl 1997; McCleneghan & Ragland 2002), gay and lesbian media (e.g., Ridge et al. 1997; Wiessing et al. 1999; Morton & Duck 2000), and ethnic media (e.g., Jeffres & Hur 1981; Blanks Hindman et al. 1999; Tsagarousianou 1999). There is also a complementary field of research on ‘alternative media’ (Hamilton 2000; Hamilton & Atton 2001), focusing on non-profit political newspapers (McLeod et al. 1996), community television (Higgins 1999) and radio (Barlow 1997; Carpentier et al. 2003), and multimedia social activism (Hing-Yuk Wong 2000; Makagon 2000), all of which is interested in the ‘mobilisation’ (Treno & Holder 1997) of non-commercial media audiences. James Gillett is one of the few authors to write about community- produced HIV/AIDS media, arguing that: Independently produced media among those who feel excluded from, even oppressed by, the dominant social order provides a means of raising awareness among oppressed or marginalised communities while at the same time challenging the meanings conveyed by social institutions like the mass media and the state considers the role of media activism has played in the development of community-led responses to HIV/AIDS (2000: Bit 1).
However, Gillett has recently tempered this radical appraisal of the political function of community media, suggesting that: In recent years, as the institutional response to HIV/AIDS has expanded, there have been fewer areas of contention between activist and mainstream media. Many of the initiatives that emerged through community mobilisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including media projects, have been incorporated into or contained by institutional structures. In this context, it becomes increasingly difficult for the alternative public sphere created through the AIDS movement to remain connected to the lives of many people with HIV/AIDS (2003: 621).
This quote suggests that Australian community health magazines might have a less ‘authentic’ connection to their audiences than is generally claimed. Chapter seven will address this in detail, with particular interest in the politics of participation facilitated
36 via the rhetoric of community empowerment central to these three community publications.
7. The reification of pleasure and risk
Health magazines assume that audiences are just as motivated by sensory pleasures as ascetic moralism, negotiating the ambivalent ideals of being ‘sensible’ and ‘not denying yourself’. Therefore, the seventh cultural condition of health magazines relates to the ways in which consumer culture draws upon discourses of bodily pleasure in order to capitalise upon these ambivalences. Indeed, it may be this condition that most clearly differentiates health magazines from public health doctrines. As Coveney and Bunton have recently suggested: ... pleasure and pleasure-seeking activities are often considered to be at the root of irrational, often spontaneous actions which predispose individuals to unhealthy, so-called risk-taking behaviours ... Pleasure is considered a prime force creating the ‘root of resistance’ whereby individuals flout the norm which public health attempts to impose ... Pleasure and pleasure-seeking is thus conceived as the weak link in the chain of command from authoritarian discourses of health governance to docile compliance for body maintenance (2003: 166).
Although health magazines clearly prioritise the virtues of body maintenance, they do not demonise all forms of pleasure-seeking and risk-taking. Lupton and Tulloch have argued that ‘the notion of risk-taking as contributing to self-development, self- actualisation, self-authenticity and self-control is part of a wider discourse that privileges the self as a continuing project that requires constant work and attention’ (2002: 122). This suggests that health magazines are somehow able to negotiate a more flexible definition of health than that established by public health, incorporating ‘risks’ such as cosmetic surgery, extreme sports, and unconventional therapies within the overall constitution of the healthy self.
The recent theoretical interest in risky pleasure is distinctly relevant to the critical study of health media. For example, Monaghan’s (2001) study of bodybuilders argues that medical sociology must pay greater attention to the lived and healthy body, rather than focusing only on illness and disability. Monaghan offers the notion of ‘vibrant physicality’ as a way to theorise bodybuilding as a deliberate attempt to take pleasure in the production and performance of ideal health: ‘For individuals embroiled in the
37 positive moment of bodybuilding, such activity is beneficial to mental, physical and/or social health’ (2001: 331, italics in original). This is, of course, a deliberately optimistic position, since bodybuilding also contributes to the social regulation of body types, and is often associated with steroid use, over-exercise and extreme competition. However, as Williams has suggested, consumer culture thrives upon this very ambivalence: ... health promotion exhorts us, among other things, to take more exercise, eat more ‘healthily’, reduce our stress levels, stop smoking and avoid excessive alcohol consumption ... On the other hand, however, we also have the emphasis on health as a consuming passion and pleasurable release ... The trick of consumer culture, it seems, rests precisely on the perpetuation of an ‘unbridgeable’ gap between idealized images and the real as the guarantee of ever renewed consumption. The rational mandate for ‘control’ (i.e., denial) therefore jostles if not clashes with the corporeal desire for release (i.e., pleasure), our bodies providing what is perhaps the ‘ultimate metaphor’ reflecting and refracting the general mood and cultural contradictions of late capitalist society (1998: 441-42).
The reification of pleasure is bound up in the politics of health and so perhaps health magazines are positioned as a mediating nexus between the pleasures of everyday consumer behaviour and the obligations of the healthy neoliberal citizen. As Williams has observed, ‘rooted as they are in the problem of human desire and the vicissitudes of emotions, bodies are sensual as well as ascetic, fluid as well as static, volatile as well as fixed’ (1998: 440). This focus on the politics of living healthy bodies necessarily includes the role of emotions: a subject beginning to be brought into medical sociology (James & Gabe 1996; Williams, SJ 1998) and cultural studies (Harding & Pribram 2002).
Media studies on health, pleasure and consumer culture offer some important insights into the role that the media play in facilitating these contradictory processes. For example, Petersen argues: An important point to note about the contemporary focus on appearance and bodily appearance in the media is that ultimate responsibility for body maintenance rests with the individual. Within consumer culture ... Health and well-being become items that can be bought like any other commodity, and it is ultimately the individual who is held responsible for making the ‘correct choice’ ... Unfortunately for the majority of people, they can neither afford such commodities nor live up to the ideals (1994: 129).
Indeed, in a study on the representation of food controversies in the media, Lupton and Chapman found that media audiences actively challenged the incompatibility of the
38 competing requirements of consumers, finding ways of integrating the various expectations within their own frame of possibility. For example, with an issue like cholesterol reduction, the dictate that all fats are bad is now tempered by a distinction between some good and some bad fats, which means that in many cases, audiences relied on more localised meanings to decide between tasty and healthy foods: ‘They tended to draw upon the repertoires of commonsense and “everything in moderation”, and their observations of others (friends and family members) as strategies to inform their response to the conflicting advice evident in media and health promotional texts’ (Lupton & Chapman 1995: 491). This suggests that health magazines offer a unique site for the analysis of these competing claims on risk, health, pleasure and rationality, and perhaps reader letters can offer some insight into how healthy citizenships are constituted via the public negotiation of these ambivalences.
8. The technological capacity to connect information and people
Health magazines assume that audiences have the technological and cultural literacy to access and evaluate information from multiple sources and so are marketed as an information gateway linked to a variety of secondary sources, only one of which is professional medical expertise. Therefore, the eighth cultural condition of health magazines is the technological capacity to connect information and people, presuming an ideal model of the pro-active consumer as the information conductor. As Beck has suggested, ‘In the individualized society, the individual must ... learn, on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself as the center of action, as the planning office with respect to his/her own biography, abilities, orientations, relationships and so on’ (1992: 135). This is no easy task, particularly since, as Nettleton and Burrows postulate, health information has escaped the confines of regulated expert institutions: Medical knowledge is no longer exclusive to the medical school and the medical text; it has ‘escaped’ into the networks of contemporary infoscapes where it can be accessed, assessed and reappropriated. Rather than being concealed within the institutional domains of medicine, knowledge of the biophysical body seeps out into cyberspace and may be accessed and assessed by non-’experts’. Furthermore, such knowledge may mix with alternative views or knowledges of the body, disease and illness, with the effect that new conceptualizations may emerge. Thus, medical knowledge and ideology may not be controlled by a medical elite, but may emerge from
39 the interactions of users, patients, consumers, pressure groups, and so on. (2003: 180).
Health magazines act as a conduit for the transmission and validation of a huge variety of health information sources, both expert and lay. Rather than challenging the authority of medical institutions, these magazines simply broaden the scope of permissible expertise, citing a wide range of theories and opinions about health.
As Ziguras has observed, ‘People often gather information and advice strategically ... They may consult friends, healthcare professionals, advertising material, self-help books, magazines, and, now, the Internet’ (2001: website). But it is the last technology that appears to have most radically opened up the possibilities for widespread information access (e.g., Pandey et al. 2003). The internet provides health consumers with the opportunity to design their own health care programs, not only ensuring access to more than one site of information, but also shifting the balance of power from monological information transfer to dialogical information exchange (Lee & Garvin 2003). As Shilling has noted, the internet ‘...appears to promise for those who can afford it an unprecedented degree of choice in health care decisions’ (2002: 629). However, as Henwood, Wyatt et al have argued, ‘“Rights” carry “responsibilities” and, whilst many commentators in the consumer health-information and consumer health-informatics fields may believe that increased consumer/patient responsibility for health is the way forward, some patients are clearly not yet convinced’ (2003: 604). Thus, although access to health information may offer invaluable opportunities for the democratisation of medical expertise, these positive effects are restricted to those with the financial and literacy prerequisites to make effective use of new technologies.
The internet also has the capacity to connect up people in diverse geographical and cultural spaces, which can facilitate the validation of new forms of lay health expertise: ... perhaps the most significant use of the Internet is to connect people with similar health issues. There are numerous online chat rooms, mailing lists and web-sites created by community-based organisations dedicated to every conceivable condition, and a newly diagnosed sufferer can often find a community of people ready to share their own experiences and offer support. We should not forget that, while most of the health information on the Internet flows from the top down, it is also a powerful medium for facilitating these horizontal connections (Ziguras 2000: 37).
40 Such horizontal connections also facilitate the expansion of globally-connected illness support groups. Although these new mediated social forums, ‘...are large, public, and disembodied, they offer people access to direct, open, supportive conversation...’ (Galegher et al. 1998: 512). The rapid proliferation in online support groups has offered a new and public space for the representation of illness experience, and so the study of illness narratives has recently begun to address these new genres of internet writing. Some of the texts offered as sites of self-expression include webforums (Novas & Rose 2000), home pages (Hardey 2002) and chat rooms (McKay 2001). But there are many other ways in which traditional forms of media such as magazines interact with the internet, including the promotion of internet information sources, and the establishment of promotional websites that reproduce material from print media. Although some media research is beginning to address these various technologies of narrative disclosure, health magazines offer a unique opportunity to consider how new sites of medical information are altering the social functions of medical expertise and how these negotiations between lay and ‘expert’ opinions are made publicly resonant.
9. The public fascination with disclosure, confession and exhibitionism
Health magazines assume that audiences will engage with health information only if it relates to their personal experience or triggers an empathetic recognition of other people’s stories. These magazines prioritise personal stories of health and illness, as journalistic introductions to medical topics, in more in-depth investigations of particular experiences and reader opinions in either the letters page, advice columns or surveys. Therefore, the ninth cultural condition of health magazines relates to the culture of ‘exhibitionism’ facilitated by the popular media. Exhibitionism is not used here in the sense of an excessive and extraverted flaunting of the private self but rather refers to a more general cultural trend in the validation of personal disclosures and confessions as suitable for public representation. This links the idea of ‘exhibitionism’ to the previous condition on information technologies, particularly relating to the observation that narratives of health and illness have become more central to the performance of advanced liberal subjectivity. Hyden has suggested that ‘illness narratives have different functions: to construct an illness experience, to reconstruct life history, to make disease and illness understandable and to collectivise the illness experience’ (1997: 64). A similar statement can be made about health narratives, or indeed, about any personal
41 narrative disclosure that is made in public. Rather than relying upon narrative genres, health magazines capitalise on the popular culture of narrative disclosure that has become increasingly legitimised, and indeed, customary, within popular media.
Narratives have taken on a new significance within social research and are of particular importance to medical sociology. Frank suggests that ‘...stories that ill people tell of their experiences are a technology of the self: yet another strategy of power in which illness becomes a truth-game, an occasion to know oneself as the subject of certain social knowledges’ (1998: 336). And as Bury posits, The current emphasis on ‘personal narratives’ and ‘lay beliefs’ and ‘lay knowledge’ in social research is ... part of a general feature of late modern cultures, involving the loosening of the authority of the ‘grand narratives’ of science and medicine in the ordering of everyday experience, and especially in response to illness (2001: 265).
Narratives have been interpreted via various theoretical models, including as ‘confessions’ (e.g., Barcan 1997; Marshall 1998), ‘disclosures’ (e.g., Baxter & Sahlstein 2000; Greene 2000) and ‘narcissistic performances’ (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998). Public sites for the performance of personal narratives are predominantly located in the popular media, typified by such genres as women’s magazines (Mandziuk 2001), television lifestyle programming (Giles 2002), talkshows (Carpentier 2001) and reality TV (Tincknell & Raghuram 2002). A recent article by Seaton (2003) even associates recent television acting styles (close-ups, domestic scenarios, etc.) with the tabloid interest in ‘exposing’ celebrity private lives.
Seale argues that there is a political function to the increasing presence of ‘real-life’ stories in media forums, particularly in those stories relating to the experiences of health and illness: The confessional narrative has become popular over a range of media genres. In relation to cancer and terminal illness, for example, personal accounts abound in which people recount their tribulations and successes in the face of life-threatening disease ... often contain[ing] a significant anti- medical component, in which orthodox medicine is cast as unhelpful or flawed (2003: 522).
Within magazines, the main forums for confessional narratives are reader letters in the letters page and reader ‘stories’ in editorial articles. In their analysis of ‘real-life’
42 magazine pathographies, McKay and Bonner concluded that ‘...the imperative to produce sensational copy means that for an ordinary woman’s story to be told, it must be highly personal, include elements of the bizarre — especially coincidence and excess — and conclude if at all possible with positive statements about triumphing over adversity’ (1999: 569). In the context of health, public disclosures are also framed as a therapeutic device, related to the ‘talking-cure’ of psychotherapy: ‘Even the most extreme of the tabloid pathographies in our sample advocates the benefits of telling the story both for the woman telling it and the women reading it’ (McKay & Bonner 1999: 570). One implication of the shift towards exhibitionism is that the popular media could increasingly become a ‘site for the airing of stories that invite other stories but no true debate’ (Wahl-Jorgensen 2001: 317). This is an important consideration in the study of health magazines, since this is a genre of popular media accustomed to soliciting stories but not necessarily to mobilising change.
10. The formation of (media) publics and counterpublics
All health magazines are concerned with the economic (market share, income) and cultural (interests, demographics) characteristics of their imagined audiences. However, magazines published with a profit motive are less explicitly concerned with the political concerns of their audiences, whereas the non-profit publications are quite clearly committed to political empowerment. Therefore, the tenth and final condition of health magazines relates to the ways in which they constitute their audiences as citizens of either normative ‘publics’ or marginalised ‘counterpublics’. This distinction is taken from Warner’s (2002) Publics and Counterpublics which offers several theoretical ideas that can be usefully applied to the comparative analysis of ‘commercial’ and ‘community’ health magazines. Firstly, Warner argues that every site or event involving an address to an imaginary public contributes to the constitution of a ‘public’. He writes: ‘A public is self-organized. A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself ... It exists by virtue of being addressed’ (2002: 67). Therefore, health magazines must be seen as each representing a different public, if only because they each actively and repeatedly address an imagined public. This is an important idea, particularly in that it avoids the question of evaluating the ‘authenticity’ of audiences, by assuming that publics are brought into being at the point of address, rather than existing a priori. Further to this, Warner argues: ‘A public is constituted
43 through mere attention ... If you are reading this, or hearing it or seeing it or present for it, you are part of this public’ (2002: 87). This assumes that audiences are constituted at the moment of engaging with a text, whether by choice or not. Again, this helps to avoid the problem of distinguishing when a group of imaginary readers has actually become some type of ‘concrete’ audience. Instead of attempting to identify or measure the audience, Warner suggests that a media public is discursively constituted at the point at which a reader reads, whether or not that reader then changes their health habits, or chooses not to buy the magazine after all, or indeed, writes a letter to the editor. In some ways, this also offers a way to approach audiences as simultaneously economic, cultural and political subjects, since publics must necessarily be all of these things, whether or not they are explicitly created within a market or social justice frame.
Another characteristic of Warner’s publics that resonates with this topic is the expectation that: ‘A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse’ (2002: 90). That is, publics are constituted through a circular mode of address that requires reflexive evidence of the existence of that public, in order to justify the ongoing cycle of discourse: Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public ... Writing to a public helps to make a world insofar as the object of address is brought into being partly by postulating and characterizing it. This performative ability depends, however, on that object’s being not entirely fictitious – not postulated merely, but recognized as a real path for the circulation of discourse. That path is then treated as a social entity (2002: 90-92).
This description corresponds with the discursive functions of health magazine reader letters. Warner is suggesting that publics are constituted through an ongoing cycle of writing those publics into the world, in order to construct evidence for a ‘real’ public presumed to already be in existence. So, for example, the audience of Men’s Health is ‘postulated’ and ‘characterised’ as a socially recognisable public of male readers, and as a potential media audience open to continuing address. This thesis is most interested in how the publication of reader letters — whether ‘real’ or fictional — justifies this ongoing constitution of health magazine publics.
44 Finally, Warner’s analysis of the function of discursive publics is useful because while it presumes that all discursive actions contribute to the constitution of publics, it also explicitly acknowledges that not every address is intended to address everyone. That is, a commercial health magazine such as Men’s Health, while producing a generalist description of its reading audience as ‘men’, does not actually intend to address all men, and certainly does not expect to be read by men with HIV, or men engaged in sex work or illicit drug use. Indeed, the generalist ‘publics’ constituted by commercial health magazines can be proven to be extremely exclusive in their modes of address. Therefore, Warner suggests that although all discourses produce publics, some are either voluntarily or deliberately constructed as ‘counterpublics’: Some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status (2002: 56).
Media counterpublics are constructed as minority challenges to the normative dominance of majority publics, involving a self-reflexive awareness of being outside mainstream society. Although there are problems with a simple polarisation between publics and counterpublics, this model nonetheless offers a useful way to approach a comparative analysis between commercial and community health magazines. For example, in the analysis of Men’s Health (chapter five), the magazine audience is addressed as a public of health, body and fashion-conscious, high-earning urban men; yet the reader letters indicate a counterpublic of ‘authentic’ Australian readers, unwilling to be reshaped into the ideal mould promoted by the global Men’s Health brand. And in the comparative analysis of Good Medicine and Nature & Health (chapter six), the claimed counterpublic of alternative health is problematised via its many congruences with the more overtly commercial approach of women’s beauty culture.
But perhaps the most useful application of this idea of ‘counterpublics’ can be found in the analysis of the three community magazines (chapter seven), in which community media audiences are constituted as economic, cultural and political counterpublics that experience multiple exclusions from normative public discourse. The Talkabout
45 audience is addressed as a counterpublic of people living with HIV or AIDS, in need of dedicated health information that is absent from the mainstream public sphere, notably, information about HIV treatments, welfare services, anti-discrimination policy and the political movement of positive pride. Similarly, in the case of User’s News, the magazine audience is addressed as a counterpublic that is bound together through the use of illicit drugs and the absence of fair and unbiased information about the safe administration of those illicit substances. And finally, in the case of The Professional, the magazine audience is addressed as a counterpublic engaged in work within the sex industry and unable to achieve the legal, economic and social recognition required to mobilise ‘pride’ in sex work as a valid form of employment. But rather than assuming that Warner’s model of publics and counterpublics can be unproblematically mapped onto the distinction between commercial and community media, these chapters will investigate the many ways in which these and other differentiating factors are deployed for particular purposes in magazine reader letters.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to contextualise the cultural conditions of health magazines and to introduce some of the key theories that have contributed to the remaining chapters. One of the overarching themes of these conditions has been the notion of ‘responsibility’, implicated in all six of the health magazines under investigation, whether they are situated within the context of men’s lifestyle and consumer culture or the ‘alternative’ domain of natural health care, or indeed, in the diffuse contexts of illicit drug use. As Petersen has observed: Being a ‘healthy’, ‘responsible’ citizen entails new kinds of detailed work on the self and new interpersonal demand and responsibilities. The strategy of ‘community participation’, universally applauded by new public health commentators as the means of ‘empowering’ citizens, establishes its own disciplines of the self (e.g., the requirement that one engage with formal political structures and with various experts, and the ability to demonstrate commitment to shared goals and to manage interpersonal conflict), and may serve as a strategy of exclusion (1997: 204).
This observation is critical to the ways in which ‘commercial’ and ‘community’ health magazines can be comparatively associated and differentiated. Despite their profound social and political objectives, these six magazines are still all situated within a context of advanced liberalism, in which the deployment of the ideal subject as responsible and
46 self-actualising is almost completely unchallenged. All six magazines are constituted as health magazine publics and exist by virtue of the ongoing construction of a discursive space for their address. And yet, the three community magazines offer a quite different perspective on the political function of this address. Insofaras Talkabout, User’s News and The Professional are concerned with political transformation, they are engaged in the constitution of counterpublics, and in this way, the presence of responsibilising strategies is framed differently from the commercial magazines. And even though there are points at which some counterpublic rebellion is apparent in commercial magazines (such as in the unconventional therapies promoted in Nature & Health), these magazines nonetheless presume to be addressing audiences of responsible consumers, who face only ‘everyday’ issues in the quest to achieve a more complete public health.
47 CHAPTER THREE
Researching magazines and reader letters
Introduction
The previous chapter offered a global perspective on the cultural conditions of the contemporary ‘phenomenon’ of health magazines. This chapter will focus on the specifically local conditions of this topic, offering a brief explanation of the methodological choices made in the collection and analysis of the material presented in subsequent chapters. These choices are influenced by a wide range of disciplinary fields, however as Lupton has suggested: There is much to be gained from an eclectic perspective which approaches the same research problem from different theoretical and methodological angles, while at the same time maintaining an awareness of the disciplinary traditions and rationale of the different approaches (1994: 19).
The eclectic methodologies employed in this thesis have been grouped under the general headings of content analysis and context analysis, both because of clear differences between the two but also because these approaches are applied in quite distinct ways throughout the remaining chapters of this thesis. The term content analysis is used here to refer to a method that ‘counts’ measurable phenomena, whereas the term context analysis groups the more interpretive methods of discourse analysis, ranging from grounded theory to linguistic, narrative and critical discourse analysis. Some of the subsequent chapters contain smaller sections on methodology, in order to ground that information in the context of the actual analysis. This chapter, then, serves as a general positioning, including an overview of the selection and collection of research material and the organisation, coding and analysis of that material.
Collecting the material
In order to conduct a comparative analysis of health magazines and their audiences, ‘reader letters’ were identified as a genre common to most publications, offering enough scope for variation to be comparatively interesting. Although magazine reader letters follow traditional stylistic conventions, their range of topics and arguments demonstrate differences between the magazines and their imagined audiences. Each of the six
48 publications chosen for this research included a letters page in each issue published between January 1997 and December 2000. This period provided enough material for an effective qualitative analysis as well as some basic quantitative observations.
Figure 7: Sample letter pages (left) Men’s Health February 2002 and (right) The Professional August-October 2000
Library holdings of each magazine title were identified and the letters page of each relevant issue photocopied. Library collections accessed were held at the State Library of New South Wales, the University of New South Wales, the AIDS Council of New South Wales and the National Centre in HIV Social Research. Missing issues were also sourced from some magazine publishing archives. In total, three hundred and sixty-four reader letters were collected to form the basis of the research. Additional supporting information such as magazine industry statistics and audience demographics were gathered as required, along with appropriate theoretical literature. Letters were scanned from the photocopied pages into Microsoft Word and then checked against the original to ensure correct reproduction. This text was transferred into a customised Endnote (bibliographic software) template using categories such as writer’s name, month and year, letter title, magazine title, location of publication, magazine publisher, issue number and page.
Although the letters page is dedicated to representing the ‘voice’ of magazine readers, there is a multitude of strategies that magazine editors use in order to communicate particular ideas about their audiences. Thus, magazine editors can also offer invaluable insight into how media audiences are ‘imagined’ by media producers, presuming that
49 ‘...magazine editors should be treated as very powerful opinion leaders’ (Johnson 1997: 22) or at the very least, as cultural intermediaries. As Nixon and du Gay suggest: ... there is considerable strategic value to be gained from focusing upon [cultural] intermediary occupations ... In particular, in relation to the study of the commercial domain and commercially produced culture, they shift our attention away from the over-emphasis on the moment of consumption that has tended to dominate recent accounts of the commercial field. In doing so, they open up the links between production and consumption and the interplay between these discrete moments in the lifecycle of cultural forms (2002: 498).
Although this quote focuses specifically on commercial media cultures, it can also be applied to the domain of community media, particularly as community editors are often solely responsible for the entire production of their magazines. To source this editorial perspective, an interview request was sent to the editors of all six publications (see Appendix I: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form), and the editors of Men’s Health, Talkabout, The Professional and User’s News agreed to participate3. For these four interviews, general guidelines were followed to standardise the subject of discussion (see Appendix II: Guidelines for interview structure). Audio tape recordings were transcribed following standard procedures, which attempted to remain sensitive to the specificities of spoken communication (Kohler Riessman 1993: 12). The editors were not guaranteed anonymity, due to the public nature of their professional position, however, no personal information was discussed during the interviews. Full transcripts of the interviews were sent to the participants for their approval, and confirmation of their approval was received and noted. Tape recordings were destroyed after transcription and checking and de-identified transcripts will be retained for five years and then safely disposed.
Analysing the material
In Crotty’s terms, the foundations of this particular piece of social research can be described as the ‘methods’ of theme identification, comparative analysis and content analysis, the ‘methodology’ of discourse analysis, the ‘theoretical perspective’ of critical inquiry and the ‘epistemology’ of subjectivism (1998: 5). This section offers a
3 Unfortunately, since the editors of Good Medicine and Nature & Health declined to participate these two magazines are unavoidably under-represented in this research. Therefore, the following chapters have been organised to focus attention onto the most valuable information available for each publication.
50 brief overview of how others have approached magazine and reader letter research, and justifies the use of these multiple, and in many ways, multi-disciplinary analytic approaches.
Magazines are ‘weekly, fortnightly and monthly publications which straddle the boundaries between journalism, leisure, entertainment and business’ (McNair 1996: 13), and yet, although magazines are a highly lucrative industry (Rhodes 2001), McKay and Bonner have observed that ‘...in comparison with the scholarly attention paid to television, newspapers and film, magazines are under-researched’ (2000: 119). This is perhaps because the traditional magazine format does not fit the model of a ‘mass communication’ since it does not necessarily have the audience potential of broadcast media. But as Dale, Henry and Ryder have observed, ‘Name a hobby, sport, major city, cultural activity, computer system and chances are there’s a magazine (or two or three) devoted to the subject’ (2000: 31). Magazine research has been predominantly carried out within media studies but as the previous chapter demonstrated, magazines are also used as research material in fields as disparate as public health and feminist theory. Even cultural geography has moved into this area, addressing magazines as public ‘sites’ that contribute to the social construction of space such as in the new genres of urban lifestyle magazines (Greenberg 2000) and men’s lifestyle magazines (Jackson & Brooks 1999).
However, this thesis is most closely aligned with cultural and communication studies. The range of magazine-based topics addressed by this field is immense, but magazine advertising is arguably the most popular focus (e.g., Miller et al. 1999; Al-Olayan & Karande 2000; McLoughlin 2000), followed by the feminist examination of womens’ and girls’ magazines, (e.g., Winship 1987; Ballaster et al. 1991; McCracken 1993; Hermes 1995; Radner 1995; Beetham 1996; McRobbie 1996; Aronson 2000). There is a conspicuous absence of research on smaller, community-produced magazines and in fact, the only non-profit magazine that has received some theoretical attention is The Big Issue: an internationally franchised publication designed to provide an ongoing source of income to those people registered as homeless ‘Big Issue Vendors’ (Tunstall 2002). Several facets of media and cultural studies enrich the study of magazines. One is the capacity to address both the visual and textual aspects of magazines (e.g., Allen
51 1992), and another is their incorporation of ‘language and discourse in the construction of knowledge and the formation of persons or subjects’ (Poynton & Lee 2000: 1). The frequent use of this notion of ‘discourse’ is the subject of ongoing contestation and clarification, both despite and because of its conspicuous popularity across a range of social research fields (Sawyer 2002). Yet it is an important idea that contributes to an ongoing reformulation of notions of culture and language.
The third facet of media and cultural studies that benefits magazine research is an interest in media audiences. As Jensen and Pauly have observed, ‘Every theory of the media invokes an image of the audience ... a market of consumers, a jaded mob, a nascent public, a lumpen proletariat, textual poachers, situated spectators, “the people”‘ (1997: 155). Although much research is available on print media audiences (e.g., Green 2002), most audience research focuses on cinema (e.g., Austin 1989; Maltby & Stokes 1999), television (e.g., Livingstone 1990; Kavoori 1999; Giles 2002; Tincknell & Raghuram 2002) and recently, online or internet media (e.g., Bromley 1998; Roscoe 1999; Seiter 1999; Downes 2000; Gillard 2000; Green 2000; Hine 2001). Nightingale makes a useful distinction between three main approaches to media audience research: commercial research into the consumer behaviour of audiences, policy research into the ‘effects’ of media on audiences and cultural research into the ‘active’ resistance or negotiation of audience positions. Crucially, Nightingale applauds elements of each of these positions for contributing to an overall picture of the behaviour, impact and agency of media audiences: The three models which underlie [media audience] research traditions and their respective agenda – the consumer as part of a particular demographic profile, the psychologically vulnerable individual within an aggregate or mass, and the active user or fan of particular media texts – all tap fundamental realities about the media audience today. Each captures important aspects of economic, social and cultural processes. Each generates and perpetuates certain angles, not all harmonious, on media audiences (1997: 351-2).
This thesis is positioned within this triangular approach to media audiences, so although the audience is predominantly invested with the capacity to act-back against media messages and to actively negotiate their relationship with media structures, they are also not entirely abstracted from the regulatory imperatives of commerce and governmentality. As Ang has argued, ‘...audiences may be active in a myriad of ways in
52 using and interpreting media, but it would be utterly out of perspective to cheerfully equate “active” with “powerful”, in the sense of “taking control” at an enduring structural or institutional level’ (1996: 139-140). Although this thesis does not go so far as to offer an ethnographic examination of media audiences, it is hoped that the analysis of material in the remaining chapters will be sensitive to both the ‘closures’ of media production and the ‘openings’ of audience resistance.
The small amount of literature on the social functions of reader letters can be grouped into five approaches: journalistic, political, linguistic, sociological and historical. The journalistic literature is most interested in how reader letters can be better managed to increase audience interest and contribute to a profile of the active, interactive audience (e.g., Daniel 1993; Metcalf 1993; Sheiman 1995, 1996; Outing 1999). Some media studies have, however, focused in more detail on the social function of reader letters, in terms of the construction of media images of the general public (Allan 1999), in gauging community attitudes (Fowler 1981) or in facilitating oral storytelling traditions (Bird 1996). Thornton has published some interesting studies of the historically changing role of reader letters in debates on media ethics and journalistic standards (Thornton 1998a, 1998b). And Wahl-Jorgensen has published several articles on the political function of reader letters, some of which will be employed in subsequent chapters (1999; 2001; 2002c; 2002a; 2002b).
Political research on reader letters focuses on their function as a forum for social activism (Buell Jnr 1975; Polletta 1998), as a political ‘watchdog’ (Bromley 1998; Richardson & Franklin 2003) or a technology for achieving public consensus (Sigelman & Walkosz 1992; Stojsin 1996). There are also a number of websites dedicated to training readers in the art of letter-writing for political purposes (e.g., Anonymous 2002a; Donald 2002; Schaffer 2002). Interestingly, some political analyses of reader letters are published in linguistic journals, focused on the discursive construction of politics and publics (Kienpointner & Kindt 1997; Sotillo & Starace-Nastasi 1999). Although some of this research is specifically focused on the linguistic structures of letter-writing (Martin 1995), others link language to its social context and often, to the political position of minority groups. For example, Heidi Frank (2002) has suggested that Japanese lesbians construct a distinct writing style as a means of facilitating lesbian
53 pride and Jacobs (1998) claims that the advent of a ‘queer’ politics in Canada can be traced through a letters debate over sexuality issues. In terms of ethnic identity, Richardson (2001) has observed a linguistic technique of ‘spatial management’ in broadsheet reader letters discussing Islamic Britons and Delgado (1998) has traced the development of a US Latino vernacular in reader letters to Low Rider Magazine. Morrison and Love (1996) have also focused on the development of ethnic identity in reader letters, suggesting that a ‘discourse of disillusionment’ was apparent in Zimbabwean reader letters published ten years after the establishment of a ‘democratic’ government and a ‘free’ press.
Although focused on language, this research is similar to the sociological interest in media participation. For example, Collins (1998) suggests that reader letters in three pornographic lesbian magazines contribute to the ongoing regulation of lesbian identities. Berg (1997) reviewed the issues and ideas raised in reader letters from two Amish magazines to consider how this unique culture was changing in contemporary times. Other sociological accounts are interested in historical access to past cultural contexts, including unpublished letters in the archives of a defunct Soviet newspaper (Lenoe 1999) and letters published in Japanese girls’ magazines at the beginning of the 20th century (Sato 2002). In Australia, Scott (1998) has published an interesting review of reader letters to women’s magazines between the two world wars and Pearman has archived the ‘informal record’ of history from reader letters published in The Australian (1982) and Time magazine (1985). There is also a substantial linguistic literature on the writing of personal letters (e.g., Phillips 1999; Al-Khatib 2001), as well as the social function of letter-writing as a communicative tool (e.g., Matthews & Callahan 1996; Banks et al. 2000; Roper 2001) and a historical archive (e.g., Milligan 1979). Recently, research has also been published on the related topics of the linguistics of e-mail (e.g., Baron 1998) and on-line forums (e.g., Schultz 2000; Loader et al. 2002). Other media research associated with the analysis of reader letters examines newspaper editorials (e.g., Bolivar 1994; Torronen 2001; Eilders 2002), personal advertisements (e.g., Thompson & Thetela 1995; Carroll 1996; Hogben & Coupland 2000; Marley 2000, 2002), advice columns (e.g., Kreuz & Graesser 1993; van Roosmalen 2000; Currie 2001) and even suicide notes (e.g., Utriainen & Honkasalo 1996). This overview of research on reader letters and related genres is offered in order to contextualise the
54 interdisciplinary approach taken in this thesis, which attempts to simultaneously review the journalistic, linguistic, medical, political, sociological and historical context of health magazine reader letters. It is hoped that a synthesised approach can satisfactorily grasp the role of narrative disclosures within a wider culture of exhibitionism.
The following sections will outline the two methods of analysis: 1) content (structure, convention etc) and 2) context (theme, cultural implications etc). In general, the content analysis is designed to provide structural observations about the material to ground the semiotic investigations of context. In a complementary sense, the context analysis will be as dense as is appropriate to make meaningful the more abstract conclusions about content.
Content analysis
Although content analysis is generally used as a quantitative method to gauge frequencies and trends across a wide spectrum of comparative data, Berelson suggests that, ‘...communication content is so rich with human experience, and its causes and effects so varied, that no single system of substantive categories can be devised to describe it’ (1999: 200). For this reason, contemporary versions of content analysis in media studies have begun to prioritise the more qualitative potential of this technique. So although Berelson correctly asserts, ‘Content analysis is a research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication’ (1999: 204), this does not define the limits of the method. The key benefit of content analysis is its capacity to generate valid and reliable comparative findings; also the element most criticised by media scholars (e.g., Slater 1998). The act of coding data for content analysis requires a more structured approach than is demanded by other more exploratory methods and should therefore be limited to establishing the parameters by which qualitative issues can be measured. Coffey argues that ‘attaching codes to data and generating concepts have important functions in enabling us rigorously to review what our data are saying’ (1996: 27). So content analysis can be used to set out the ‘facts’ of a discursive matter, that is, providing rates of frequency, recurrence and association between variables: observations that may otherwise appear ‘anecdotal’ (Seale 1999: 128). For this reason, content analysis has been regularly employed in media and communication studies (e.g., Riffe et al. 1996;
55 Berelson 1999), although often only as a precursor to other modes of qualitative analysis (e.g., Galasinski & Marley 1998; Bell & Milic 2002).
In this research, the method of content analysis was used to examine the frequencies with which certain identity claims were made about letter writers and how these related to certain genres of letter-writing. Content analysis is an appropriate method to achieve this task because it can be designed as comparative, structured and wide-ranging, whilst maintaining critical attention to the specificities of texture and pattern that each letter displays within their original narrative structure and publication context. This content analysis was heavily informed by qualitative research, both in the development of coding categories and in the reflexive approach to making coding decisions. Each category was isolated, defined and then ‘counted’, not in order to reduce the complexity of the texts, but as Seale and Kelly recommend, to ‘...help in reassuring the reader that the researcher has not simply trawled through a mass of data and selected anecdotes to report that support his or her particular bias’ (1998: 156). This follows Coffey’s reminder that: ... coding need not be viewed simply as reducing data to some general, common delimiters. Rather, it can be used to expand, transform, and reconceptualize data, opening up more diverse analytical possibilities ... Such data complication is used not to retrieve and to aggregate instances to a restricted number of categories; rather it, it is intended to expand the conceptual frameworks and dimensions for analysis (1996: 28-30).
The most important theoretical evidence for this approach was taken from Potter and Levine-Donnerstein, who write: ‘...we argue that the challenge of designing a content analysis can only be met if researchers begin by making decisions about the nature of the content they want to analyse and the role of theory in their study’ (1999: 259). This material has been organised into manifest and latent content: ‘Manifest content is that which is on the surface and easily observable ... [whereas latent content] shifts the focus to the meaning underlying the elements on the surface of a message’ (1999: 259). Although there are problems with this surface-depth model of communications it does enable a differentiation between the literal and implicative meanings available to the audience.
56 The coding categories were thus ordered into ‘manifestly’ evident content, including word count and the format of the reader’s name and address (if published) and ‘latently’ connotative content, which required closer definition and interpretation. Although the concept of ‘latent content’ was first used to include all ‘implied’ declarations such as sexuality or readership mode, it soon appeared more helpful to clearly distinguish between ‘patterned’ and ‘projected’ latent content: With pattern content, the designer of the content analysis puts precedence with the content and believes that there is an objective pattern there that all coders should uncover by sorting through symbols and recognizing the connections among them. In contrast with projective content, the researcher puts precedence with the coders’ judgments and believes that the elements in the content are symbols that require viewers to access their pre-existing mental schema in order to judge the meaning in the content (Potter & Levine-Donnerstein 1999: 259).
Therefore, ‘patterned’ declarations included those already labelled with specific social categories, such as age (numbers) and gender (male/female/transgender), whereas ‘projected’ declarations included those that required the nomination of new categories, such as readership mode (fulfilled/questioning/critical) and ‘corporeality’.
Potter and Levine-Donnerstein make another distinction between analyses designed via an inductive or deductive use of theory. This distinction proved useful in the development of a coding structure, as it contextualised the implications of approaching the text with an interpretive or exploratory intent or with the positivist intent to ‘test an hypothesis’. Specific coding choices will be explained in more detail in chapter four, however, it is important to state here that all but one of the coding categories were developed inductively, that is, they were reviewed and redesigned through a process of trial-and-error. As Coffey writes: [Codes] are not cast in stone. As you chose and select them, so you can abandon, change, re-sort, rename, and so on. Similarly, once you are in a position to look at all the data across the codes, you should not be tempted to ignore incidences, events, individuals, or chunks of data that do not ‘fit’ into the codes. The exceptions, misfits, and ‘negative’ findings should be seen as having as much importance to the process of coding as do the easily coded data (1996: 46-7).
However, theory does have a high degree of influence on the development of coding categories. In this research, only one variable was explicitly developed using a particular theoretical model and this is outlined in the section on political genres, which
57 uses Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2001) typology of ‘modes of publicity’ as a theoretical base. And although the remainder of the codes were developed inductively and were dependent upon semiotic markers within the texts in order to flesh out a coding system, theory is nonetheless invested within the ‘reading’ of these semiotic markers, and indeed, in the ways in which each coding decision is made.
Context analysis
The chapters that follow on from chapter four focus in detail on the cultural context of reader letters and interview transcripts. The rest of this section explains this approach, but is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the theoretical background to each of the interrelated methodological approaches. The generalised descriptor of ‘context analysis’ is used because this approach is informed by multiple methodologies. One ‘school’ of analysis that must be acknowledged as influential to this approach is critical discourse analysis (CDA), a research area that: ... represents an outgrowth of the work of British and Australian pioneers of Critical Linguistics, particularly Fowler and Kress, in convergence with the approaches of the British discourse analyst Fairclough and Dutch text linguist van Dijk. CDA has produced the majority of the research into media discourse during the 1980s and 1990s, and has arguably become the standard framework for studying media texts within European linguistics and discourse studies (Garrett & Bell 1998: 5-6).
Associated with CDA, however, and equally as influential to this thesis, are a variety of other approaches to discourse and cultural analysis and in particular, those forms that intersect with cultural studies analyses of media texts. It is also important to recognise the contributions of more conventional linguistic analysis, as well as the ‘narrative’ analysis that has been a focus of recent language and culture research.
Critical discourse analysis is grounded in discourse analysis (e.g., Coulthard 1977; Coulthard 1994; Georgekapoulou & Goutsos 1997; Hoey 1997, 2000), sociolinguistics (e.g., McElhinny 1997; Heller 2001), critical media and communication studies (e.g., Altheide 1996, 2000), political linguistics (e.g., Blommaert 1997; van Dijk 1997), linguistic anthropology (e.g., Bucholtz 2001; Slembrouck 2001), critical psychology (e.g., Wetherell & Potter 1992; Potter 1996), gender studies (e.g., West et al. 1997; Wodak 1997) and even some research within medical sociology (e.g., Lupton 1992;
58 Yardley 1997). Although this indicates an extensive interdisciplinarity, Blommaert and Bulcaen suggest that ‘CDA should primarily be positioned in a linguistic milieu, and its successes should be measured primarily with the yardstick of linguistics and linguistically oriented pragmatics and discourse analysis’ (2000: 452). This linguistic association has, however, subjected CDA to much internal debate, particularly as to the distinction between ‘discourse analysis’ and ‘critical discourse analysis’ (e.g., Widdowson 1995; Fairclough 1996; Widdowson 1998), and its relation to conversation analysis (e.g., Mey 2001) and linguistic theory (e.g., Hammersley 1997; Flowerdew 1999).
Despite these debates, there has recently been a spate of media studies publications claiming a CDA methodology to examine material such as political news reports (Chouliaraki 2000), network marketing (Kong 2001), advertising campaigns (Lazar 2000) and daily newspapers in Turkey (Oktar 2001), Greece (Stamou 2001) and Australia (Teo 2000). The clearest value of using CDA in this thesis is its capacity to delve deeply into the linguistic construction of texts, whilst remaining vigilant to their political implications. Bucholtz states that if critical discourse analysis can be identified as a discrete methodology, the theorists most often associated with this ‘school’, such as Fairclough (1992; 1995b; 1995a; 1999) and Van Dijk (1990) can be characterised by a ‘willingness to voice an overt political commitment’ (Bucholtz 2001: 167). Fairclough’s (1992) model of CDA is most appropriate for this approach to media studies, particularly in its capacity to incorporate a range of methodologies within a political framework, to ‘help us be more reflexive about power relations between speakers within and between language communities’ (Barker & Galasinski 2001: 22). Fairclough proposes a ‘three-dimensional conception of discourse’ (1992: 73), which includes text, discursive practice and social practice (graphic representation reproduced in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Fairclough’s (1992) ‘Three-dimensional conception of discourse’
Social practice
Discursive practice (production, distribution, consumption) Text
59 This model is useful because it insists that media research take account of all three levels. As Fairclough has suggested, one of the most important principles of CDA is ‘...that analysis of texts should not be artificially isolated from analysis of institutional and discoursal practices within which texts are embedded’ (1995a: 9) However, as Kohler Riessman has observed, ‘...most scholars treat narratives as discrete units, with clear beginnings and endings, as detachable from the surrounding discourse rather than as situated events’ (1993: 17). Therein lies the challenge of approaching reader letters as socially contextualised discourse events, which must be framed within an institutional context, including an appraisal of the media, government and medical bodies that contribute to health magazine production. This thesis examines material that operates at the level of ‘text’, but the analysis is focused at the level of ‘discursive practice’, and all conclusions are intended to be relevant to the much wider domain of ‘social practice’.
Chapters’ five to seven — the chapters that employ a ‘context analysis’ — also incorporate a basic ‘count’ of the discursive practices under observation. So for example, in chapter five, the number of letters that ‘consolidate’ or ‘contest’ the four main functions of Men’s Health have been counted and compared, in order to, as Seale has put it, ‘...enabl[e] readers to judge whether the writer has relied excessively on rare events, to the exclusion of more common ones that might contradict the general line of argument’ (1999: 128). This is not intended to justify the analysis of discursive and social practices, but instead to ‘...give a more balanced picture than selected anecdotes alone could provide’ (Seale 1999: 129). The final methodological comment relates specifically to the use of interview transcripts. This material is analysed using a form of conversation analysis informed by discourse analysis, insofar as the topics discussed were thematised in the context of particular ways of speaking. However, this is not linguistic research and therefore, is not concerned with matters of turn-taking, rhetorical devices or other spoken discourse concepts. Interview extracts are reproduced in their simplest form, retaining original emphases, but are nonetheless segmented for analytic purposes, rather than always remaining in their original context. These interviews play a supportive role but nonetheless manifest the ethnographic dilemmas of the social research interview (Rapley 2001). As Slembrouck observes: ‘However well equipped the discourse analyst may be with a rich and complex social-theoretical potential for contextualizing what is being overheard, s/he necessarily overhears and interprets’
60 (2001: 43). These interview transcripts speak for media professionals who have bravely opened up their professional lives to academic scrutiny, while remaining positioned within the ‘...institutionalised normative framework in which journalists are embedded’ (Boyle & Hoeschen 2001: 524). The community editors in particular work in extremely difficult jobs and have deliberately constructed a way of working that protects their publications from the gaze of external expertise.
Evading the ‘problem’ of authenticity
Popular myth suggests that many reader letters are not representative of ‘real’ people’s opinions, fuelled by what Allan has described as ‘...general conviction among newsworkers that “the bulk of audience reaction is from cranks, the unstable, the hysterical and the sick”‘ (1999: 110). Another myth about reader letters is that they are written by magazine staff to manipulate the representation of audience interests to suit the normative editorial position. Admittedly, many reader letters may be ‘ghost-written’ or at the very least heavily edited by magazine staff. As Bromley has observed: All correspondence columns are highly mediated, and publication has always been subject to editorial discretion. The fabrication of letters has been, at times and in some instances, common practice; and genuine contributions tend to be selected and edited for publication in accordance with editorial policy, or with an eye to political and commercial interests, including advertising (1998: 150).
However, rather than focusing on the ‘problem’ of validating letter authenticity, this thesis is more interested in how letters contribute to the constitution of imaginary health magazine publics. Therefore this research approaches reader letters as a form of contemporary ‘epistolography’: an outmoded term for the act of ‘letter-writing’. An ‘epistle’ is defined as: A communication made to an absent person in writing; a letter. Chiefly ... applied to letters written in ancient times, esp. to those that rank as literary productions, or ... to those of a public character, or addressed to a body of persons (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2003).
Epistolography can be seen to be a form of public storytelling, contributing to the discursive construction of social realities, whether or not letters are actually written by ‘real’ readers. Approaching letters as literary constructions deflects questions of authorship and authenticity, assuming that ‘...story telling and story reading are indeed social inventions, fictions, fabrications. They cannot be otherwise’ (Plummer 1995:
61 168). The letters published in health magazines are also produced in relation to questions of health and medicine, and thus, are related to but not necessarily examples of, the ‘pathographies’ analysed by McKay and Bonner (1999) in women’s magazine health stories and by Hawkins (1984) in literary accounts of illness. However, the question of editorial influence continues to be an important one and this issue is one that is creatively managed by Shevelow in her historical analysis of reader letters in the Athenian Mercury. Shevelow suggests that ‘...the reader “represented” is the reader constructed, not necessarily because her letter is an editorial fabrication, but because the representation of the self in writing is always a construction, whether on the part of the alleged writer or on the part of the periodical’s editors’ (1989: 67-68). This is precisely the approach taken in this thesis: magazine audiences are seen to be ‘always a construction’, whether or not the reader letters published as their representative testimonials can be proven to be authentic.
Conclusion
The following chapters provide the ‘body’ of the thesis and are intended to demonstrate how the different methods outlined in this chapter can be cooperatively employed in sustainable and productive ways. Although the objectives of these varied methods range from political to linguistic, they are framed within the wider epistemological objectives of media and cultural studies and as such, are always related to the function of text in cultural context. Chapter four offers a content analysis of the reader letters published in all six magazines between 1997 and 2000, focusing on the ways in which letters make claims about the identity and politics of the writer, via demographic declarations and the use of certain letter genres. After that, the three discourse analysis chapters will address, in consecutive order: chapter five, public negotiations of the contemporary reshaping of masculinity in Men’s Health; chapter six, consumer approaches to women’s wellbeing in the ‘mainstream’ Good Medicine and ‘alternative’ Nature & Health; and chapter seven, the political interventions employed by magazine editors in the context of community health media.
62 CHAPTER FOUR
Entitled to write: A content analysis of letters, writers and genres
Introduction
This chapter conducts a close analysis of the content of health magazine reader letters, inspired by two of the most noticeable features of these letters: entitlement claims and political genres. Entitlement claims are claims to cultural identity incorporated into reader letters as an ‘entitling’ strategy. So it is common to find letters opening with introductory statements of qualification such as ‘I am a 38-year-old, single, white, Australian male’2 or ‘As a person living with HIV/AIDS here in Wagga Wagga...’ 3 In addition, there are several genres of reader letters specific to health magazines, each of which evokes a different political implication. This chapter commences with a basic analysis of the ‘manifest’ features of reader letters, and then moves into deeper analysis of the more ‘latent’ forms of content, grouped into three kinds of ‘entitlement claim’ — identity, readership and corporeality — and five political genres (full results presented in Appendix III: Content Analysis). A content analysis of letter writers and letter genres is interesting because it paints a (somewhat) systematic picture of how reader letters are constructed. The question of why they are constructed in certain ways will be addressed in more detail in the discourse analysis presented in subsequent chapters. This content analysis is primarily interested in how reader letters participate in the ‘imagining’ of magazine audiences through favouring certain genres and incorporating certain public declarations of cultural identity.
Manifest content
Sample size and period
A total of three hundred and sixty-four letters were included in this research,4 drawn from magazine issues published between 1997 and 2000. Two hundred and fifty of these letters were from the ‘commercial’ magazines, comprising a significant majority (70%), whereas one hundred and ten letters were taken from the ‘community’
4 Every reader letter reproduced or referenced in this thesis has been allocated an endnote number, and the full reference for that letter is reproduced in endnote list under Appendix IV.
63 magazines, representing only 30% of the material. Because far more commercial than community letters were published during this period, a deliberate attempt was made to include as many community letters as possible, and to reduce the number of commercial letters. Therefore, not every commercial letter published between 1997 and 2000 was included in this study and for the same reason, extra community letters published from outside of this period were included. In other words, all community letters have been included in this research, as have a few extra letters published before 1997 or after 2000, whereas only a random selection of commercial letters were selected (from available issues).
Table 2: Annual number of letters by commercial publication
Total Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Heal. % total Year of publication letters N=136 N=74 N=44 N=364 1997 0 0% 0 0% 16 36% 16 6% 1998 33 24% 5 7% 9 20% 47 19% 1999 59 43% 57 77% 10 23% 126 50% 2000 44 32% 12 16% 9 20% 65 26% 254 70%
Men’s Health contributed the highest number of letters, with one hundred and thirty-six letters (37% of total) included. Good Medicine and Nature & Health contributed the next comparable level of letters at seventy-four (20%) and forty-four (12%) respectively. Talkabout contributed the greatest number of community letters, and at fifty nine (16%), represents a larger proportion than the smallest commercial publication, Nature & Health. However, the final two community magazines contributed an equally small number: User’s News with twenty-six letters (7%) and The Professional with twenty-five letters (7%). Good Medicine and Men’s Health both launched inaugural editions (in Australia) in 1998, and thus, self-evidently, include no letters from 1997. The majority (77%) of Good Medicine letters included in this study were published during 1999 (fifty-seven letters), dropping to only twelve letters in 2000 (16%). Most of the Men’s Health letters (fifty-nine letters) included were also published in 1999 (43%), with less of a decrease to forty-four letters in 2000 (32%). Nature & Health included the most balanced annual frequency in this study, with sixteen letters in 1997 (36%), nine letters in 1998 (20%), ten letters in 1999 (23%) and another nine letters during 2000 (20%).
64 Due to their smaller number of published letters, it is difficult to trace publication trends in the community magazines over time but all have been operating for longer than their commercial equivalents. Most of these publications are bi-monthly or quarterly, and do not restrict audience participation to the convention of letters-to-the-editor but instead actively solicit submissions in the form of articles, interviews, creative writing and so on. Therefore, the frequency of letters is lower than in the commercial magazines, and yet the depth and length of the published letters offer valuable insights into modes of community media participation.
Table 3: Annual number of letters by community publication
Total Talkabout User’s News The Profession. % total Year of publication letters N=59 N=26 N=25 N=364 1997 30 51% 4 15% 1 4% 35 32% 1998 17 29% 8 31% 5 20% 30 27% 1999 6 10% 2 8% 10 40% 18 16% 2000 6 10% 7 27% 4 16% 17 15% Other years 0 0% 5 19% 5 20% 10 9% 110 30%
Most (thirty) of the sampled Talkabout letters were published in 1997 (51%), with a continuous decrease over subsequent years, from seventeen in 1998 (29%) to only six in 1999 (10%) and six in 2000 (10%). However, The Professional displayed a different trend, with letters increasing within this period from only one letter (4%) in 1997 to five in 1998 (20%), nine in 1999 (36%) and seven in 2000 (27%). Again, an additional four letters (20%) were included from the period prior to 1997, to boost numbers for this publication. User’s News showed similar figures, with four letters published in 1997 (15%), eight in 1998 (31%), two in 1999 (8%), and three in 2000 (12%). Five letters (19%) were included from outside the standard period to increase the total number of User’s News letters.
Letter word counts and editorial replies
Several characteristics of reader letters can be measured in a content analysis. One that lends itself to enumeration is the number of words in each letter. A content analysis of word counts offers an easy quantitative comparison between publications to examine the amount of space dedicated to the representation of audiences. To calculate word counts, the number of words that appeared in the body of the letter was counted, as well
65 as, where applicable, the number of words in the editor’s published reply. Total word counts were calculated for each magazine, and then averaged against the total number of letters for that publication, and rounded to the nearest whole number. Interestingly, this element of the analysis offers additional support for the inclusion of the community letters in this research, as community letters were found to be generally longer and more in-depth than their commercial counterparts.
Table 4: Number of words in reader letters by publication
cmrcl5 cmnty6 Total Total Number of words MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean sum mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Words in shortest letter 53 35 34 41 63 31 30 41 246 41 Words in longest letter 272 331 172 258 571 469 629 556 2,444 407 Total word count 19,348 8,708 3,581 10,546 15,313 4,820 7,042 9,058 58,812 9,802 Mean word count 142 118 81 114 260 185 282 242 1,068 178
The mean word count for a community magazine letter was two hundred and forty-two, compared to the commercial mean of one hundred and fourteen words per letter. Looking closer at this result, Men’s Health had the highest commercial mean at one hundred and forty-two words per letter, with Good Medicine averaging one hundred and eighteen, and Nature & Health dropping right down to the lowest of the six magazines, at eighty-one words per letter. In comparison to this, the top mean was — perhaps surprisingly — held by The Professional, at two hundred and eighty-two words per letter. Talkabout was closer to the community mean at two hundred and sixty words per letter, but User’s News had the least at one hundred and eighty-five, still well above the highest commercial mean. These findings suggest that community health magazines have a more deliberate strategy of soliciting detailed reader letters. Another way to gauge the significance of word counts is to compare the shortest and longest word count of each magazine’s published letters. For example, Good Medicine had the largest range between its shortest and longest letters (35 / 331) whereas Nature & Health had the smallest (34 / 172). The community magazines demonstrated quite different profiles: although The Professional had the highest word mean (282 per letter), it published both the shortest and the longest community letter word counts (30 / 629), in comparison to Talkabout (63 / 571) and User’s News (31 / 469). The stand-out finding in this comparison is that the commercial magazine letters have a more standard range of word
5 ‘cmrcl’ = commercial magazines. 6 ‘cmnty’ = community magazines.
66 counts than the community letters (i.e., they show a narrower range), suggesting that the commercial magazines are more likely to ‘crop’ letters to fit a pre-designed template. It would also be unlikely for a commercial magazine to publish a letter of the essay-style length that is regularly published in community magazines.
Table 5: Number and length of editorial replies by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Editorial replies mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Letters with reply 16% 15% 34% 19% 14% 46% 28% 25% 75 21% Letters without reply 84% 85% 66% 81% 86% 54% 72% 75% 289 79% Shortest reply 5 13 11 10 9 5 7 7 50 8 Longest reply 88 103 75 89 271 547 280 366 1364 227 Total words in reply 579 595 389 521 734 1,002 525 754 3824 637 Mean length 24 25 35 28 46 200 105 117 436 73
The other texts that can be measured for word length are editorial replies. Overall, only 21% of letters received a reply, with a higher number (25%) published in the community than the commercial magazines (19%). User’s News published the highest rate of editorial replies (46%), while the lowest was in Good Medicine (15%). In terms of word counts, a range was found across all magazines: the shortest mean word count was eight, and the longest was two hundred and twenty-seven, leaving a general mean of only seventy-three words per reply. This varied dramatically across ‘industries’, with commercial magazines publishing a mean of only twenty-eight words per editorial reply, in comparison to one hundred and seventeen words in the community magazines. Again, this would appear to confirm that community magazine editors are more invested in audience participation than commercial editors.
Name and address formats
The second characteristic identified as ‘manifest content’ was the format of the reader’s name and address, as published alongside or within the letter text. There were five main formats for author names: 1) anonymous (e.g., Anonymous, Name Withheld or Name and Address Supplied); 2) pseudonym (e.g., Letter Girl, or ‘Christy’); 3) initials only (e.g., CN); 4) given name or surname only (e.g., Christy, C. Newman, or Newman); and 5) full name provided (e.g., Christy Newman).
67
Table 6: Name format of letter writers by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Name format mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Pseudonym 0% 0% 0% 0% 3% 8% 8% 5% 6 2% Initials only 4% 19% 5% 8% 0% 27% 0% 6% 28 8% Given/surname only 85% 14% 5% 50% 7% 50% 32% 23% 153 42% Full name provided 7% 51% 86% 34% 81% 8% 44% 55% 147 40% Anonymous/withheld 4% 16% 5% 7% 8% 8% 16% 10% 30 8%
This analysis is not intended to judge whether or not author names are fictitious or genuine but rather, to assess the formats of name presentation that are preferred or prevalent in each magazine. The most common format for reader names was given name or surname (42%) followed by full name (40%). Given the popular myth that reader letters are written by ‘cranks’ (Allan 1999), this finding demonstrates that, in fact, most letters deliberately claim a public identity of authorship. Interestingly, none of the commercial magazines published letters that employed a pseudonym, whereas six community letters did, suggesting that the closer proximity between community editors and audiences might warrant the use of such privacy strategies.
There were several different formats for author ‘address’, some of which were simply geographic and others more obscure. The categories were grouped as: 1) e-mail or internet; 2) overseas (i.e., not in Australia); 3) New South Wales; 4) Victoria; 5) Queensland; 6) South Australia; 7) Western Australia; 8) Tasmania; 9) Northern Territory; 10) Australian Capital Territory; and 11) none claimed.
Table 7: Address format of letter writers by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Address format MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Via e-mail or internet 18% 9% 0% 12% 0% 0% 4% 1% 32 9% Overseas 7% 3% 5% 5% 3% 0% 0% 2% 15 4% New South Wales 18% 32% 25% 23% 27% 19% 20% 24% 85 23% Victoria 18% 18% 11% 17% 0% 4% 0% 1% 43 12% Queensland 18% 16% 32% 20% 0% 4% 0% 1% 51 14% South Australia 5% 1% 7% 4% 0% 0% 0% 0% 11 3% Western Australia 10% 5% 2% 7% 0% 0% 0% 0% 19 5% Tasmania 2% 3% 2% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 6 2% Northern Territory 0% 0% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1 0% Aust.Capital Territ. 3% 1% 0% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 5 1% None claimed 2% 11% 14% 7% 69% 73% 76% 72% 96 26%
68
Although 63% of all letters included an address, there is a considerable discrepancy between the number of addresses published with commercial (93%) and community letters (28%). Of those few community addresses, almost all (24%) were located in New South Wales. This seems to reflect the local focus of these community publications, despite their national and sometimes international profile and distribution. Only Men’s Health (7%) and Good Medicine (3%) published letters from international locations, although Talkabout’s connection to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region did gain some recognition (3%). Also, new communication technologies such as e-mail and the internet appear to play a very minimal role in the more ‘traditional’ genre of reader letters. 18% of Men’s Health letters were published as ‘e-mail communications’, compared to 9% of Good Medicine letters and none in Nature & Health. The Professional published one e-mail letter but there was no admission of electronic submissions in the other two community magazines. And finally, in terms of domestic geographical associations, population patterns appeared to be represented proportionally in reader letters, with the greatest numbers claiming an address in New South Wales, Victoria or Queensland. The only stand-out finding with regard to the representation of Australian States and Territories is that Nature & Health published a disproportionately high number of letters from Queensland (32%).
Latent content
Moving on from the ‘manifest’ content analysis, the more complex and qualitative aspects of this analysis are represented as ‘latent’ content. This distinction has been developed from Potter and Levine-Donnerstein’s (1999) explication of content analysis methods, to enable a complex system to be rigorously interrogated for bias and validity. In its most basic form, latent content refers to meanings that are communicated through a set of semiotic references that are more complex than can be identified with a particular number (e.g., word length) or word (e.g., address = ‘Perth’). It is hoped that the categories developed follow Boyatzis’ observation that ‘a good thematic code is one that captures the qualitative richness of the phenomenon’ (1998: 31). Each of the following sections will explain the reasoning behind particular design and analysis choices. However, it should be noted that this was a process of circular, iterative
69 reflection, during which the relevance of each approach was consistently reviewed. As Seale and Kelly write: The quality of a coding scheme influences the eventual quality of data analysis, for it is in coding schemes that a researcher becomes committed to particular ways of categorizing the world. Coding schemes can be narrow, artificial devices that hinder thought, or they can contain the seeds of creative new insights (1998: 146-47).
The rest of this chapter is divided into two sub-sections, each of which identifies a different aspect of reader letters: entitlement claims and political genres. The entitlement claims were approached inductively, that is, theory was used to enrich rather than design the analysis. However, the political genres were approached deductively, using Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2001) model of ‘modes of publicity’, adapted into a more complex typology of letter genres, informed rather than determined by the theory.
Letter writers: Authorship entitlement claims
Authorship positions are constructed via a series of textual acts that involve both linguistic techniques and cultural performances. That is, letters draw upon demographic characteristics and political positions in order to make public claims to an entitlement to participate. Therefore, the content in this section is described as ‘entitlement claims’,7 inspired by the ‘concept of claims’ and ‘entitlement’ described by Goffman (1971: 28), as well as Sacks’ lecture on ‘entitlement to experiences’ (1992: 242-248). The term entitlement has been used in various theoretical ways, including to describe the rhetoric of entitlement employed by some men in justifying the physical abuse of female partners (Adams et al. 1995). Entitlement is therefore also a political concept, and so is easily imported into media and cultural studies to represent one of the strategies by which letters claim a ‘right’ to write, within the genre of magazine letter-writing. Three varieties of entitlement claiming have been identified in this content analysis: identity, readership and corporeality. Claims of ‘identity’ represent a cultural construction of self that involves a self-description of demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, sexuality and so on. Claims of ‘readership’ are common to most public forms of audience representation and involve an evaluation of the magazine via the discourses of
7 I first heard the term ‘entitlement claim’ used in a conversation with Professor Alec McHoul of Murdoch University, Western Australia. He was unsure of its origin, but suggested that I look towards the work of Harvey Sacks. I have since expanded upon this definition, with advice from Dr Henrike Korner, Dr Suzanne Eggins, and Dr Rod Gardner, all of the University of New South Wales.
70 fandom or critique. And finally, claims of ‘corporeality’ are specific to the genre of health magazines and involve a representation of the letter-writer as a corporeal being, in varying proximity to the realms of health, illness and medicine.
Claiming identity: The demographics of self-description
The demographic claims first identified in these reader letters were age, gender, sexuality, marital status, family position, employment status, ethnicity and geographic location. It was anticipated that since at least one or more claims was identifiable in nearly every reader letter, this variable would prove to be a critical component of letter- writing. However, the only identity claim that proved at all common in this analysis was gender, which was employed in over 70% of all published letters. The remaining claims were employed in less than 25% of letters and the two variables of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘geographic location’ were identified in less than 10% of letters and so have been entirely excluded from the presentation of results. It is interesting to consider which forms of identity are prioritised in this forum because, as Barthes argued in Mythologies (1973: 142-58), the more dominant forms of cultural identity such as ‘maleness’ or ‘whiteness’ tend to be ‘ex-nominated’ as a default standard, whereas minority descriptions such as ‘gay’ or ‘black’ are explicitly marked out and named. Therefore, the almost total absence of claims to ethnicity suggests that non-white ethnicities are rarely constituted as potential audiences, assuming a default culture of whiteness.
Entitlement claims — such as these examples of ‘age claims’ — can be communicated either explicitly (e.g., ‘I’m a 19-year-old university student’4) or implicitly (e.g., ‘I am currently serving a four-month control order at Baxter Juvenile Justice Centre’5). However, gender claims are almost always made implicitly (e.g., ‘I was a highly energetic, motivated, single mother’6). To expand the parameters of this category, the implied gender of the author’s name was incorporated where available, e.g., ‘Jenny’.7
Table 8: Claims to gender of letter writer by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Gender MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Female 9% 70% 70% 37% 12% 23% 44% 22% 119 33% Male 54% 3% 23% 33% 73% 42% 8% 51% 141 39% None claimed 38% 27% 7% 29% 15% 35% 48% 27% 104 29%
71
Gender was the most common identity claim in this research, with only 29% of letters making no reference to the gender of the author. Even the community letters, which demonstrated proportionally fewer entitlement claims than their commercial counterparts, published 73% of letters that included some kind of gender claim. Interestingly, although the community magazines are inclusive of transgender audiences, there were no unconventional challenges to the familiar ‘prototypes of gender’ (Visser 2002) in any of these letters. However, the community magazines demonstrated a considerable gender discrepancy in the number of male claims (51%). This result was influenced by the significant number of male claims in Talkabout (73%), perhaps indicative of the imagined gay male audience of this publication. The more important finding, therefore, is that most magazines published a proportion of gender claims reflective of their intended market demographic. For example, the female-focused Good Medicine published 70% of female claims and only 3% male, and the male-focused Men’s Health published 54% male and 9% female claims. Nature & Health published the highest proportion of gender claims (93%) and supporting their inclusion of a broad audience of men and women, published 70% of letters with female and 23% male claims.
The next most common identity claim was ‘employment status’. The coding of this claim was designed to avoid the traditional distinction between ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ workers, distinguishing instead between: 1) corporate/professional/university qualified, e.g., ‘As a professional man and the father of two young children’;8 2) trades/services/trade or apprenticeship qualified, e.g., ‘Many of your articles relate to the white-collar brigade and don’t suit the physical working man’;9 3) unemployed/home duties, e.g., ‘When applying for a job’;10 4) student/in training, e.g., ‘I’m in my second year of study in Multimedia’;11 5) non-specific employment reference, e.g., ‘Long-term addicts such as myself, who have been working for the past 15-20 years’12 and 6) none claimed. With many recent changes to employment prerequisites, the distinction between ‘trade’ and ‘corporate’ professions has become less clear. Therefore, employment status claims are often only identifiable in the context of the letter’s subject. For example, in the following letter from Men’s Health, a university-qualified job is described within a ‘working class’ culture: ‘Being in the
72 health department on a “blokie” mining site isn’t easy, but Men’s Health provides me with many ideas of lecture topics and acceptable reading material to leave lying around’.13 And another Men’s Health letter questions the assumption that ‘professional’ positions equate with a high income: ‘I don’t go without much and nor does my family, but how about at least occasionally publishing holidays, products or gift ideas that most of us “normal” guys can afford’.14 To summarise, a ‘corporate’ employment position was defined as including health care, education, military and police services, government and finance, whereas ‘trades and services’ was defined as including fields such as sales and retail, fitness training, alternative health, such as naturopathy, construction work, cleaning and sex work.
Table 9: Claims to employment position of letter writer by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Employ. position MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Corporate / Prof. 17% 8% 5% 12% 17% 4% 8% 12% 44 12% Trades / Services 6% 1% 14% 6% 0% 4% 40% 10% 26 7% Unemployed/Home 1% 0% 0% 1% 3% 8% 0% 4% 6 2% Student / Training 2% 1% 2% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 5 1% Non-specific employ. 4% 1% 2% 3% 0% 4% 0% 1% 9 2% None claimed 69% 88% 77% 76% 80% 81% 52% 74% 274 75%
The most common (12%) claim to employment status in both the commercial and the community magazines was one of corporate or professional employment. This suggests that class may be a significant influence on the entitlement strategies employed in reader letters. And interestingly, the two magazines that published the highest number of corporate claims were also those with the highest rate of male-gender claims: Talkabout and Men’s Health (17% each). Unsurprisingly, the highest rate of employment claims was in the one magazine dedicated to an employment-based audience: The Professional (48%). Of these letters, 40% made trade-based claims: an obvious result of defining sex work as a trade/service. The only other magazine that published a significant number of trade claims was Nature & Health (14%), almost all of which were from alternative and natural health practitioners.
Another entitlement claim used in reader letters is the relative positioning of the reader within their own definition of family. Although the coding categories for ‘family position’ were designed to be flexible, no non-traditional family models were evident, and so the categories remained close to the following definitions: 1) parent, e.g., ‘when I
73 had my daughter’;15 2) child/grandchild, e.g., ‘Despite the physical distance that remains between my father and me’;16 3) partner/husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, e.g., ‘I am happily married to a man who accepts I am a “working girl”‘;17 4) sibling, e.g., ‘my sister has been diagnosed with severe borderline personality disorder’18 and 5) none claimed.
Table 10: Claims to family position of letter writer by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Family position MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Parent 8% 18% 7% 11% 0% 0% 0% 0% 27 7% Child / Grandchild 5% 0% 2% 3% 2% 0% 0% 1% 9 2% Partner / Husband etc 15% 5% 9% 11% 2% 4% 8% 4% 32 9% Sibling 1% 1% 0% 1% 0% 0% 0% 0% 3 1% None claimed 71% 76% 82% 74% 97% 96% 92% 95% 293 80%
Overall, the most common (9%) family position claim was ‘partner’ (including ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘girlfriend’ and so on), however, the commercial magazines published an equal number of parenting and partnering claims (11% each). Interestingly, there were no claims to a parenting role in the community magazines, and indeed, the only family position claims published in these magazines were those of child (1%) and partner (4%). Men’s Health published the highest individual number of family position claims (29%), and of these, the majority (15%) described being somebody’s partner, perhaps reflecting the emphasis that this magazine places on men’s sexual and emotional relationships. But as an interesting comparison, Good Medicine, which also focuses on sexual and relationship health, published a higher proportion of parenting claims (18%), perhaps representing the gendered emphasis on women’s responsibility for the health of their families.
Moving onto the related category of ‘sexuality’, these claims were also far more conventional than originally anticipated, falling into the following broad sexual identities: 1) heterosexual; 2) gay or lesbian and 3) none claimed. The normativity of these positions is particularly conspicuous since sexual identity politics have become increasingly complex in recent years (e.g., Evans 1993; Hennessy 2000). However, it is perhaps unsurprising that there are no ‘bisexual’ claims, as this identity continues to be stigmatised within both heterosexual and homosexual paradigms (Rust 2000). In a similar way to gender claims, sexuality was most often communicated implicitly, as in
74 this letter from User’s News: ‘Ron and I are a de facto couple’.19 This letter was authored by ‘Cherie’, which clarifies the description of ‘defacto’ as heterosexual. However, other claims were more clearly defined in sexual terms, as in this letter from Talkabout, which begins: ‘As an older gay HIV positive man...’ 20
Table 11: Claims to sexuality of letter writer by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Sexuality mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Heterosexual 32% 14% 14% 23% 2% 4% 8% 4% 63 17% Gay or lesbian 1% 0% 0% 0% 5% 0% 0% 3% 4 1% None claimed 68% 86% 86% 76% 93% 96% 92% 94% 297 82%
Sexuality claims are a good example of identity ex-nomination (Barthes 1973) with only 18% of letters making a claim to sexual preference despite the ‘culture of sexual story telling’ (Plummer 1995: 3) that has become a characteristic of much popular media. Those letters that did contain a sexuality claim were almost all heterosexual: 17% of letters claimed heterosexuality and only 1% (that is, only four letters out of a total of three hundred and sixty-four) claimed homosexuality. Interestingly, there were no claims to a lesbian identity and the four gay male claims were published in magazines with a higher rate of male gender claims: three letters from Talkabout (5%) and one letter from Men’s Health (1%). The highest rate of sexuality claims was in Men’s Health (33%), of which only one letter (1%) claimed a ‘gay’ identity, perhaps unsurprising in a magazine aimed at a heterosexual male market.
Claims to sexual identity are often made in relation to marital status, and so these letters were coded according to the following partnership claims: 1) married partner, e.g., ‘I have become a house-husband’;21 2) de-facto/long-term partner, e.g., ‘When my partner started buying Men’s Health for me’;22 3) boyfriend/girlfriend, e.g., ‘My girlfriend is in her early 30s’;23 4) single, e.g., ‘I am a single mother with seven-year-old twin daughters’;24 5) divorced/separated, e.g., ‘I am a single (divorced) parent who is over 40’25 and 6) none claimed. The anticipated category of ‘casual partner’ was removed when found to be absent from this material. Some marital status claims were difficult to code, as in this ‘longterm partner’ claim from Talkabout: ‘Keith and I took them up on their offer, and we both have had many happy hours and some very “frustrated” ones in cyberspace!’26 Without the authorship of ‘Adam and Keith’, and a later reference to
75 ‘exchanging emails with other gay men’, it would be difficult to judge marital status, and yet this letter is still absolutely organised around that notion of partnership.
Table 12: Claims to marital status of letter writer by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Marital status mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Married partner 8% 7% 7% 7% 0% 0% 4% 1% 20 5% De-facto / Long-term 2% 0% 0% 1% 3% 4% 4% 4% 7 2% Boyfriend / Girlf. 12% 1% 2% 7% 0% 0% 0% 0% 18 5% Single 2% 3% 0% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 5 1% Divorced / Separated 2% 1% 0% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 4 1% None claimed 74% 88% 91% 81% 97% 96% 92% 95% 310 85%
The most common claims to marital status were equally divided between ‘married partner’ (5%) and ‘boyfriend / girlfriend’ (5%). However, community magazines again published the fewest marital status claims, with just a few claims to ‘de-facto/long-term partner’ and one ‘married partner’ claim published by The Professional (4%). By far the highest rate of marital status claims were in Men’s Health (26%), with the majority (12%) of these letters claiming the position of ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’.
The final identity claim in health magazine reader letters was ‘age’. Although most age claims involved a clear number, some letters were less explicit. Therefore, age claims were only categorised into the following age groups if a clear reference to a number or range of ages was articulated: 1) less than twenty; 2) between twenty and thirty; 3) between thirty and forty; 4) between forty and fifty; 5) more than fifty and 6) none claimed.
Table 13: Claims to age of letter writer by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Age mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Less than 20 2% 1% 0% 2% 0% 4% 0% 1% 5 1% Between 20 and 30 6% 7% 0% 5% 0% 0% 4% 1% 14 4% Between 30 and 40 5% 11% 2% 6% 0% 0% 0% 0% 16 4% Between 40 and 50 6% 4% 0% 4% 0% 4% 0% 1% 12 3% More than 50 2% 7% 2% 4% 0% 0% 0% 0% 9 2% None claimed 79% 70% 95% 79% 100% 92% 96% 97% 308 85%
Although 85% of these letters made no age claim, those that did were surprisingly well distributed across age ranges. Good Medicine published the highest rate of age claims amongst the commercial publications (30%), followed by Men’s Health (21%), which
76 could be associated with the commercial targeting of specific age groups. However, Good Medicine was the only magazine to actually represent its target age market of ‘women 25-54’ (Australian Consolidated Press 2003a) in their published reader letters. For example, the marketing material for Men’s Health claims that ‘...half of Men’s Health male readers are aged between 25 and 39...’ (Murdoch Magazines 2001) and yet 6% of their published letters claimed an age of ‘between forty and fifty’, 2% of ‘more than fifty’, and 2% of ‘less than twenty’. The almost complete absence of age claims in the community letters is almost certainly representative of the open age policy of those publications, particularly in comparison to the much more specific demographic targeting by the commercial publications.
Claiming readership: Fans, browsers and critics
Hartley has defined readerships as ‘the audiences, consumers, users, viewers, listeners or readers called into being by any medium, whether verbal, audio-visual, journalistic or fictional’ (1996: 58). In this thesis, claims to readership are seen to be those statements that pass judgement on the comparative worth of each publication, drawing on the utility of media consumption that was discussed in the introduction. The various categories of health magazine readership were distilled into the following broad audience positions: 1) committed regular reader; 2) uncertain casual reader; 3) critical non-reader and 4) none claimed. Broadly speaking, a ‘committed’ letter displays a concerted dedication to fandom, such as this Good Medicine letter: ‘Thank you for your magazine, I buy it every month’.27 An ‘uncertain’ letter might make mention of the publication’s merit, but tempers this with advice for improvement, such as this Men’s Health letter: ‘Initially, I found your feature articles informative and fascinating. However, I think it’s time for some variety’.28 Finally, a ‘critical’ letter clearly rejects the magazine, as in this Talkabout letter: ‘I started out feeling good reading Talkabout but by the time I had finished I felt angry and confused, thanks Talkabout – not!’29
Table 14: Claims to readership of letter writer by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Readership MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Committed regular 68% 34% 77% 59% 17% 27% 16% 19% 172 47% Uncertain casual 17% 14% 0% 13% 2% 12% 0% 4% 37 10% Critical non-reader 9% 9% 0% 7% 10% 0% 4% 6% 26 7% None claimed 7% 43% 23% 20% 71% 62% 80% 71% 129 35%
77
Readership claims were quite frequent, with only 35% of letters claiming no readership position. Editors would be happy to note that almost half (47%) of these published letters claim a committed position, whereas 10% were uncertain and 7% were critical of the magazine. Commercial magazines published far more readership claims (80%) than the community publications (29%) and Men’s Health published the highest proportion (93%) of readership claims overall. Men’s Health also published the highest rate of ‘committed’ readership claims, perhaps illustrating the ‘newness’ of the men’s magazine genre. That is, since men’s lifestyle magazines are still relatively recent (Jackson et al. 2001), audiences may be more reflexively aware of the social evaluation of their worth, inspiring a more emphatic display of support for this new genre and publication. However, the only magazine to publish solely ‘committed’ readership letters was Nature & Health: 77% of letters in this magazine were written from the position of regular fandom, with absolutely no letters that questioned or rejected the magazine. This is either indicative of the highly developed ‘fan culture’ (Hills 2002) of alternative health audiences, or an editorial policy that concentrates on positive feedback and constructive criticism. Although User’s News also published no letters written from an explicitly ‘critical’ position, this can be explained by the fewer letters published in this magazine, and perhaps by what has been termed a lack of ‘self- efficacy’ (e.g., Celentano et al. 2002) by drug users in pro-actively seeking public representation.
Claiming corporeality: In sickness, health and my professional opinion ...
Reader letters are a distinctive mode of written communication, and as such must be examined for characteristics peculiar to not only the genre, but also their publishing context. Therefore, this section will offer an original method for the analysis of narrative disclosures of ‘corporeality’ in reader letters, with a specific emphasis on medical or health-related disclosures. As Rose has suggested, ‘human beings in contemporary Western culture are increasingly coming to understand themselves in somatic terms — corporeality has become one of the most important sites for ethical judgements and techniques’ (2001: 21). Claims of corporeality attempt to embody identity and readership within a material frame of ‘reality’ that is distinguished from the ‘conceptual’ realm of the magazine. A typology of corporeal claims was identified,
78 ranging from ‘illness’ to ‘health’, informed by but not reliant upon, biomedical classifications of human pathology.8 Part of the function of corporeality claims is what Charmaz has described as the ‘implicit hierarchy of moral status in suffering’ (1999: 374). So the categories in this analysis have been designed to prioritise the moral status of corporeality, rather than simply its medical evaluation.
As Slater writes of content analysis: ‘Beyond the formal criteria (that they be exhaustive and mutually exclusive), the categories must also be enlightening, producing a breakdown of imagery that will be analytically interesting and coherent’ (1998: 236). Although the categories for corporeality claiming are not (necessarily) mutually exclusive, they are exhaustive and designed to throw light on the ways in which embodiment is deployed as yet another strategy of entitlement. The categories are: 1) physiological conditions; 2) psychological conditions; 3) cosmetic conditions; 4) body improvement; 5) body satisfaction; 6) medical expertise and 7) none claimed. These categories are not intended to encapsulate all modes of corporeality, embodiment or illness experience, but they are intended to summarise all of the various ‘body stories’ communicated in these letters. Claims to a ‘physiological condition’ may be employed to justify reading a health magazine, whereas claims to ‘medical expertise’ situate authorship as professionally abstracted from these visceral forms of embodiment. Despite their differences, both examples organise the audience in relation to the material and medicalised body.
The category of ‘physiological conditions’ includes any form of physical pathology, from life-threatening conditions such as HIV/AIDS and cancer, to less chronic conditions such as infertility, impotence and irritable bowel syndrome, non-pathological conditions such as pregnancy, menopause and acute conditions such as minor injuries and ‘addictions’. Examples of ‘physiological’ claims can be found in these letter extracts: ‘I have had two close brushes with death and have been permanently disabled by this virus’;30 ‘My husband and I are childless and, after five years, we know this will not change’.31 The category of ‘psychological conditions’ relates to mental and emotional health, including conditions such as stress, depression, schizophrenia, eating
8 The term pathology is used here in its most abstract definition, as: ‘something abnormal’ (Merriam- Webster Online 2003).
79 disorders, self-harming and loneliness. The following Men’s Health letter demonstrates a claim of psychological ill-health: ‘I can’t deny I feel isolated and lonely’.32 The third and rather ambivalent category of ‘cosmetic conditions’ includes such ‘conditions’ as cellulite, acne, (over- and under-) weight, skin ageing and breast size. The following Men’s Health letter is an example of a cosmetic claim: ‘I desperately want to gain weight but no-one seems to be able to give me some specific ways of going about it’.33
The next two categories shift focus to the ethical organisation of embodiment. The first is ‘body improvement’, which describes letters that reference the act or intention of optimising the physical self, by improving fitness, working on stress levels and so on. An example of this is found in a Men’s Health letter: ‘I’ve discovered a passion for exercise and a greater understanding of how diets and exercise can assist in how I feel about myself’.34 There is a wide and diverse literature on body improvement (e.g., Featherstone 1991; Falk 1994; Dutton 1995), much of which was inspired by the work of Foucault on The Care of the Self (1986). The logical endpoint of this self-work is the ideal of ‘body satisfaction’. This claim was identified in letters that declared a satisfied contentment with the current state of health, as in this letter from User’s News: ‘...all these wonderful natural sensations you get when you’re clean and healthy, like the feeling of shivers down your spine and lumps in the throat when you hear a really good song’.35 The final corporeality claim involves an abstraction of the body via the discourse of medical expertise. That is, these letters construct a position outside the materiality of embodiment by engaging with the expert discourse on — rather than the private experience of — health and illness. Medical expertise was deployed via such ‘expert’ roles as medical doctors, fitness instructors, professional athletes, naturopaths and HIV-organisation representatives. Most claims of medical expertise were very explicit, as in this Nature & Health letter: ‘I am a registered nurse and, from a professional standpoint, I admire the way you report on health issues’.36
The majority (65%) of health magazine reader letters made some claim to corporeality, but two categories stood out as the most typical: ‘physiological condition’ (29%) and ‘body improvement’ (15%). This result is somewhat confounded by a high number of ‘improving’ letters in the commercial magazines (21%) and a high number of ‘physiological’ letters in both the commercial (20%) and the community magazines
80 (48%). Interestingly, although the commercial and community magazines published a similar rate of corporeality claims (68% and 60% respectively), almost all of the community claims were grouped under ‘physiological conditions’ (48%) and ‘medical expertise’ (10%). In some ways this is a self-evident finding, in that the three community magazines are aimed at audiences defined by their transgressions against normative definitions of health.
Table 15: Claims to corporeality of letter writer by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Corporeality MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Physiological cond. 7% 31% 43% 20% 63% 35% 28% 48% 104 29% Psychological cond. 6% 7% 2% 6% 0% 0% 4% 1% 15 4% Cosmetic condition 1% 27% 2% 9% 0% 0% 0% 0% 22 6% Body improvement 36% 3% 5% 21% 0% 0% 0% 0% 53 15% Body satisfaction 3% 7% 0% 4% 0% 4% 0% 1% 10 3% Medical expertise 9% 5% 16% 9% 17% 0% 4% 10% 34 9% None claimed 39% 20% 32% 32% 20% 62% 64% 40% 126 35%
A claim that was conspicuously absent from all of these magazines was ‘body satisfaction’: only 3% of letters described a state of embodied pleasure. The lack of body satisfaction is, in many ways, a further indication of the dominance of the body improvement ethic in health magazines. The mandate for these publications is achieved by exposing ‘sickness’ (i.e., physiological conditions) and providing tools for achieving ‘health’ (i.e., body improvement). Predictably, the highest proportion of corporeal claims in Men’s Health was ‘body improvement’ (36%): further evidence of this magazine’s mission to inspire men to physical fitness. It is interesting to compare this, however, with the other two commercial publications, both of which are aimed at women, and both of which published very few ‘body improvement’ claims and very many ‘physiological condition’ claims. Good Medicine also published a significant number of ‘cosmetic condition’ claims (27%), with a particular focus on cellulite, ageing and weight loss, but unlike the Men’s Health letters which discussed any cosmetic issues under the rubric of ‘improving the male body’, these letters were almost always explained as corporeal pathologies, rather than as transitional disorders able to be improved via techniques of self-motivation and body-work.
81 Letter genres: The politics of form
Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2001) description of three ‘modes of publicity’ articulated by newspaper letter editors has been drawn upon to organise a typology of five genres of reader letters, each of which relates to a politics of participation. As a brief introduction, Wahl-Jorgensen distinguishes between ‘dialogist’, ‘activist’, and ‘exhibitionist’ modes of publicity: dialogist publicity interprets the ideal functioning of the public sphere as a domain of equal participation between rational agents, with the end objective of obtaining consensus; activist publicity advocates for specific counterpublics as a way to empower less visible or marginalised groups and exhibitionist publicity promotes the subjective experience of individual audience members, suggesting that a cohesive public can be formed through the mutual sharing of personal stories. Again, the term ‘exhibitionist’ is used in this context to describe a culture of disclosure rather than a type of personality or behaviour. These three modes will be examined in more detail in chapter seven, but for the purpose of this content analysis were found to map onto five different ‘genres’ of reader letter (see Figure 9).
Figure 9: Reader letter genres by mode of publicity
Mode: Dialogist
Genre: Opener Genre: Rejoinder
Mode: Activist
Genre: Endorsement
Mode: Exhibitionist
Genre: Commitment Genre: Confession
82 Openers and rejoinders as ‘dialogist’ genres
Two letter genres employ a dialogist mode of publicity: openers and rejoinders. These genres are dialogist in that they are dedicated to a notion of audience participation as the fulfilment of democratic citizenship entitlements, idealised in the popular notion of ‘freedom of speech’. In this mode the magazine is understood to operate as a public bulletin board, creating the space for rational dialogue between readers, editors and the wider community. The ‘opener’ genre is designed to initiate new debates or suggest new topics for research and publication. This letter from Good Medicine is an example of initiating a new topic: ‘I see your magazine as a great way to educate the public and relay information from different industries, so, as a concerned consumer, I am requesting that you do an article on food additives, their use and their effect on the consumer’.37 And this letter from Nature & Health is an example of a suggestion for new magazine research: ‘I love Nature & Health. I especially like the fact that it’s bimonthly, because it gives me more time to digest the articles and it’s less of a financial drain. I would, however, like to suggest four topics...’ 38
Reader letters that employ a ‘rejoinder’ genre engage with ideas already in circulation by responding to a previous letter or to a particular magazine item. Although some rejoinder letters can be seen to work against the opener ethic by deliberately closing down a previous debate, these are nonetheless both dialogist genres, because they prioritise active and dialogic audience participation. An example of the rejoinder genre can be found in this letter from Talkabout written in response to a published article: ‘Just writing to say thank you for publishing Mother Helen Highwater, OPI’s article in the May edition of Talkabout’.39 Alternatively, the following letter is written in response to a previous letter published in Good Medicine: I found the January letters page sad [reader feedback to our Cellasene trial offer]. What does cellulite matter if the thighs in question are functional and healthy? Did Mother Teresa, Mum Shirl, Queen Elizabeth I, Caroline Chisholm or Jane Austen ever suffer from cellulite? Who knows? They are remembered for better reasons!40
Although he does not use these terms, Porter has also identified both opener and rejoinder letter genres in his study of the 18th century Gentleman’s Magazine: ‘In number after number of the Magazine, one is bombarded by requests for medical advice
83 ... Many of these queries duly received their reply from other readers ... Furthermore, hundreds of other remedies were sent in by laymen off their own bat’ (1985: 149-150).
Table 16: Dialogist letter genres by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Dialogist genre mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Opener 2% 3% 7% 3% 5% 15% 48% 17% 27 7% Rejoinder 16% 22% 25% 19% 25% 4% 4% 15% 66 18% Total dialogist letters 18% 24% 32% 22% 31% 19% 52% 33% 93 26%
Overall, dialogist genres were employed in just over a quarter of all letters (26%), with rejoinders (18%) more common than openers (7%). This suggests that dialogism remains a significant, if not dominant, principle within health magazines. Dialogist genres were more common in the community magazines (33%) than their commercial counterparts (22%), publishing a similar number of openers (17%) and rejoinders (15%). In comparison, only 3% of the commercial letters were openers, and 19% rejoinders. This perhaps demonstrates that commercial magazines encourage reactive participation, in comparison to the pro-active audience contributions solicited by community magazines. However, 25% of the Talkabout letters employed a rejoinder genre, compared to only 5% of openers. This perhaps indicates the popularity of ongoing Talkabout letter debates, some of which can be traced across the whole period of this research. Finally, the highest number of dialogist letters was found in The Professional (52%): a figure boosted by several letters from one author who wrote unsolicited commentaries on topics of interest to sex workers.41
Advocacy-endorsements as ‘activist’ genres
Only one letter genre employed an activist mode of publicity, best described as the ‘advocacy-endorsement’ genre. These letters are explicitly concerned with publicising a particular organisation, theory, or demographic, with the political objective of mobilising change. Advocacy is defined as ‘...to plead in favour of; to plead the cause of another...’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2003), and this is precisely what activist letters attempt to achieve. An advocacy letter is generally written on behalf of, or to endorse the perspective of, a marginalised or discriminated group. Once again, in any letters that included a dialogist or exhibitionist genre as well as an activist one, only the letters that clearly prioritised activism were categorised as such. An example of the advocacy genre
84 is this letter from Men’s Health, which advocates on behalf of sexual minorities: ‘We should be encouraging a diversity of sexual expression and not making men ashamed (no matter what their sexuality) of showing affection to another guy’.42 Other groups advocated in these magazines include endangered species, drug users, teenage boys, older people, gay men, people living with HIV/AIDS, female nurses, PLWHA in developing countries, Tasmanians and divorced fathers.
Another purpose of this genre is to endorse the political significance of particular organisations or theories. For example, this letter from Talkabout is an example of an organisational endorsement: ‘I can assure all, clients and carers, that CSN Western Sydney will continue to provide good services for HIV positive clients and support for carers as we have always done’.43 Other endorsed organisations include the AIDS Council of New South Wales, Australian Complementary Health Association, Positive Heterosexuals, CIDESCO Schools Australia Ltd. (beauty school representative body), PRIDE (NSW) Ltd, National Centre in HIV Social Research and the Western Sydney Positive Women’s Committee. And the following letter from Nature & Health endorses a (marketed) theory: ‘I used to be addicted to poker machines ... and, in the process of freeing myself, developed a program that I have been teaching successfully to others for more than two years ... [The Free Yourself Program] success rate in initiating change is very high’.44 The only other theory to be endorsed in these letters is natural health as a ‘time-proven’ alternative to conventional biomedicine.45
Table 17: Activist letter genres by publication
cmrcl cmnty Total Total Activist genre MH GM N&H mean TALK USER PRO mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 Advocacy-endorsem. 6% 5% 5% 5% 20% 4% 0% 12% 27 7%
Only 7% of letters demonstrated a clearly activist mode of publicity. This suggests that magazine letters pages — as opposed to newspapers — are rarely used for the activist purposes of promoting the self (as a representative of an organisation or belief) or defending others (for political change). There were considerably more activist genres evident in the community magazines (12%) than in commercial (5%) but this result is confounded by a high rate of activist letters in Talkabout (20%). And these Talkabout letters can be partially explained by the close association between this publication and
85 several key community organisations: letters were regularly published from HIV/AIDS organisations responding to queries or communicating new information about their policies, plans and philosophies. Finally, there were no letters in The Professional that could be categorised as activist: a surprising result in a magazine run by a sex worker advocacy organisation.
Commitments and confessions as ‘exhibitionist’ genres
Two aspects of audience exhibitionism have been theoretically examined in recent years. One is the increasing phenomenon of public disclosures, including the high degree of motivation required to make such public disclosures (e.g., Baxter & Sahlstein 2000; Dindia 2000; Orrego et al. 2000; Kloss & Lisman 2002). The other focuses on autobiography (e.g., Peck 1996; Smith & Watson 1996; Gergen 1997; Zuss 1997) and the act of public confession (Marshall 1998). In this thesis, ‘exhibitionism’ has been identified in letters that incorporate a deliberate self-disclosure or personal narrative. And although two genres have been identified as purely exhibitionist in mode, the other three are also occasionally employed to articulate an exhibitionist objective. Therefore, five genres are outlined as exhibitionist in this section: (exhibitionist) opener or rejoinder; (exhibitionist) advocacy-endorsement and (exhibitionist) ‘commitment’ or ‘confession’. Exhibitionist genres were the most common in this material, with 244 letters (67%) declaring a private narrative in this very public way.
The first set of genres describes exhibitionist letters with a dialogist purpose. These opener and rejoinder genres combine exhibitionist publicity with a dialogist technique, in order to facilitate or contribute to a ‘rational’ dialogue by offering evidence from the private realm of the reader. The following extract from a Nature & Health letter is an example of an exhibitionist mode aligned with a dialogist opener genre: ‘I have been a vegetarian for 19 years (since I was 12 years old) and a fruitarian for almost one year. I am seeking more information about fruitarianism ... Any help from readers of Nature & Health would be appreciated’.46 The following extract from a User’s News letter is an example of a dialogist rejoinder genre: Re: Noondaa Weejal’s story ‘Koories, Prison and the Courts’, User’s News #27 ... In the past month I’ve been witness to a bagsnatch and threatened with a mugging, not to mention other shit. I know those of you who rob and
86 fuck other people over think you are justified. I question this assumption and your credibility to then lament that no-one cares.47
The next exhibitionist genre demonstrates an activist purpose, and can be identified in letters that offer a personal story in order to endorse an organisation or theory, or to advocate on behalf of a marginalised group. For example, this letter from Talkabout endorses a theory of non-treatment of HIV/AIDS, in reaction to the ‘militant’ promotion of treatments across the medical sector: While I have chosen not to take HIV treatments for a variety of reasons, I have never sought to influence other people’s decisions and I have always respected the individual’s right to make an informed decision. The current pro-treatment views of service providers, i.e., the militant and dictatorial ‘treatments now’ message, is becoming more and more abhorrent.48
The following letter from Good Medicine is an example of the use of an exhibitionist mode to support an advocacy genre: I believe that society underestimates the effect acne can have on a person’s life. Speaking from personal experience, acne can be just as destructive of a person’s self-esteem as being overweight! I feel so strongly about this that I am considering starting a support group myself.49
Other exhibitionist letters advocate on behalf of illicit drug users, aboriginal people, sex workers, PLWHA, straight PLWHA, women PLWHA, men on low incomes, men in non-corporate jobs, drug users in prison, overweight people, underweight people, older people, PLWHA who choose not to take treatments, and men who do not look like ‘greek gods’. However, there are no examples of exhibitionist letters that included both a significant personal disclosure and an endorsement of an organisation. This seems to suggest that the act of disclosure is incongruent with endorsing or acting on behalf of an activist organisation.
The third and final set of exhibitionist genres align with the mode of exhibitionist publicity. Although this produces the awkward description of exhibitionist- exhibitionism, this genre appropriately emphasises the excessively revelatory character of these letters that are dedicated solely to self-disclosure, with no other identifiable dialogist or activist purpose. Two distinct exhibitionist genres were apparent in this research: 1) commitments; and, 2) confessions. The genre of exhibitionist commitment is most often articulated in reader letters that employ a personal story as evidence for a public ‘pledge’ to media fandom, as in this Men’s Health letter:
87 I have gone from a 115 kilogram, stressed-out, unfit, smoking, boozing office worker to an 82kg jobseeker. Thanks in no small part to your magazine, which I started reading in August 1998. Since then Men’s Health has helped motivate me to stay fit and healthy.50
Confessional letters are similar, and yet to confess is defined as ‘...to tell or make known; to declare faith in or adherence to; to give evidence of’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2003). Therefore, confessional letters have less interest in justifying their disclosure through reference to the magazine. Instead, a confession is a pure exhibitionist disclosure, for the sake of exhibitionism. This is not to say that a confession needs to include a disclosure of something profoundly secret or shameful. Indeed, the confession genre is typified by disclosures of quite ordinary, everyday experiences. However, the genre remains a confessional since a reader letter necessarily implies the public presentation of a personal story, as in this letter from Good Medicine: I had no knowledge of scoliosis until my daughter was diagnosed with it in grade six ... Over the next 20 months, she had X-rays and orthopaedic consultations, and we watched as the curvature progressed rapidly ... On her last visit, we were told that the whole issue might have to be reconsidered and, if the curve continued to progress, surgical intervention would be the only alternative, as she was too old for any type of bracing ... We understand that we have a long road ahead of us, but we are determined to give our daughter the chance to make a recovery from scoliosis without surgery.51
Exhibitionist letters that demonstrated some dialogist or activist intention were categorised as a commitment or a confession if the primary purpose of the letter was to share rather than to claim or to change. For example, in the following letter from Men’s Health, a dialogist rejoinder (i.e., responding to an article) becomes a personal fandom commitment: Three weeks ago I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said ‘yes’, which is great. So we’ve set a date in November. Ages away, right? Well that’s what I thought, until I read your ‘For Whom the Bells Toll’ article in the July issue ... Your article is like a checklist for me. I’ve photocopied it, scribbled notes and phone numbers on it and I carry it with me everywhere I go (even to the gym!).52
And the following letter from The Professional demonstrates a shift from an activist genre (advocating for sex workers) to a wider ‘confessional’ genre (the experience of participating in the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade): The main aim of the SWOP float this year was to get a message out to the thousands that were watching ... The float headed up Oxford Street with our
88 heads up high and working that crowd the whole time. We were glamorous, stylish and most of all the sexiest float in the parade!53
Table 18: Exhibitionist letter genres by publication
Total Total MH GM N&H cmrcl TALK USER PRO cmnty Exhibit. genre mean mean letters mean N=136 N=74 N=44 N=254 N=59 N=26 N=25 N=110 N=364 EX/Opener-rejoinder 9% 27% 25% 17% 19% 15% 8% 15% 60 16% EX/Advocacy-endor. 8% 14% 2% 9% 19% 42% 16% 24% 48 13% Commitment or conf. 59% 30% 36% 46% 12% 19% 24% 16% 136 37% Total exhibit. letters 76% 70% 64% 72% 49% 77% 48% 54% 244 67%
The most conspicuous result of this analysis is that 67% of all letters in all magazines employed an exhibitionist genre. This would appear to support Wahl-Jorgensen’s claim that editors prioritise exhibitionist publicity, and downgrade the value of dialogist or activist reader letters. The dominance of exhibitionist genres was evident in each of the magazines, although it was particularly true of the commercial publications (72%). And although personal narratives disclosed for a dialogist (16%) or activist (13%) purpose were not uncommon, it was the purely exhibitionist letters that dominated this analysis: 37% of all letters were structured as a commitment or confession. Men’s Health appears to be the prototype of this conclusion: the majority (59%) of letters in Men’s Health employed a commitment or confession genre, suggesting that this magazine prioritises the personal stories of individual audience members.
Conclusion
This chapter has focused on reader letter content that is engaged in making claims about the identity of the letter writer and making connections to specific genres of political expression. Although these features were comparatively different between publications and industries, there are some general conclusions that can be made about all six magazines. One is the overall predominance of exhibitionism as a mode of audience participation. This is typical of both the medium of the magazine and the forum of reader letters, since both are products of a more general cultural shift towards the validation of personal narrative as a form of commercial and cultural expression. However, exhibitionism becomes particularly interesting when it is related to entitlement claiming. The demographic variables of gender, employment, family, sexuality, marital status and age all demonstrate that the identities that are generally subject to processes of ‘ex-nomination’ (Barthes 1973) in mainstream culture, are here
89 deployed in explicit strategies of nomination. Hartley describes ex-nomination as follows: Whereas it is frequently the case that women are represented first as women, and then in other terms, for men this is not so. They are represented in terms of their job, action, character or whatever – their gender is ‘beyond discourse’, as it were: it does not need to be named. So we find newspaper headlines that tell of ‘Senator and girl in crash’, or ‘Beauty of the siege – Cheery heroine was a lifesaver’, or ‘Sexy Anna tops poll’. In each case the woman is defined by her looks, body or procreative ability, whereas men are very rarely ‘nominated’ in this way (1994: 111).
Thus, it is particularly fascinating that in this analysis, the categories normally represented as ‘beyond discourse’, such as the male gender, heterosexuality, professional employment and so on, are more likely to be proclaimed explicitly, drawing attention directly to those factors as an entitling strategy. It is almost as though these characteristics are extra-nominated, particularly in the case of Men’s Health. Warner has argued that ‘masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space ... [and men] often feel their masculinity challenged when their bodies are on display as objects of erotic desire’ (2002: 24). Therefore, the next chapter will focus in detail on how the Australian Men’s Health audience is represented as responding to the reification of men’s bodies as objects of desire, in a culture that has been traditionally suspicious of exhibitionism and extra-nomination.
90 CHAPTER FIVE
Boys doing bodywork: The reshaping of masculinity in Men’s Health
Introduction
The Men’s Health marketing material commences with the following battle cry: What do you want out of life? A healthy body? A fantastic relationship? An interesting and successful career? Happiness? The secret is to stay on top of things, to be in control and to maintain a balance, so as to enjoy a useful and rewarding life. This is what a men’s magazine should be about – a lifestyle magazine that offers the reader a winning formula. Men’s Health constantly monitors these foundations – giving men the choice to take up the challenge as they see fit (Murdoch Magazines 2001).
This chapter examines how Men’s Health constructs this ‘winning formula’ via the interplay of four discursive functions, here described as the medical, social, consumer and beauty functions of Men’s Health. Assuming that ‘men’s lifestyle magazines provide opportunities for reflexive monitoring of behaviours and practices which serve to construct masculine identities within contemporary consumer cultures’ (Bunton & Crawshaw 2002: 188), this analysis will consider how reader letters negotiate the construction of a globally standardised model of masculinity by drawing upon local idioms in defence of normative stereotypes about Australian men. For this reason, emphasis is placed on those letters that ‘contest’ the four functions of Men’s Health, deploying a localised resistance to the reshaping of masculinity associated with the globalisation of the American Men’s Health brand. Reader letters challenge the responsibilising of the Men’s Health audience in playful and ironic exchanges, drawing attention to some of the economic, political and environmental constraints that restrict the capacity of many men to achieve the proposed physical, social and lifestyle ideals. The chapter concludes with a case study investigation of the topic of men’s body hair removal, including reader letters, editorials and interview extracts with the editor of Australian Men’s Health.
The globalisation of the Men’s Health brand
Men’s Health is representative of the commercial success of both ‘health’ and ‘men’s lifestyle magazines’ as new consumer industries. As Bunton and Crawshaw explain:
91 ... until recently magazines for men were either special interest or pornographic ... The emergence of the lifestyle magazine which covers a broad range of issues, including health, yet still typically incorporates what are seen as the traditional male interests often dealt with in ‘specialist magazines’ (cars, sport, pornography), is much more specifically a late twentieth-century phenomenon (2002: 189).
The US edition of Men’s Health was launched as a quarterly magazine in 1988 by Rodale Press, a small health publisher, and proved the critics wrong by establishing a strong circulation very quickly. A review in Fortune proposes that: Men’s Health has turned the concept of men’s magazines upside down ... Unlike its more conventional competitors, the magazine unabashedly goes the way of women’s publications: It offers advice on health, fitness, and yes, beauty. Ten years ago, no one would have believed men would want to read such articles. Yet in a decade Men’s Health circulation has rocketed from zero to 1.5 million – more than GQ’s and Esquire’s combined (1998: 40).
Men’s Health repeated this success with multiple international editions (see Figure 10).
Figure 10: Cover pages of Men’s Health international editions from (clockwise from top left) the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany
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The Australian edition was launched as a monthly magazine in October 1997 by Murdoch Magazines, publishers of ‘boutique’ titles marie claire and Better Homes & Gardens. Although this and the other international editions have not reached the massive circulations boasted by the original US edition,9 they have nonetheless demonstrated that the graphic and editorial template managed by Men’s Health International is commercially replicable in diverse cultural contexts.
One of the primary features of the Men’s Health ‘brand’ is a thematic focus on health and fitness information. As one media satirist writes: Once (men’s magazines) were essentially about reading virile literature and looking at pictures of naked women. All you had to do was sit there and be entertained. It was wonderfully passive. It was downright relaxing. Not any more. Nowadays the successful men’s magazine insists that you get off your lazy butt and start crunching your abs and pumping your thighs. Apparently, the editors have found out (through painstaking research, no doubt) that you, should you be male, are a complete ignoramus. Your head is empty and needs to be crammed full of basic-survival briefings before you dare stick a toe out of bed in the morning (Grossberger 1997).
Men’s Health assumes that most men do not know how to look after themselves, and indeed, are thoroughly irresponsible in this regard. This belief has been supported by recent research that suggests that although ‘...some men do defy social prescriptions of masculinity and adopt healthy behaviours, such as getting annual physicals and eating healthy food...’ (Courtenay 2000: 1397), in general men are not engaging in preventive health. Men’s Health adopts a new public health model of men’s wellbeing, incorporating the emotional, environmental, work and sexual aspects of men’s lives (Watson 2000). Men’s Health has also extended the jurisdictions of ‘health’ to address the career, community and cosmetic expectations of urban men, not only expanding the parameters of its audience but also attracting a wider range of advertising.
A second requirement of the global template for Men’s Health is the visual semiotics of the magazine and in particular, the posing of the male models on the cover and throughout the magazine’s content. As Puri writes, ‘It’s hard not to notice the magazine
9 The Magazine Publishers of America ‘Fact Sheet: Circulation’ puts Men’s Health’s 2002 circulation at 1,677,574, ranking it no.43 in the ‘Top 100 ABC-measured magazines’. This compares to 21.7 million for the top-ranking NRTA/AARP Bulletin, 12 million for the no.3 ranked Reader’s Digest, and 947,662 for the no.100 ranked marie claire.
93 on the newsstand: Each month the cover sports a fabulous, rippling man with (a) no shirt, (b) a wet shirt, or (c) a shirt in the process of being removed’ (1998: 41). This ‘range’ of stylistic options is also standardised by the use of black and white photography, which renders these modern bodies with the status of classic beauty. ‘Classic’ or not, such images are extremely unusual in popular publishing. As Petersen and Lupton have observed: ‘The bare flesh of men’s bodies tends to be far less available to the gaze than that of women’s bodies; instead men generally appear clothed in the armour of business suits or uniforms ... men tend to constitute the surveyors rather than the surveyed’ (1996: 81). This indicates just how radical it was to launch a popular (heterosexual) men’s magazine featuring semi-naked images of men. As the Men’s Health editor explained: ... there was initially a lot of reluctance because people thought a men’s magazine in Australia, telling men how to look after themselves, and with a guy on the cover, wouldn’t work. Because traditionally Australian men only buy magazines with bikini clad starlets or cars or a fisherman holding up a catchable sized fish ...
This unusual visual approach seems to work as a result of being framed as explicitly (a) health-focused and (b) heterosexual.
The second of these frames will be addressed later in the chapter, but it is important to acknowledge the role that images of smooth, hard and muscular male bodies play in a publication dedicated to improving men’s health. Featherstone has argued that ‘...the images in the advertisements, popular press and health education pamphlets are of lithe, bright-eyed beautiful people, in varying states of nakedness, enjoying their body work (1991: 184). And as Monaghan proposes, ‘...at the level of cultural signification, male and female athletic bodies have popular currency as symbolic modes for transmitting positive social values such as health’ (2001: 338). Other positive social values are also transmitted via these representations, particularly in a magazine that places great emphasis on ‘the slim, trim, sexually attractive body as the key to success from the boardroom to the bedroom’ (Williams, S 1998: 440). Thus, images of ideal physicality are seen to represent ideal citizenship in other domains, particularly that of career and sexuality. Men’s Health suggests that ideal masculinity can be achieved through personal behaviour and consumer choices but can only be lived through the social performance of physical ‘fitness’. So what is perhaps most important about the success
94 of Men’s Health as a global franchise, is its capacity to publicise the private, domestic and sexualised domains of men’s lives, and to do so in an environment that is clearly defined as both body-conscious and masculine.
Men’s Health promotes this new globalised masculinity by prioritising four discursive functions for the magazine. The first is a medical function, described as expounding essential men’s health information. The second is a social function, attempting to navigate changing social roles for men. The Men’s Health consumer function recommends ideal consumer behaviours and finally, the beauty function models new body aesthetics for men. Despite their separate implications, these functions are necessarily complementary, simultaneous, partial and contextual. An individual reader letter might address only one of these functions, or it might address two or more, or none at all. The one hundred and thirty-six Men’s Health letters included in this research were coded according to which of these four functions they most explicitly addressed, and how those functions were consolidated or contested.
Figure 11: Letter responses to the four functions of Men’s Health
50 45 43 43 40 35 30 25 20 14 15 9 10 8 7 8
5 1 2 1 0 Medical Social Beauty Consumer Miscellaneous function function function function
Consolidates Contests
The most obvious finding from this analysis is that the majority of Men’s Health letters consolidated rather than contested these functions. And it is interesting to note that only the consumer function received more challenging than supporting letters, perhaps suggesting that many men find the commercial focus of Men’s Health to be more alienating than enticing. And although the medical and social functions were
95 consolidated most often, all four functions were contested in around the same number of letters. This chapter is therefore interested in how contestation operates as a letter- writing tactic in this media environment. The rest of this chapter will examine each of these functions in detail, in order of the frequency with which they were addressed in the letters page (see Figure 11). However, it should be noted from the outset that many of these letters appear to be either heavily edited or written by professional writers, suggesting that this magazine either has a highly literate audience or is fabricating letters for particular editorial objectives. The illustrations provided throughout this chapter have been predominantly selected from a single issue of Men’s Health that was published in the middle of research period: April 1999. This single issue was selected in order to demonstrate the simultaneous presence of all four functions, however these images also represent the range of Men’s Health issues, both from before and since that particular edition. Other illustrations have also been included from the US and Australian online websites for Men’s Health magazine.
Negotiating the discursive functions of Men’s Health
Not being doctors: Contesting the medical function
Men’s Health utilises an ‘instructional genre’ (Schirato 1999: 84) that establishes ‘a clear divide between the “expert” (the magazine) and the person in need of advice (the “reader”)’ (Stevenson 2000: 370). And although concerned with establishing the authority of the magazine, this genre simultaneously challenges the authority of the medical profession by insisting that readers can monitor their own health requirements with reference to expertly informed Men’s Health instructions. Thus, the first and primary function of Men’s Health is to expound essential health information for men. Although this magazine models a uni-directional information flow from the ‘pure’ realms of biomedical science towards the ‘ordinary’ business of health behaviours, it also performs a prosthetic function: In adopting/adapting a prosthesis, the person creates (or is created by) a self- identity that is no longer identified by the edict ‘I think, therefore I am’; rather, he or she is constituted in the relation ‘I can, therefore I am’ ... Thus placed within the grasp of choice, natural and social attributes of the self may be constituted as modifiable by deliberate, voluntary transformation, thereby leading to the multiplication of new spheres of decision-making in the arenas of health, leisure, sexuality and work (Lury 1998: 3, 19).
96 Men’s Health is fashioned as a social technology for the ongoing project of constructing the ideal self. Medical information is framed as a tool for directing this project, and although not claiming to replace the need for ‘expert’ advice from medical professionals, Men’s Health is also seen to operate as a medical authority unto itself.
Figure 12: ‘Health bulletin’ article (left) and ‘Flex appeal’ article with illustrations (right), Men’s Health April 1999
The medical function of Men’s Health was a popular theme of reader letters in this period. Many letters commented on the accessibility of health information,54 arguing that: ‘I enjoy reading your health tips and other articles without needing a medical degree to understand all the chemicals and muscle groups others rave about’.55 Other common topics were the medical value of Men’s Health to ‘absent’ readers, including military personnel on overseas postings,56 commercial fisherman,57 city dwellers on rural work-postings58 and travellers.59 Another interesting theme was letters from health and fitness professionals who claim to use Men’s Health as a pedagogic tool in their work as fitness instructors,60 school physical and health education teachers,61 police academy lecturers,62 physiotherapists,63 and health educators.64 Other letters were written from family members explaining that this magazine provides a unique opportunity for their partners,65 parents66 or children67 to learn how to look after themselves: ‘Thank you for exposing my husband to a world of health and I hope he can also be made aware that doctors aren’t just nasty men waiting to maul and embarrass him!’68
Many reader letters also offer personal testimonials of the positive medical benefits of reading Men’s Health. Some of these include stories of ‘ordinary’ readers becoming
97 athletes,69 unfit readers becoming fit,70 unhealthy readers becoming self-conscious of their ‘problem’71 and sick readers becoming well.72 The following letter is a typical example of a consolidation of the medical function: The obstacles we face and success at overcoming them is not only determined by individual ability and self-belief, but also by the help we receive from others along the way. I was diagnosed with chronic leukaemia in January 1999 and the road to recovery has been long and arduous. During this time, there are two things that I have come to rely heavily upon. The first is sound medical advice from under-acknowledged individuals who live and breathe their profession. The second is my new ‘bible’. Your magazine has become part of my staple diet, acting as a rich and invaluable source of information ... So thank you and congratulations Men’s Health for providing your readers with the appropriate ammunition in the life-long battle of health and fitness.73
This letter suggests that the responsible and pro-active health consumer has access to two sources of expert support: medical professionals — the traditional experts — and health media, the ‘new’ experts. Both sources, however, define health as an attribute of the pro-active individual invested with the capacity to make rational and informed decisions about health behaviours and consumer choices and therefore, with the social responsibility to become healthy. The closing line of this letter uses a military metaphor to suggest that non-readers will have little armament to survive the barrage of risky and unhealthy temptations posed by everyday life.
Figure 13: ‘Where there is determination, a way can be found’ (left) and ‘Life is a challenge, not a spectator sport’ (right), desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website10
10 Men’s Health Australia website: http://www.menshealthaus.com.au/downloads.php
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Although the majority of letters support this medical function, those that contest it do so on the basis of a reverence for the traditional authority of medical expertise. These letters question the capacity of popular media to effectively communicate medical information. The following letters demonstrate this suspicion: Congratulations on a fine magazine. One small, but important, typo from the article ‘Of Myths and Men’ (Sept ‘98) – it’s hepatitis A, not B, that can (maybe) be transmitted by touch, but only if faecal matter enters the mouth ... Project Officer, Hepatitis Vaccination Campaign, Australasian College of Sexual Health Physicians.74
For someone who doesn’t normally read magazines, I must admit that yours is the first I have read from cover to cover ... However, one thing I feel I should point out is that if you are going to give medical advice, you should really have someone on your editorial staff with some sort of medical background. I’m referring to the article ‘Pains in the Neck’ in your June issue. Although your picture is quite nice, it actually has the lymph nodes and thyroid gland labels round the wrong way. The large, pink H-shaped gland is the thyroid and the small blue round ones are the lymph nodes. Hope you don’t get too many other organs in your body mixed up.75
Both letters commence as fan mail, but quickly move into a position of medical expertise, pointing out factual errors that have significantly compromised the quality of published information. Other letters that contest the medical function of Men’s Health point out the inaccuracy,76 inaccessibility77 and incomprehensibility78 of published information.
Since Men’s Health is in the business of popularising complex information from multiple medical sources, such professional feedback is essential. But rather than discrediting the magazine, these letters serve to publicly consolidate the medical function of Men’s Health, which is seen to provide a forum for health debates and an intermediary liaison between medical experts and consumers. This unexpected consequence was touched on in the interview with the Men’s Health editor: ... one of the risks I guess of getting information from the States is that some of the medical advice, if you talk to an expert, comes across as very North American. And we, not being doctors in here, we don’t know that. We’ve got obviously medical people in Australia we run some stuff past, but ... We got pulled up the other day on the units we used for measuring cholesterol. We’d used the wrong ones, the American one instead of the Australian one. But that’s good, so now we’ve got a story subsequently on cholesterol and we adjusted it, so it’s just, it helps us get better and better.
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This editor evaluates the publication of incorrect health information in a health magazine as an opportunity for ‘continuous improvement’, in which media and medical professionals play complementary roles in the development of reliable expertise. So rather than suggesting that the medical function of Men’s Health may be compromised by publishing international, rather than local, research on men’s health, the editor insists that the quality and capacity of this publication will continue to improve in this way.
Don’t mess with the mix: Contesting the social function
Men’s Health is premised upon an imagined community of Australian men, celebrating specifically local characteristics such as dry humour and an ethics of mateship, whilst continuing to prioritise a globally standardised image of ideal masculinity. Men’s Health describes and prescribes appropriately manly behaviours, often conveyed through the same instructional genre as the medical function: ‘The Men’s Health Guide to Sex: We’ll show you how to melt her heart, be a superhero, pull a few tricks from porn flicks, rub her up the right way and position yourself for better lovin’.’ (September 2002). The presumption that Australian men need instructing in techniques of social interaction, particularly those relating to gender and sexuality, reflects a wider focus on the changing social expectations of masculinity. This is illustrated in the following quote from a high-circulation Sydney weekend magazine: For men, the straightforward mating hierarchy is gone and, instead, the ideal bloke is supposed to sit somewhere upon a continuum of masculinity. Imagine a street with, at one end, a grubby bar containing Russell Crowe (pre-marriage), Jack Nicholson, Sam Newman, their mates and several topless barmaids. At the other end sits a designer homewares store run by a flamboyant male couple with two chihuahuas and a penchant for musical theatre. Then, somewhere in the middle, there’s a barber shop where David Beckham is being groomed, talking soccer tactics and wearing a sarong. Maybe Brad Pitt’s in there, too, having his stubble pruned while he discusses wallpaper on the phone with Jen. This barber shop of dreams, midway between macho and camp, is home to the modern alpha male ... Walking that masculinity tightrope is far tougher than any fight for physical supremacy. No wonder they’re feeling fragile (Cooper 2003: 11).
The imagined fragility of Australian men is addressed by the second function of Men’s Health, which navigates changing social roles for men. The magazine is designed as a manual of contemporary social etiquette; a unique space for what Jackson and Brooks have described as ‘a kind of cultural “comfort zone”, which gives men the discursive
100 resources to handle their changing circumstances and experiences’ (1999: 367). Men’s Health promotes the possibility of balancing between the two extremes of machismo and effeminacy, firmly consolidating the magazine as a life coaching tool.
These discursive resources are framed by a playful tone of self-deprecation, designed to ‘“handle” the tension’ (Jackson & Brooks 1999: 362) of ‘men talking about men’ (Schirato 1999: 83). Thus, a virtual sociality is constructed through the use of this informal vernacular that rejects the ‘bite your tongue’ political correctness of post- feminist social space (Gough 2001). Puri describes this as ‘the jocular tone of the articles – intended to give some manly edge to such delicate matters as men’s monthly hormonal cycles’ (1998: 41). The Men’s Health editor described this in the following interview extract: ‘it’s delivered in a very Aussie, blokey, self-deprecating way. We take the piss out of ourselves, we take the piss out of them. Don’t try and make it too serious, but ... I like to think of it as a guy sitting at a pub, talking to a mate’. Benwell describes a similar tone in men’s lifestyle magazines in the UK: ... the tone or style is almost entirely consistent: ironic, humorous, anti- heroic, and explicitly interpersonal, emulating the processes of social bonding. Men’s magazine discourse can therefore be seen to support two symbiotic functions: the creation of male friendship through interaction, and the crystallization of masculine identity through exclusion or stigmatization of what is ‘other’ (2001: 20).
Figure 14: Contents page and ‘Breasts: A Handling Guide’ article, Men’s Health April 1999
These two functions are heavily prioritised in Men’s Health: the creation of male friendship is prioritised through the ‘mateship’ ethics that run right through this publication; and, the construction of a new Men’s Health masculinity depends upon the
101 exclusion of minority masculinities. A good example of this is the exclusion of minority sexual preferences achieved by framing all visual representations of men’s bodies with a relentless heterosexual tagging (Nixon 1993). As Figure 14 demonstrates, the Men’s Health contents page (left) associates images of semi-naked, buffed and polished male torsos with heterosexual signifiers, here represented by a Fred Astaire embrace and a photograph of female breasts sought out by a pair of male hands. The accompanying article, ‘Breasts: A handling guide’ (right) represents the many determinedly heterosexual articles included in this men’s magazine.
Reader letters that defended the social function of Men’s Health addressed a range of social issues and expectations associated with Australian men. Some of these letters explained that Men’s Health provided them with very practical advice about ‘learned’ social skills such as how to plan a wedding,79 survive international travel,80 behave in a job interview,81 communicate with your partner,82 negotiating divorce and custody situations,83 cope with ‘angry’ feminists,84 become a ‘house-husband’,85 survive time away from family and friends,86 deal with paralysing fears,87 cope with stress,88 build a raft,89 recover from a failed relationship,90 and choose the best wine.91 A number of letters were written by women to celebrate the fact that Men’s Health has helped their male partners become better lovers or their teenage sons grow into happy adults.92 Other letters were written to thank the magazine for helping avoid a mid-life crisis93 or to explain that Men’s Health plays a ‘father figure’ role for younger men with few role models.94 The following letters illustrate the social function of Men’s Health, constructing both a productive sense of social bonding and exclusive assumptions about male audiences: Your magazine is truly the best of its kind. Your editorial staff and researchers have captured the essence of what males in this country have been denied for far too long – lifestyle education exclusively for men. I believe that your magazine captures the very lifeblood of what Australian males require if they are to balance out their professional lives with that of a preventative and pro-active mind-set in a society that dictates continual change.95
Somehow I landed in a small country town (pop. 150) about 600km from anywhere. I’m going crazy. I’ve lost the plot. The only social life here is to sit on the river with a slab of cans (make that two slabs) with your farmer mates, catch a carp and discuss the rain, or lack thereof. The women in this town dress in pink tracksuits and moccasins. I decided I needed help for my
102 mental frustration and was seeking out therapy when I came across Men’s Health. What a saviour. I have found male bonding again through your stories. I love the dry humour and also the information you offer. I have read over and over the article ‘Not Getting Enough Sex’ (Apr 98). I think it’s brilliant. Who needs therapy now? 96
Both of these letters portray Men’s Health as a therapeutic device concerned specifically with improving the social capacities of Australian men. The first letter takes an essentialist approach to the notion of masculinity, suggesting that Men’s Health has been able to identify and even ‘bottle’ authentic Australian manhood, and to therefore deliver a magazine that truly represents that audience. The second describes the challenges of being physically removed from urban male social networks and is more concerned with emulating the ‘dry humour’ of the magazine, as a means of connecting with a virtual mateship culture in absence of the physical possibility of social bonding.
Figure 15: ‘Water play’ desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website
The majority of letters that discuss the social function of Men’s Health support the construction of a men’s media space. However, letters that challenge this function do so by contesting the forms of male sociality prioritised by this magazine. So for example, one letter argues that Men’s Health does not deal adequately with the tricky social complexities of being a good father97 and another argues that Men’s Health should be actively promoting the ethics of being faithful to your partner.98 These letters question the values, behaviours, norms and beliefs about masculinity prioritised by Men’s Health. But most contest letters are written to advocate for people excluded from these
103 normative ideals of masculinity: women and gay men. For example, Men’s Health has published letters from female readers who argue this magazine promotes insensitive attitudes towards abortion,99 derogatory generalisations about women,100 sexualised representations of female nurses101 and humorous depictions of older women.102
As with most mainstream media, heterosexuality is not framed as a choice in this medium, rather it is the default ‘ex-nominated’ (Barthes 1973: 150) position. However, the ambivalence between stylised images of near-naked men and overtly heterosexual editorial copy should be expected to provoke a significant degree of audience contestation. A newspaper article on new men’s fashion magazine Men’s Style Australia was quoted as saying: ‘Male cover models tend to label a magazine as being “niche” – which in this case is industry code for “gay”‘ (Jackson 2003). In fact, only two of the one hundred and thirty-six letters in this research made any mention of homosexual or queer sexuality, one of which rejects the homophobic interpretation of a homosexual dream103 and the other of which is reproduced here in full: Your March issue gives me the creeps. How could you possibly know so much about me? You know I am an office bod trying to make the most out of my gym workouts. You know I love my food but worry about the fat in my cereal. You know I enjoy a beer but baulk at drinking it in restaurants. You know I wonder if sports drinks are any good. You know I like playing darts. You know I wonder if my ties match my suit. You know I’m unsure how much to tip when I travel. You know I sometimes get stressed and have started t’ai chi. God, you even know I’m going bush soon and wonder if firestarters ruin the cred of the experience! In fact, the only thing you don’t seem to know is that I’m gay. And considering some of your readers are, perhaps you should just acknowledge the other side of the fence every now and then.104
This letter commences an exposure of heterosexual bias by following the conventions of a ‘fan’ letter, detailing the ways this magazine succeeds in addressing the social needs of Australian men. But rather than critique the heterosexual bias of Men’s Health, this letter asks only for an acknowledgment of the potential diversity of audience identifications. In doing so, it consolidates an ethics of ‘mateship’ promoting the egalitarian inclusion of gay men within the normative parameters of this media domain.
The issue of sexuality was raised at several points in the interview with the Men’s Health editor, and two of these discussions have been reproduced here:
104 We get told a lot of the time, ‘Oh, you’re that gay magazine’ and we don’t, and we don’t pitch it, obviously, at gays, and in fact we get letters from disenfranchised gays saying ‘Why don’t you recognise us’, because the only thing that’s not applicable to them is the sexual content. Because it’s a men’s mag, it’s like saying, well we don’t write articles specifically for Aboriginal Australian men, it’s just ... We do what we do, it’s for the broadest audience. [end passage]
I don’t want to go out there and say, to the gay guys: ‘It’s not going to change, it is what it is, and has to be, for various reasons’. So then, we’ve almost thrown it open to the letter writers to have a debate amongst themselves. So we’ve run a couple of gay letters in there, saying ‘Why don’t you recognise us’, then the next month we’ll get some guys writing in saying, ‘Well don’t mess with the mix, don’t be sidelined by a minority’ and then we’ll get other gay guys writing in saying ‘Don’t mess with the mix, I know you can’t do it for this reason, that reason, just leave it as it is’.
As the first extract explicitly admits: ‘...we don’t pitch it, obviously, at gays’. And yet there is also an acknowledgment here that the magazine is often misrecognised as a ‘gay magazine’, perhaps because of the visual presentation of the Men’s Health models. The first extract concludes by arguing that the magazine does not write specifically for Aboriginal or gay men in order to reach ‘the broadest audience’: implying that the broadest range of men can be characterised by the most normative identities, such as an anglo ethnicity or a hetero-sexuality. The illogicality of this statement continues into the second extract, in which the editor defers responsibility for resolving this issue onto his audience, explaining that the letters on either side of the debate (which are exaggerated in number) are most effectively resolved by a compromise position: in this case, a gay man who agrees that the magazine should not alter its heterosexual focus to incorporate the social diversity of its audience.
Look better and feel better: Contesting the beauty function
Over the last decade, media representations have shifted to include an increasingly reified, perfectible male body. The Men’s Health photographic models are buffed and polished, challenging the traditional ‘function and capacity’ approach of Australian men to their health (Saltonstall 1993). This is the most visually distinctive function of the magazine and one that is associated with the history of body styling in women’s magazines. This points to the third function of Men’s Health, which is that it models new body aesthetics for men. This is a multi-faceted function, which avoids terms like
105 ‘beauty’ while placing considerable emphasis on grooming technologies (hair care, skin care, cosmetics, clothing and accessories) and body sculpting. The Men’s Health ideal body combines two extreme versions of masculinity: the ‘boy’ (sensitive, young, pretty) and the ‘man’ (muscled, manly, strong). This compromised masculine ideal has a boyish charm, a sophisticated attitude, a hairless torso and well-developed muscles on a lean frame. As Petersen and Lupton have observed: ‘The male body is dominantly culturally represented and understood as “contained”, dry and controlled compared with the soft, viscous body of a woman ... The muscular body not only stands for outward containment, but also bespeaks inner control and rigidity’ (1996: 81). Thus, the softness implied in the cheeky grin and playful demeanour does little to modify the overtly masculine performance of the muscular exterior.
Figure 16: Desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health South Africa website11
As Boni has argued: ‘Men’s Health is the most representative title for a study concerning the social and media construction of the “new man” — a man who retains several characteristics of the traditional, “hegemonic” masculinity and yet is concerned with new, more “feminine” issues such as body care and health’ (2002: 469). So the Men’s Health body is symbolically associated with the homosexual eroticisation of the
11 Men’s Health South Africa website: http://www.menshealth.co.za
106 ideal masculine body and what Petersen and Lupton describe as ‘the “feminised” discourses of looking after yourself’: Such practices are also often coded as ‘homosexual’ rather than ‘heterosexual’, in their feminised interest in physical appearance. For the male subject position, to ‘give into’ or betray to other feelings of weakness or illness is thus ‘unmasculine’ (1996: 82).
Nixon has written extensively on media representations of masculinity, including the establishment of men’s style magazines in the UK during the 1980s, which he claims was associated with a dramatic shift in cultural modes of ‘looking’ at men’s bodies (Nixon 1996). These magazines also drew on visual regimes historically associated with gay men, that is, male readers consuming images of male models in provocative poses, but significantly did so without pathologising that relationship. Perhaps, as Jackson and Brooks (1999) suggest, magazines such as Men’s Health prioritise heterosexual editorial copy, in order to manage the ambivalence of men consuming images of other men. The editor of Men’s Health demonstrates such a tactic in discussing the beauty function of the magazine: ... of late we’ve found that guys, surprisingly, but it has happened ... guys are more interested in appearance. Obviously if you get healthy you’re going to look better and feel better about yourself, but they are interested in information about grooming, which you know, in the harsh Australian sun, our environment here, is important. And also, curiously, they’re interested about fashion which is something that, I wasn’t sure would ever happen, but they’re coming round, it’s good news for girls!
This quote commences with description of the magazine as a passive observer, rather than instigator or even facilitator, of a cultural change that validates masculine self-care and self-consciousness. The extract concludes, however, with a deliberate reminder of the heterosexuality of this dynamic, which would presumably otherwise imply a shift in sexual preference in addition to gender behaviours.
Although Watson (2000) has argued that men’s lay health narratives prioritise the social and relational functions of health over external or cosmetic ideals, Men’s Health offers little space for a ‘naturalised’ aesthetic of men’s bodies. Instead, this magazine places a ruthless priority on the use of ‘motivational’ images of ideal masculine physicality, and the following letter illustrates a typical defence of this approach: I know that I’ll never have an ironman body or have sex six times a day without Viagra but, as a target reader with a flabby stomach and hair
107 everywhere except where I want it, I need both information and motivation to improve my health. This is where Men’s Health is a winner. While the magazine provides me with all the health information that I need, the models you use provide me with the motivation to achieve a healthier appearance, even if I don’t look like them at my age. What I don’t want to see is a more average, slightly overweight, balding old fella struggling with weights whenever I visit the gym. Having this image portrayed in your magazine would make me give up. Besides, you’re not going to persuade someone that they need a Ferrari if you show them a Holden.105
Other letters that defend the beauty function of Men’s Health address topics such as the importance of providing fashion and style advice in Men’s Health106 and ‘makeover’ stories about using Men’s Health as a motivation to change body shapes.107 And although Men’s Health offers the ‘Fitness Challenge’ to encourage readers to document and publicise their fitness makeovers, other letters are more inclined to reject the associated culture of exhibitionism: ‘This previously-soft-paunched 38-year-old dreamer is now enjoying life more than ever and discreetly displaying his hard-earned six-pack to the woman he loves’.108
A similar number of reader letters rejected the notion that images of beautiful men would motivate readers to engage in fitness improvement. Instead, they requested the occasional representation of ‘normal’ body images, or at the very least, of ordinary accounts of the experience of attempting to achieve this extreme beauty: As you probably know, not all blokes who work out have physiques like the models in your magazine. And, yep, I’m one of those who doesn’t have the chassis of a Greek God. I can understand the reasoning behind the need to display these fine fellows because they give us something to aspire to, but what about doing a story on some average Nineties male who turns his life around by using one of your work-out programs? All I’m attempting to do is see if there is another side to the coin.109
Your magazine gives me tips on being healthier and even dressing better, for which I am grateful. But, like many men my age (32), I drink too much, smoke, probably dress badly and probably have an unsatisfactory sex life, compared to the audience you seem to target. Articles like ‘Simple Ways to Improve your Health Without Changing your Life’ or ‘Dress Well for your Body Shape’ would make me feel that it’s possible to improve myself without needing a well-shaped body to start with. The image and lifestyle you portray is unattainable to 95 per cent of us, even though we want it.110
Neither of these letters challenges the assumption that Men’s Health readers would desire an improved body. Instead, they suggest that many readers may find such images
108 depressing rather than inspiring. Interestingly, one other published letter claimed that Men’s Health does already publish images of authentically recognisable ‘ordinary’ men: ‘Finally, there’s a mag that deals with real men, ordinary men, men like me ... Finally a magazine about health and fitness that doesn’t make me feel like a wimp when I look in the mirror’.111
Figure 17: Illustration from ‘The genius of dumbbells’ article, Men’s Health April 1999
The obvious implication of this visual culture of ideal masculinity is that ‘the penalties of body neglect are a lowering of one’s acceptability as a person, as well as an indication of laziness, low self-esteem and even moral failure’ (Featherstone 1991: 186). An interesting letter from a female reader contextualises this issue in relation to the history of women’s magazines: As a 20-year-old female, I find Men’s Health to be a very informative magazine, helping keep me in touch with what guys are thinking. I always read the letters to the editor and every now and then there are ones from men complaining that the male models you use are not an accurate representation of the average man. I’d just like to point out that women have been dealing with this issue for about 30 years. The media, fashion and advertising industries have a lot to answer for because they’re all guilty of using models, who do not represent the majority of the female population, to sell and promote their products. These unrealistic images have now been adopted by mainstream society which, in turn, pressures women to be ‘thin and beautiful’. We’re now seeing the effects of this in anorexia, depression and suicide among the young. You have to have character and strength to know who you are and be comfortable with that and not let society’s ‘perfect’ images rule your life.112
This letter links the debates about the impact of ‘unrealistic’ representations of women’s bodies in women’s magazines to these ‘new’ issues around the commodification of
109 men’s bodies. The Men’s Health editor had the following to say on this issue of using ‘unrealistic’ male models: ... the nature of magazines is, there has to be an aspirational, well there doesn’t have to be but, it’s been set by the audience, there has to be an aspirational cover on there. I can’t think of one magazine, anywhere, in any sector that has an ugly cover image, really ... cars, women, the women’s mags do that. The brief that I would take on board is to make that aspirational image just that much more achievable. I should say, like I said probably last month, I’ve had requests ‘Put yourself on the cover’, but that’s just ... I need to sell the thing!
These issues will be considered in more detail in a case study at the end of this chapter, focusing on the issue of men’s body hair removal, which is seen to be symbolic of the changing markers of maleness in media representations of masculinity.
Ideal target market: Contesting the consumer function
Men’s Health links health optimisation to commodity consumption, privileging a high- earning, high-spending, male reader (Edwards 1997) and developing a culture of connoisseurship for contemporary Australian men (Sender 2001). Thus, the fourth and final function of Men’s Health relates to the business of creating a consumer market for masculine products and services. Specifically, the magazine recommends ideal consumer behaviours for men. Although much of this consumer function is enacted via advertising imagery, there is also a significant amount of editorial content dedicated to the promotion of both luxury (gadgets, cars, holidays) and everyday (food, cosmetics, clothes) consumption (see Figure 18). And as Boni has observed, the marketing of men’s products has changed considerably with the introduction of men’s lifestyle media: Men are now encouraged to use a whole set of beauty and body care products that were traditionally associated with women; for this reason, advertisers must legitimate these products for masculine use, one strategy being that of using stereotypical images of the male body. Cologne and underwear ads, for example, display pictures of muscular male torsos and assertive faces with penetrating eyes staring out at the reader (2002: 474).
Although the connection between cologne, underwear and ‘men’s health’ is not immediately apparent: ‘the “healthy self” is defined not simply by the absence of illness, but also by his ability to participate fully within communities and consume appropriately’ (Bunton & Crawshaw 2002: 189). Thus, the cultural association between
110 health and wealth has increased as the popular ideal of masculinity has shifted from working-class strength to corporate gym-fitness (Cook 2000).
Figure 18: ‘How to pick the right [golf] club’ article (left) and ‘Essentials: Our guide to what’s happening and what’s new’ article (right), Men’s Health April 1999
The marketing material for Men’s Health includes a report on the social and economic characteristics of Australian men, prioritising four ‘archetypes’ typical of the imagined Men’s Health audience: While other men’s magazines tend to appeal to the more ‘blokey’ kind of Australian man, Men’s Health appeals to men with a millennium edge: the more successful, confident and up-scale they are, the more they fit into the top end of the new men’s value segments – and the more inclined they are to pick up and read Men’s Health (Men’s Health 2001: 14).
Unsurprisingly, the types of Australian men adopted under the Men’s Health banner are those with the highest incomes and expensive spending habits. The editor explains this policy by differentiating Men’s Health from magazines aimed at less ‘mature’ readers: ... if you look at international male publishing in terms of the big selling lifestyle mags. There are the mags with bikini-clad starlets on the cover, and then there are, there are us, and then there are sports magazines. Because of our positioning as a slightly more mature, I s’pose, I won’t say intellectual, but a bit more grown up product. The guys who read us tend to be, the broad band that we’d be targeting are 25-50 year old, white collar guys, so they’re an ideal target market for some of the upmarket fragrances, some of the fashion houses, obviously some of the car manufacturers. So, yeah, that ... we don’t get that much health advertising because they, one, we would probably be a bit expensive in terms of ad page rates, for the health guys, and they also tend to focus on specialist press of their own.
This quote highlights the commercial nature of magazine publishing, suggesting that the medical and social functions are in many ways secondary objectives. This editor has
111 moved from describing Men’s Health as ‘very Aussie, blokey, self-deprecating’ and ‘for the broadest audience’ to admitting that reaching the ‘ideal target market’ of white- collar men aged 25-50 is a more important objective.
Figure 19: ‘Running Guy’ (left) and ‘Suit in Alley’ (right), desktop wallpaper from Men’s Health Australia website
It is thus interesting to note that of the nine letters that addressed the consumer function of Men’s Health, all but one were actively opposed to the exclusivity of this culture, and the exception was a letter that contradicts these stereotypes of the male connoisseur: I’m a contractor in the building industry. I work long hours, most weekends and am hardly ever out of my overalls. In this industry, takeaway tucker and boozing with the boys at the local pub is normal after a long day’s slog. This routine has been going on for a few years now and at 32 the body is starting to show some wear and tear. My first Men’s Health was in January. Your catchphrase ‘heaps of useful stuff’ speaks for itself and the magazine has changed my lifestyle, both in mind and body. Even the old wardrobe has seen a few additions. I’m now a subscriber and it’s money well spent.113
This letter defends the consumer function of Men’s Health by implying that the lifestyle promoted by the magazine is one that this reader hopes to achieve. Despite working in a manual profession, this letter suggests that Men’s Health offers tips for quality consumer behaviours that will improve any man’s life. Although this magazine prioritises an urban, corporate, professional lifestyle, this letter gives no indication of feeling excluded from the socio-economic expectations of Men’s Health.
However, the eight other published letters did take offence at the exclusivity of the Men’s Health consumer function. For example, one letter writes: ‘It’s obvious this magazine is targeted at your office worker type – so how about some articles for your
112 “anything but nine-to-five Mr Average”? There are plenty of us out there’.114 And another argues, ‘I don’t go without much and nor does my family, but how about at least occasionally publishing holidays, products or gift ideas that most of us “normal” guys can afford’.115 Another letter simply states: ‘Not every man puts a shirt and tie on before work’.116 Other letters that contest this consumer function argue that fitness advice doesn’t take into account the possibility of manual work,117 or low-income earners118 or non-urban locations.119 However, some letters argued for the opposite, suggesting that Men’s Health is too focused on the ‘lowest common denominator’: You’ve got it all wrong. You know that we’re the guys that have the self- respect to buy Men’s Health. Yet sometimes you treat us as if we buy Ralph! While the stories of stereotypical male behaviour are amusing, we’re not the sort who eat our dinners straight from the frying pan. Sure, we’d like to save on washing up, so tell us how to get the dishes done faster (eg what is the best value dishwasher on the market?) ... aren’t we more likely to bring out the best china and the linen napkins, arrange a healthy meal as an appetising feast and seduce our partners through our meticulous attention to detail? If you really want to add value to your recipe selections, tell us the best wine to serve with a meal.120
This letter demonstrates the difficulty of standardising a commercial image of the ideal Australian man. And the Men’s Health belief that its audience can be simultaneously ‘blokey’ and ‘sophisticated’, ‘rugged’ and ‘stylish’, will not impress everyone.
Finally, the consumer function is also critiqued in the letters page through juxtaposing the objectives of commercial media and health promotion. The following letter from public health advocate Simon Chapman argues that the consumer function is corrupting of the more valid medical objectives of Men’s Health: Your August issue had an informative article on quitting smoking, lifted from your US edition. But in the very same issue your fashion spread (‘The Rebirth of Cool’) featured two carefully choreographed shots of models smoking. Smoking in Australia kills more people than skin cancer, breast cancer, AIDS, suicide, diabetes, motor-vehicle injury and alcohol combined and half of these smokers die in their middle age. If your magazine has any pretensions of living up to the promise of its name rather than being dismissed as yet another narcissists’ bible cynically appropriating ‘health’ to lure advertising dollars, for a start, how about dropping the gratuitous glamorisation of smoking?121
This letter presents a powerful critique of the paradoxes of operating a commercial magazine under the rubric of ‘health’. Not only does Men’s Health attempt to synthesise
113 audience diversity in order to construct a commercially viable image of Australian masculinity, it also regularly pushes the boundaries of health promotion in order to tap into the more pleasure-driven sections of popular consumer culture. However, as Bunton and Crawshaw have suggested, these paradoxes may, in fact, be a characteristic typical of popular health cultures: In magazine texts we see a variety of dispositions that range from the incitement to ascetic self-regulation (to exercise, eat ‘well’, develop one’s physic and mind) to extremes of aesthetic expression and excess (to indulge in risk-taking and pleasure). Health risk activities are simultaneously celebrated and pilloried. Dispositions towards health are ritually represented and condensed. Pleasure and control are experienced together in these texts. Interdicts to maintain a healthy, hard and efficient body play alongside and make possible the spaces for transgression and pleasure ... This contradiction and ambivalence is visible, available and open to analysis in its simultaneity and irony (2002: 201).
Thus, the competing medical, social, beauty and consumer functions of Men’s Health may in fact operate in mutually productive ways, both enticing and excluding readers in order to construct the possibility of cultural resonance.
Case study: Men’s body hair removal
Although the beauty function of Men’s Health relates to many different elements of body presentation, including body sculpting, grooming, fashion and fragrances, no element of the cosmetic presentation of men’s bodies provokes quite so much debate as the issue of ‘body hair removal’. Although the cosmetic removal of body hair has been a conventional obligation of women for centuries, the removal of male chest and back hair has only recently begun to be refashioned as a valid behaviour for Australian men. Body hair removal has conventionally only been permissible for men within the sub- cultural confines of certain sports (e.g., cycling, swimming, bodybuilding) and sexualities (e.g., gay culture, drag performance). So it is fascinating that a wide range of popular media has recently begun to advertise body hair removal products for men, from DIY options to permanent laser hair removal (see Figure 20).
Although this phenomenon is by no means indicative of actual change in men’s behaviour, the cultural associations between body hair and masculinity are indisputably in flux. However, the small amount of theoretical literature on body hair is almost
114 entirely focused on women’s body hair removal, particular underarm and leg hair, with a recent article drawing attention to the increasing popularity of the ‘brazilian wax’: complete pubic hair removal (Labre 2002). In 1991, Basow followed a long line of feminist theorists by suggesting that the normative requirement for women to remove their body hair ‘serves two functions: (a) it exaggerates the differences between women and men, and (b) it equates female attractiveness with youth’ (1991: 86), and feminists continue to decry this ‘hairlessness norm’ for women, as contributing to ‘the notion that women’s bodies are unacceptable as they are’ (Tiggemann & Kenyon 1998: 884). Those few texts that have addressed men’s body hair conclude that so long as the binary dynamics of gender politics remain in place, men’s body hair will always be associated with ideal masculinity and, conversely, its absence with femininity. For example, anthropologist JM Lewis has argued ‘the male body is primarily permitted to remain in its natural hairy state’ (Lewis 1987: 13), and as recently as 1993, Synott argued: Chest hair is often regarded as a sign of virility and a sex symbol; and a man without chest hair can be very ‘ashamed’, as witness this ‘Dear Abby’ letter (Montreal Star, 20.2.79): DEAR ABBY: I’ve never seen a problem like mine before in your column. I’m a 33-year-old normal man except I have no hair on my chest, arms or legs. And that is where I want hair the most ... I am miserable in my hairless state. I want to be like the other guys. ‘Hairless in Hilo’. Hairless in Hilo was right to be worried, if hairy chests = masculinity (1993: 113, 14).
Now Men’s Health models (including the cover model) display absolutely no chest or back hair and a minimal amount of arm hair. This policy has not gone unnoticed, however, provoking a range of published responses. A familiar comment is: ‘...for those of us who can’t bear the idea of attacking anything but our face with a razor, the models on the cover have become a running joke. We’re not asking for a hairy behemoth, just a bit of testosterone produced hair gracing the cover occasionally’.122 This final section will offer a case study of the arguments and opinions around men’s body hair that have played out in the Men’s Health letters page, editor’s column, and in a private interview with the editor. This analysis will consider how Men’s Health is able to successfully validate and reify images of hairless male torsos and thus, to expand the gendered practices of body hair removal to include men. It is intended to address how reader letters contest the beauty function of Men’s Health by defaulting to a traditional interpretation of Australian masculinity as authentically ‘natural’, in distinction from the ‘manufactured’ cosmetic ideal.
115 The following letters offer two very different opinions on men’s body hair removal: ... where did you get that cover model? That hairless body with steroid- primed biceps doesn’t relate to your target reader like me – a balding, fortysomething guy with lots of body hair and a waistline in increasing risk of cardiovascular problems. Get serious and treat us with respect or I’ll switch to a muscle mag.123
So, the vitriolic ‘balding fortysomething with lots of body hair and a waistline indicating the risk of cardiovascular problems’ in the letters page of the November issue is a doctor. No doubt that same self-abused actuary would insist we accept and respect (and pay for) his ‘learned’ advice on health and nutrition. Not bloody likely. I’d rather aspire to the imagery portrayed in any issue of Men’s Health than to follow his image – any day!124
The first letter focuses on the changing ideals of masculinity represented by the models featured in the magazine, described as, ‘that hairless body with steroid-primed biceps’. This phrase infantilises the Men’s Health model body by implying that the procedure of hair removal is both vain and associated with ‘inauthentic’ means of achieving muscularity, such as steroid use. The second letter challenges the expert authority of this medical position, defending the Men’s Health beauty function as providing motivational tools to which ‘ordinary’ Australian men can aspire. Another interesting implication of this exchange is that the ‘expert’ position taken by the doctor in the first letter is dismissed out of hand in the reply, with the intention of prioritising the health benefits of being ‘inspired’ to fitness by images of masculine beauty.
This issue has been a significant focus of the public response to Men’s Health, which is illustrated in the amount of editorial attention that it has received. For example, an editorial response to the following letter provocatively flaunts the power that the editor has in controlling these representations: Once again I spied the latest cover of Men’s Health and there he was – as smooth as a turtle-waxed baby’s bottom, yet another grinning pretty boy with no body hair! Actually, this fellow had a coat worthy of a llama on his arms, but not a whisker on his torso. It appeared as though a nasty case of follicle-leprosy had set in around his nipples and was marching outwards across the poor bloke’s epidermis. Come on guys, how many of your readers do you think wax their chests? Furthermore, how many want to start? The influence of media imagery on establishing and maintaining social norms can’t be underestimated. While I plan to pluck protruding nose and ear hairs that may emerge in later years, I will be very upset if, in future, society dictates that I have to run a Lady-Shaver over my trunk.
116 Overall a great mag, fellas, but perhaps some of the ‘useful stuff’ in future issues could include body hair. Besides, it keeps my baby warm at night.
Editor’s reply follows: There you go! Ed (photocopy of hair) 125
The editor’s response to this request was to publish a photocopy of what appears to be a small tuft of his own body hair. In the May 2002 edition of Men’s Health, this editor again raised the issue of body hair in the magazine: Ed’s letter, May 2002: It’s said that the sign of a healthy magazine is when you have an abundance of readers’ letters coming in. I’m happy to report then, that this is one healthy health magazine. Each month we have a heartening number of complimentary letters (many thanks) and a few criticisms (many thanks again to the constructive ones; ‘steady on’ to the abusive ones). This month’s batch, however, threw up a bit of a curiosity. Out of the blue, five readers wrote in, each lamenting the lack of body hair on our cover models. Bemused, I went back and checked. By my reckoning, four of the last 15 cover lads have featured chest hair (granted, not snarling, Burt-Reynolds-style pelts, but hair nonetheless). Hard to deny though, that this leaves the majority as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bum, whether via genetics or Gillette ... So here’s your chance to be part of democracy in action. To clarify our thinking on future cover blokes, send an email to [email protected], stating your age, gender and opinion on this hairy problem. We’ll run the results next month. If the smoothies win, we’ll publish some waxing tips. If the hairies get the nod, we’ll run a ‘how to talk like Sean Connery’ or ‘how to bowl like Dennis Lillee’ piece. Not that I’m biased or anything (Ritchie 2002).
This editorial mirrors the approach taken in this case study: it approaches reader letters as audience representations, establishing the same polarity between consolidating and contesting letters and focusing on the issue of men’s body hair removal. The results of this request were published in the regular ‘Malegrams’ column in November 2002. Thirty-seven responses were received in total, of which ‘...seventeen voters favoured the smooth, buff look, much like the guys who grace the covers of our magazine. But those in favour of chest hair won by a whisker, with 20 votes’ (Anonymous 2002b: 38).
This issue was also discussed in the Men’s Health interview: I was across in the States a few months back and chatting with, we’ve got a Managing International Editor who oversees all the different issues, and he’s very open minded to specific cultural differences. And ... we talked about body hair and he ... looked at a cover and said, ‘Uh, look at that cover, nipple hair’. I said ‘Oh, imagine!’ You know ‘He’s a witch, burn him!’ And he said ‘What do you mean?’, I said, ‘Well come on Bill, open
117 your shirt’ and ‘Ooh, nipple hair! Real man!’ ... So we had this discussion and one of the things we got out of it was that the American audience look at this magazine for vanity reasons, and American guys read Men’s Health and do half, well a lot of the exercises, for vanity. They absorb far more of the multi-media stuff they get over there, be it the movies, or the TV or whatever ... but I’m pretty sure that Australian guys [want] to look good on the beach, but they don’t want to be ridiculously cut. They want to be fit for sport, or they want to feel better about life and themselves, but it’s not the vanity angle ...
The editor defends his own role in the commodification of the male body, by employing a similar line of defence as the contesting reader letters. For example, he defends authentic masculinity by arguing that Australian men are not vain, but instead value their bodies for their capacity to play sport or to ‘feel better about life and themselves’. This is premised on a model of ‘real’ men’s bodies as ‘slightly less muscled’ and ‘hairy’. A defence of an Australian vernacular culture is also established from the beginning of this extract: ‘...assuming a uniquely Australian cultural and political identity and consensus which US-originated culture threatens’ (Bell & Bell 1998: 5). In the act of recounting a humorous interaction with his American superior, this editor consolidates his own status as ‘one of the boys’, and buys into the Australian delight in cutting down ‘tall poppies’, by exposing his nipple hair, and suggesting that Australian readers are more media savvy than their US peers. The implication is that although this approach to the representation of the male body is conspicuously ‘foreign’, Australians will make it their own, taking the good with the self-conscious.
Figure 20: Advertisement for permanent body hair removal including ‘before’ and ‘after’ images (left) Men’s Health January 2002; Cover page of University of New South Wales student magazine Tharunka entitled ‘Ben’s Health’ (right) August 2002
118
An example of an Australian parody of this newly exhibitionist version of masculinity can be found in Figure 20 which reproduces the cover of university student magazine Tharunka, entitled ‘Ben’s Health’, including fictional content such as ‘Muscles: Where did Ben’s go?’
Conclusion
Men’s Health offers a public technology for tracing contemporary shifts in the gendering of popular culture. The success of this magazine heralds an increase in men’s consumer culture, as traditional forms of Australian masculinity are invested with a self- conscious attention to men’s health, beauty, lifestyle and sociality. Following Petersen, this analysis maintains that ‘modernity may have created particular ‘ideals’ of masculine embodiment and subjectivity, but it has also produced oppositional discourses, and created an array of new subject positions and personal “choices”‘ (1998: 130). Thus, although the medical, social, beauty and consumer functions promoted by Men’s Health may be organised around an ideal model of the ‘well-shaped man’ (Buchbinder 1998), they do not necessarily foreclose upon negotiation of alternative options. In particular, the articulation of a local Australian vernacular in reader letters can be read as an attempt to resist the globalising of the Men’s Health brand. However, it is most important to recognise that although reader letters offer a site of resistance to such change, the rhetoric of defence deployed in these public contests tends to employ fairly traditional explanations of masculinity by claiming that these functions were enacted with more authenticity by the older, more conventional model of the Australian man. As Arthur Frank has written, ‘the natural, unmanipulated body presupposed by the critics is no less idealised than the commodity-enhanced body of the manipulators’ (2002: 22). This links to the next chapter, which focuses on consumer approaches to the notion of women’s wellbeing, which again, negotiates the complexity of gendered notions of bodily authenticity, this time in relation to the social expectations of femininity.
119 CHAPTER SIX
Natural alternatives? Wellbeing, femininity and consumption in Good
Medicine and Nature & Health
Introduction
This chapter will consider how the two women’s health titles of Good Medicine and Nature & Health engage with the consumer industries dedicated to women’s ‘wellbeing’. Good Medicine proposes that wellbeing can be achieved by accessing a wide range of health-related consumer products and services, including pharmaceutical medicines, cosmetic therapies and alternative health treatments. However, Nature & Health rejects the mainstream promotion of conventional medicine, advocating for unconventional and ‘natural’ approaches to health care. As Seale argues, these consumer changes indicate social as well as economic shifts: Media producers in the health sphere have been quick to flatter their audiences with tales of the extraordinary powers of laypersons, assertions of the ‘rights’ of consumers of health care, and implicit theories of the power of mind over body. Accompanying this, at times, has been a valorisation of alternative, ‘holistic’ or ‘complementary’ approaches to medical therapy that assist in the task of breaking up the authority of orthodox medical expertise. Additionally, evidence is beginning to emerge that commercial interests have detected this shift in power towards the consumer in recent years and are beginning to exploit it (2002b: 186).
This chapter begins with a brief overview of research on wellbeing, to contextualise ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ health within the political framework of neoliberalism, the economic incentives of consumer culture, and the cultural expectations of femininity. Then four distinct types of ‘consumer’ are identified in published reader letters from both publications. Reader letters deploy an image of the imagined writer as either a ‘pragmatic’, ‘public’, ‘dissenting’ or ‘cosmetic’ consumer, with associated implications for the cultural evaluation of women’s wellbeing. The chapter concludes with a case study of the narrative genre of ‘women’s pathographies’ to consider how health magazines might contribute to the social understanding of health and illness.
120 A ‘new age’ of women’s wellbeing?
The popular use of the term ‘wellbeing’ generally refers to the amorphous experience of feeling well, in terms of having good health and feeling at peace with oneself and one’s place in the world. Economic and psychological research tends to use this term to describe the subjective experience of happiness, in comparison to more ‘objective’ expectations of how people should feel when their basic material needs are fulfilled (Ryan & Deci 2001). The political premise of this distinction is that: ... the ideal society would be one in which 1) everyone is well nourished, well housed, healthy, secure, safe, literate/educated, comfortable, entertained, etc and 2) everyone is experiencing the deep satisfaction and joy coming from living a very meaningful life, one lived in accord with one’s true purposes (Tomer 2002: 39-40).
But many recent studies of ‘quality of life’ (e.g., Eckersley 2000) question whether there is necessarily a causal relationship between material fulfilment and the feeling of fulfilment. For example, as Eckersley has observed, ‘while health, as measured by mortality and life expectancy, has improved steadily over past decades, well-being has not, at least not in developed nations’ (2001: 62). This conceptual distinction between material satisfaction and ‘complete wellbeing’ has fuelled the consumer move towards self-help: ‘...lifestyle consumer oriented strategies focusing on “consciousness” in the form of “finding one’s authentic self” are rapidly appearing. The “new” healthy you has to be a “true” you’ (Howell & Ingham 2001: 343).
Although this objective of attaining an integrated and balanced ‘true’ self was once considered unconventional, holistic self-improvement has become increasingly mainstream (Sharma 1996). Women have been targeted as a consumer market particularly interested in achieving wellbeing, whether through self-help literature, stress-relief products or alternative health philosophies, all of which take a holistic approach to the physical, emotional, spiritual and environmental self. Although this shift is subject to a complex set of cultural conditions, it has played out as an economic ‘revolution’ in which the New Age of alternative health has become a commercial force to be reckoned with. For example, as Eckermann writes of the alternative health industry: The consumer revolt against allopathic health services is being led by women. In many ways, women are acting as discerning consumers of health
121 services. Rather than handing their bodies over to health professionals, they are deciding which ailments are appropriately addressed by self care and home remedies, which by alternative therapists and which by mainstream scientific medicine (1994: 394).
Women’s health magazines have entered the consumer market at a time when the popular validation of the range of alternative approaches has occurred. Thus, although Nature & Health is entirely dedicated to promoting alternative industries as both viable and reliable, even the more commercial Good Medicine dedicates a significant amount of editorial and advertising space to alternative health.
Women’s health magazines are also very much framed as women’s magazines, despite their inclusive editorial approach. As Doel and Segrott have observed: Despite their discussion of generic health issues, such as stress and personal relationships, these magazines are primarily concerned with female health, and health as a specifically female issue ... The presentation of [complementary and alternative therapies] tends to focus on ‘natural’ therapies that have come to be associated with purportedly ‘feminine’ qualities such as sensuous touch and the release of emotions, and are therefore presumed to be appealing to women (2003: 137-38).
These cultural shifts are also linked to consumer culture through an articulation of the neoliberal philosophies of self-care, self-improvement and active citizenship. This is perhaps most evident in the more explicitly individualist focus of Nature & Health: ... the ‘natural’ within [complementary and alternative medicine] and its mass mediation tends to be valorised as a constellation of qualities that can be recovered through inward contemplation of one’s essential being: harmony, balance and proportion – but also self-responsibility, personal empowerment, and individual enlightenment (Doel & Segrott 2003: 136).
This reification of the self-regulating individual is a political notion central to consumer culture. As Arthur Frank argues: ‘...consumerism individualizes the bases and morality of action. The self is the sole referent’ (2002: 19). Health consumers thus become responsible for deciding their own expectations of wellbeing and locating and consuming the appropriate resources to realise this. Health magazines capitalise on this market opportunity by defending the ‘consumer rights’ of their audiences to access quality information about goods and services conducive to achieving wellbeing.
122 One hundred and eighteen reader letters from Good Medicine and Nature & Health were included in this research and were organised by the modes of consumption they prioritised. A wide variety of modes were initially identified and then grouped into four distinct but complementary models of the female health consumer: pragmatic, public, dissenting, and cosmetic.
Figure 21: Consumer modes in Good Medicine and Nature & Health
Pragmatic Public Dissenting Cosmetic
Nature & Health (n 26 27 23 0 = 44)
Good Medicine (n = 19 19 13 23 74)
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Number of letters (118 in total)
The main finding of this analysis is that the cosmetic consumer was only evident in Good Medicine letters, whereas the other three were equally distributed across the published reader letters. The remainder of this chapter will consider in detail how each of these consumer modes is deployed, including illustrations from the May 2000 issue of each magazine. This issue represents the final year of this research period but these illustrations are typical of the images and editorial approaches from the whole research period and from magazine issues that continue to be published today.
Modelling the ideal women’s health magazine consumer
The pragmatic consumer: ‘I would like to tell you how I cope’126
The ‘pragmatic’ consumer is characterised by a preoccupation with the pragmatic achievement of wellbeing and the pragmatic functions of health media, that is, ‘...practical, as opposed to idealistic’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2003). In this way, the pragmatic consumer associates positive health outcomes with practical consumer
123 behaviours, supporting the advanced liberal expectation of individual responsibility for health (Minkler 1999). This approach is thus related to van Hooft’s ‘pragmatic’ mode of subjectivity, described as: ‘...the sphere of our lives which includes our deliberating about and purposively doing the things that we do. It includes the everyday practical concerns and activities that we engage in. It is self-conscious, purposive and (ideally) rational’ (1997: 25). In health magazines, the pragmatic consumer is interested in accessing quality health information about useful products and services: medical knowledge repackaged for health consumers, and delivered via the media conventions of a print magazine. Doel and Segrott prioritise this mode in their definition of the alternative health magazine as a ‘pragmatic tool kit’ (2003: 134-35). Reader letters that embody the pragmatic consumer in Good Medicine and Nature & Health evoke a representation of magazine readers as women in charge of their lives with access to the personal and social resources necessary for achieving complete wellbeing. This is premised on the assumption that ‘...wellness is the process by which one responsibly identifies areas of life in need of improvement and subsequently makes choices conducive to a more satisfying lifestyle’ (Owen 1999:180). As the rest of this section demonstrates, the pragmatic consumer is characterised by reader letters that comment on the health improvement functions of health magazines (see Figure 22 for examples of pragmatic health tips), including as a source of health information and as a vehicle to publicise individual experiences of pragmatic consumption.
Figure 22: ‘Kitchen cupboard cures’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘The best veggies for you’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000
124
Most letters that employed a ‘pragmatic’ approach are framed as positive celebrations of health media. Although this theme was present in both magazines,127 Good Medicine published several letters suggesting that the readers’ wellbeing was indebted to this magazine: ‘Whatever the recipe for a good magazine is, don’t change yours ... I believe in what you are doing and congratulate you on a wonderful job’.128 Some celebratory testaments were even authored as international, with letters sent from Japan129 and the United Arab Emirates,130 implying that these magazines offer a globally unique site for the promotion of pragmatic consumption. The following letter, entitled ‘A true believer’, suggests that wellbeing can be achieved via many different approaches to consumer behaviour, even if those approaches are theoretically incommensurable. I try not to miss an issue of Good Medicine as I find all the articles very interesting. I’m also a big believer in herbal medicine and natural therapies, rather than using antibiotics, which I believe do more harm than good. As a beauty therapist, I also learned a few interesting make-up camouflage tips from your May issue. I am a single mother with seven-year- old twin daughters, and have found a lot of your relaxation articles helpful. Keep up the good work.131
In this letter the quite distinct sectors of herbal medicine and beauty therapy become equally important in providing the reader with pragmatic strategies for achieving a balanced life. Good Medicine is very much premised on this philosophy of diverse pragmatism, promoting a wide range of competing industries as simultaneously available to women in their quest for individual wellbeing.
Although marketed as an ‘alternative’ to the more commercial health magazines, Nature & Health published many letters that employed a similarly celebratory approach to the pragmatic dimensions of wellbeing:132 I just wanted to say thank you for producing a magazine that brings me so much joy. The articles always inspire me to live a positive and healthy lifestyle. The thought of the next issue brings a smile to my face and gives me hope when I’m feeling down. My knowledge of natural health is growing, thanks to you. I wanted to let you know what you are doing is very positive and powerful. Have a wonderful day!133
This letter is ‘pragmatic’ in that it constructs a uni-directional model of the magazine- reader relationship: the magazine transfers joy, inspiration, hope and knowledge to the reader, thus enabling the pro-active achievement of wellbeing. Another letter genre that
125 takes a pragmatic approach is only apparent in Nature & Health. These letters are from health care practitioners who have been promoted in the magazine:134 ‘Very many thanks for running the article about me and my reflexology courses ... for helping to “spread the word”‘.135 These letters extend the parameters of a pragmatic approach from ‘educational’ to ‘commercial’, validating a range of experts whose knowledge can be drawn upon to enrich the consumer’s knowledge of different approaches to wellbeing.
Women’s health magazines have also developed into an interface for readers to make specific requests of various health experts. The incentive of the health consumer to identify and interact with health media in this way is related to that wider shift in health responsibility from institutions to individuals. As Rimke has argued, ‘...self-help is thus an individualised voluntary enterprise, an undertaking to alter, reform or transform the self, or some “intrinsic” aspect of it, which is contingent upon a person’s seeking some form of external form of authoritative assistance’ (2000: 62). Although Good Medicine letters displayed a marginal level of this kind of active interaction,136 Nature & Health published many letters seeking pragmatic health advice. Some were written in response to specific articles137 but most introduced a new topic in order to establish a dialogue that suited their own particular needs,138 for example: ‘I am seeking more information about fruitarianism, and have searched the Internet and existing books on mucus-free diets, with no success’.139 In general, the editor responded to such letters with a short, clarifying answer or a promise to publish research on the suggested topic in future issues, thus validating this approach as an appropriate mode of consumer participation.
However, another form of request letter demonstrates a secondary level of reader enterprise that repositions the magazine as an intermediary rather than an authority, and seeks to establish a non-professional network of audience members. Good Medicine published only one such letter,140 whereas Nature & Health published three: I am desperate for help. I cannot tolerate wheat in any form – it provokes an immune response which causes painful arthritis-like symptoms in all my joints. Have any Nature & Health readers got good recipes for bread, cakes, biscuits, pancakes, pizza bases, etc.? I’d be so grateful for your help!141
I have a large lypoma behind my left knee, which is a benign fatty tumour. I have had numerous medical opinions, including surgical removal, but I would lose too much of my leg muscle ... Does any one else have this
126 problem, and do they know of any alternative methods of treatment for this condition?142
Nine months ago my daughter had a car accident and is now a paraplegic. She is starting to get some movement back into her legs but is easily depressed and bad-tempered. I was wondering whether any other readers out there have any suggestions?143
In requesting information from other readers, these letters take a pragmatic approach to the satisfaction of consumer needs. Nature & Health is identified as a space for the celebration of unconventional approaches, including a validation of the lay expertise and personal experiences of magazine audiences.
A final characteristic of the pragmatic consumer extends the responsibility of the individual even further, by suggesting that amateur advice on alternative health treatments have sufficient authority to be published in a nationally distributed magazine. The following letter from Nature & Health demonstrates this highly engaged mode of audience participation: I enjoyed your article on Saw Palmetto for a Healthy Prostate in the December 1998 issue. I’d like to add a few points. An easy way to improve energy flow to the lower pelvic region is to practice Keget exercises. To do them, simply contract and release the pelvic floor muscles as many times as possible. The article neglects to mention that prostate health often hinges on abstaining from alcohol, coffee and other caffeinated beverages, and sometimes tobacco. The prostate is often irritated by hot, spicy foods as well.144
Good Medicine also published letters that offered lengthy and detailed explanations of new approaches to health problems. Some of these included pragmatic tips such as: ‘I would like to tell you how I cope with chronic constipation. I tried exercise and natural therapies with no success, then someone told me to start the day with a glass of hot water’.145 However, most Good Medicine reader contributions were similar in style to the letters written by medical professionals to medical periodicals, such as the British Medical Journal, or the Journal of the American Medical Association. As these letters are too long to reproduce in full,146 the following extracts have been selected to indicate their breadth and complexity: SAD (seasonal affective disorder) ... affects neurotransmitters and daily biological rhythms in susceptible people, causing recurrent autumn/winter depressions along with hypersomnia (increased sense of smell), lowered
127 energy levels, carbohydrate cravings, weight gain and social withdrawal ... 147 ... scoliosis is not just a lateral curvature of the spine, it is a multi-faceted skeletal and muscular disease that affects one in nine young women. Left untreated, it often results in crippling spine and rib-cage deformities, which in later life can interfere with the body’s major organs ...148
I used to be addicted to poker machines and, in the process of freeing myself, developed a program that I have been teaching successfully to others for more than two years ... I studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and was able to effectively control the ‘internal dialogue’ that goes on before you feel compelled to have ‘another bet’, ‘another drink’ or ‘another piece of chocolate’ ...149
These letters demonstrate that health magazines can be used as an interactive and circular mode of achieving wellbeing, which enables access to expert as well as lay contributions.
Overall, Good Medicine letters from pragmatic consumers were more neutral in tone and subject, tending to validate the established position of the magazine, whereas those in Nature & Health were often framed as questions, requests or contributions, designed to stimulate further discussion. Therefore, it is interesting to note that Good Medicine was more likely to publish the lay ‘expertise’ of their readers. However, all of the letters that took a pragmatic approach demonstrated a high level of literacy in consumer rights and a commitment to the individual’s responsibility for working towards optimum wellbeing. Therefore, all of these letters are also implicated within the paradoxes of such responsibility. As Rimke has argued: Above all, we are told, individuals possess the ability to choose happiness over unhappiness, success over failure, and even health over illness ... Constructed and acted upon as such, individuals are rendered entirely responsible for their failures as well as their successes, their despair as well as their happiness. Indeed, this is the social subject of a liberal governance (2000: 73, 63).
The pragmatic consumer is deployed as a mode of participation that is self-reflexively engaged in the construction of an advanced liberal subjectivity. This position is dedicated to enhancing the positive aspects of consumer culture, which is seen to operate as a critical resource in the everyday option to ‘choose’ health over illness.
128 The public consumer: ‘I believe that society underestimates the effect’150
The ‘public’ consumer is characterised by a preoccupation with the symbolic representations of women’s wellbeing, focusing particularly on gaining public recognition for private experiences. This position asserts that wellbeing is not restricted to the level of individual choices and behaviours, but can also be influenced — either positively or negatively — by ‘public understanding’ of individual situations. As Kerans and Drover argue, ‘...an individual’s conception of her own wellbeing will emerge as properly her own only within a social context of mutuality and respect’ (1993: 184). The public consumer assumes that wellbeing is a social phenomenon and can thus be accessed by effective media lobbying. The notion of ‘public’ is here defined as ‘exposed to general view’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2003) and is embedded within a political notion of the ‘public interest’, or in other words ‘...the common well-being’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2003). The public consumer therefore functions as citizen of a media public with the rights and opportunities to influence the politics of that public. Reader letters that articulate this approach assume that public recognition is affirming and transformative, both in validating the various health and illness experiences of different women and inspiring public understanding of underestimated or stigmatised conditions. So, if the pragmatic consumer advocates for individual responsibility, the public consumer advocates public absolution of that responsibility. The rest of this section will examine letters that deploy a model of the public consumer by either celebrating published representations, advocating for a greater public recognition of neglected illnesses or challenging media stereotypes of women’s health.
The majority of letters that employed a public approach were supportive of health magazine representations of women’s health. Both Good Medicine and Nature & Health published quite a few such letters, most of which commenced with a reference to the published article, moving into an explanation of how the private experience of the reader either converged or diverged from those public representations. The following Good Medicine letters typify this structure: The Pain of Self-Hate in your October issue was great. I have been a self- harmer for more than four years. It all started with an eating disorder, anorexia, which started when I was 15. I began cutting myself when I was 17. I have cut myself many times over the years, and have several scars on
129 my arms. I have used razor blades, glass, knives, paper clips, coat hangers, fingernails, drawing pins, etc.151
Regarding The Pain Of Self-Hate (October issue), my sister has been diagnosed with severe borderline personality disorder and self-injuries ... To exacerbate the situation, she is also intellectually disabled ... With her input, your article and the websites recommended, I now have a comprehensive understanding of her plight.152
Letters like this,153 whether or not the author is describing the experiences of themselves or someone close to them, demonstrate the public consumer model by contributing a deeply private situation in order to validate the public representation of their experiences. Figure 23 reproduces examples of ‘case studies’ published in these two health magazines that attempt to influence the public representation of women’s lives through publishing personal ‘true life’ stories.
Figure 23: ‘Gambling with tragedy: Case study’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘Revive your love life: Denise’s story’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000
In addition to these affirming narratives, both magazines also published letters attempting to publicise neglected or stigmatised illnesses. For example, Good Medicine published four letters that detailed the difficulties of living with ‘invisible’ conditions such as incontinence,154 acne155 and mental illness.156 The letter on incontinence described a commercial advertisement for incontinence treatments as though it were part of a public health campaign to raise awareness: ‘Finally someone is writing about weak bladders’ and ‘Why doesn’t anyone tell you this?’ The other three letters employed political rhetoric and personal narratives to expose the lack of coverage of
130 two ‘misunderstood’ conditions: acne and mental illness. However, as Radley and Billig write: Health and illness are not merely oppositional terms defining states about which individuals have discrete attitudes. Instead, these ideas have a double existence. On the one hand, they are the means by which we can maintain and define our fitness for society; on the other, they portray a world of experience that we claim for ourselves alone (1996: 237).
So although these letters identify the barriers that restrict particular individuals from establishing their own definitions of health, they also ‘portray a world of experience’ that restricts that campaign to an exclusively private domain.
Interestingly, the remainder157 of the ‘public consumer’ letters dealt with topics relating to women’s reproductive health: infertility,158 miscarriage,159 abortion160 and pregnancy.161 The following letter demonstrates the affective power of employing personal narratives to contribute to public representations: Your story on ‘The Baby Chase’ was, I guess, a pleasure to read. You really have to search for reliable information on the subject of infertility. My husband and I are childless and, after five years, we know this will not change ... And for the people who ask childless couples like us ... why they are so selfish, or say ‘we don’t know what we’re missing out on’, please try to hold your tongues. One day I’m going to stand on a high mountain and shout that even though we can’t have children, it doesn’t mean I’m any less of a woman, or that my husband is any less of a man ...
Becker has suggested that ‘narratives carry the moral authority of the narrator; stories are not ideologically neutral’ (1997: 27) and this letter clearly relies upon the moral authority of personal experience in order to challenge public understanding. The position of public consumer is articulated as a technology of political citizenship, advocating for greater medical awareness in order to combat unnecessary social stigmatisation. In this case, the letter itself is employed as a metaphorical ‘shout’ to the general public and the magazine as the ‘high mountain’ that enables the silenced reader to be more widely heard.
The final group of public letters deliberately challenges the forms of media representation in currency. Again, the few letters that took this approach were published in Good Medicine and focused on the media representation of illness:
131 I refer to your article on chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), The Big Sleep (January 1999). Being a chronic fatigue sufferer since 1991, I could most definitely identify with its contents, but was appalled with your choice of photograph. The subject you used was a beautiful, youthful and fresh- looking woman, whose hair and make-up was just so perfect. Her face was free of dark circles and tired lines. Only a CFS sufferer knows that having the condition is like going to hell and back. Every day is a hard, long struggle and every night ends with a desperate prayer that you wake up looking ‘normal’. It is vital that you portray the truth about illnesses. The picture you used was laughable.162
Regarding your story on fibromyalgia (September issue), I am a sufferer and I cannot remember seeing a doctor who really knows as much as the sufferer of this complaint. If it were a simple case of ‘sore muscles’ I would be jumping for joy. I did not like the doctor’s comment that it is a much better things to have than a lot of more serious conditions. Does the doctor realise that sufferers cannot lead a normal life? Some cannot work and exercise is almost impossible. Late nights are a disaster and living with constant pain and stiffness is not pleasant. When I am having a bad time and have headaches, memory loss, chest pain, sore throat, night sweats, cold hands and feet, and frequent urination among other things, I don’t feel lucky.163
These letters not only reject medical opinion but also the assumed entitlement of health magazines to operate as representatives of health consumers. As Sakalys suggests, ‘pathographies almost universally express a need to find a voice outside meta-narrative authority’ (2000: 1470), and these letters demonstrate a challenge to the authority of both medicine and the forms of popular media that claim to represent health consumers.
However, two other Good Medicine letters took a different approach, arguing that the magazine exaggerated the severity of some illness experiences: ... though I sympathise with Ros Blackburn (A World Apart – a story of autism), I was annoyed at the selfish attitude. We can learn to make the most of what we have been given in life. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, maybe she should find someone who is worse off.164
I would like to draw your attention to the story of the mum who had her boobs and tummy done because she was unhappy with her body (Double Or Nothing, April issue). There are people out there with much worse problems. I am 15kg overweight, I suffer from ulcerative colitis and have been on steroids for four years. I have put on 20kg in six weeks. I go off the steroids and lose some, but then my colitis flares up and I’m back on them. I feel like I’m not myself. I’ve lost all my friends and rely on my mother to look after my two wonderful babies. This is the real world with real problems, so, please, let’s stop obsessing about our bodies.165
132
These letters articulate an overt moralism implying that health magazines indulge consumer narcissism. The first letter demands that people with autism try to ‘make the most of what we have been given in life’, rather than drawing upon public sympathy via the media. The second letter articulates a position commonly used to critique cosmetic surgery, arguing that elective body modification is purely motivated by vanity and self- obsession and is therefore not worthy of public validation.
All the Nature & Health letters were found to validate the potential of this magazine to recognise and represent a personal and private illness experience. However, the Good Medicine letters were more diverse, with some articulating a highly antagonistic perspective that drew upon the discourse of patient activism. As Frank, an influential proponent of illness narratives, has written: The ways that ill people are dealing with illness – including face-to-face, print and electronic narratives, each of which affects the others – are both challenging medicine and opening up new avenues of medical expertise ... But just as physicians are learning (anew) how to listen to the ill, ill people’s ways of dealing with illness reflect both liberation from medicine and a sense of abandonment by medicine (2000: 362-3).
The entwined tension between consumer liberation and abandonment is clearly a motivation for the public consumer. Despite the claimed potential of media participation, the impact of these magazines is restricted: it is likely that these magazines will publicise an experience and construct a culture of identification, but not engage in any further mobilisation of social change. The fact that health magazines provoke such a range of responses suggests that the pool of illness experience has barely been drawn upon, and yet, in this context, the public consumer receives little more than a symbolic nod before the magazine moves on to the next ‘illness of the month’. Nonetheless, the genre of reader letters continues to offer an opportunity to make public the private experience of health and illness.
The dissenting consumer: ‘I must, however, take issue’166
The ‘dissenting’ consumer is characterised by a radical performance of consumer agency via a critique of normative assumptions, choosing to actively ‘differ in opinion’ and ‘withhold assent’ from those in a position of expertise or power (Merriam-Webster
133 Online 2003). The term dissenting is employed in the sociological sense of social, political or subcultural ‘dissent’ (Wood 2000) and is intended to represent the parting of ways between conventional and unconventional positions on wellbeing and related social and political issues. Letters that illustrate the position of dissenting consumer are therefore associated with a culture of patient activism and consumer advocacy, as well as a more general trend within popular culture to validate scepticism of authority. But as the rest of this section will demonstrate, a dissenting approach is most explicitly prioritised in letters that promote alternative philosophies of health (see Figure 24 for examples of unconventional philosophies), critique the journalistic ethics of health magazines or use the magazine to expose unhealthy social attitudes to health and wellbeing.
Figure 24: ‘Your alternatives: 12 headache relievers’ article (left) Good Medicine May 2000; ‘Spirit Guides: Discover your guardian angels’ article (right) Nature & Health April-May 2000
Unsurprisingly, Nature & Health published several letters that employed a range of strategies to promote a dissenting approach to health. Some reader letters offered pragmatic examples of when and how alternative health is appropriate, for example, in having mercury amalgram fittings removed to treat Rosacea167 or in seeking naturopathic solutions to conditions that cannot be treated by conventional methods.168 Other letters celebrated a general philosophical outlook of dissent: It’s high time the notion that such methods are risky and practiced by ‘quack doctors’ was debunked. Thank you for restoring the good faith in age-old ways.169
134 Why are we surrounded by so much unhealthy ‘junk music’, while this kind of music (Earthly Garden) gets no exposure at all on radio. Please print more information about the healing qualities of music.170
I am a registered nurse and, from a professional standpoint, I admire the way you report on health issues in a balanced way when it comes to the differences between Western reductionist medicine and the more holistic forms of healing. Within our current economic climate of ‘user pays’, it is timely for your philosophy of natural health and holistic medicine to spread, as it focuses on prevention, a principle very much in line with the World Health Organisation and the Health for All strategy.171
These letters suggest that holistic health continues to be interpreted as an alternative to conventional biomedicine, even as it becomes more popular and acceptable in ‘mainstream’ society. Nature & Health can be seen to capitalise on this dissenting trend, and as the final letter demonstrates, even some medical professionals are contributing to the validation of holistic health (Wicks 1995).
However, not all letters were content with the dissenting philosophy promoted by these magazines. A key characteristic of the dissenting consumer is an explicit call for significant cultural change, often articulated in highly provocative language: Let’s all cast our economic votes now for cotton clothing, organic foods, and metal and glass in the kitchen. Say no to chemicals to improve your future and mine.172
Thank you for your magazine that moves us closer to integration and balance. We grow and dance that dynamic balance between the charged polarities of feminine and masculine ... Your coverage of the upsurgence of the feminine spirit, that which is present in each of us, fills an undefined craving in many. It lends support to the individual and planetary quest.173
As Ziguras has observed, ‘...it is peculiar that the New Age constantly harks back to premodern cultures, attempting to legitimate new fads through drawing on ancient wisdom’ (1997: 200). Although Nature & Health would not necessarily associate an interest in alternative health with a New Age philosophy, these letters demonstrate that a critical interpretation of conventional medicine tends to associate ‘old’ and ‘ancient’ approaches to health with ‘safety’ (rather than risk) and ‘nature’ (rather than technology). Nature & Health perpetuates a mystical reverence of ‘natural’ wisdom by dissenting from the authority of traditional biomedicine. As O’Neil observes: ‘The New Age stresses the evil effects of science and the scientific revolution. Science is parochial
135 and the universe is far more complex, wonderful and mysterious than science affirms’ (2001: 471). However, as O’Neil continues, ‘These basic New Age assumptions would seem to posit a very self-contained, self-satisfied and self-sufficient individual’ (2001: 471), and in this way, the dissenting consumer is very much based in a contemporary culture of individualism, which prioritises the consumer right to choose alternative lifestyles and to pass expert judgment on authority.
Other letters that promote a dissenting approach are structured around a critique of the journalism on offer, tapping into a much wider culture of scepticism that operates as a critical counterpart to the mainstream consumption of popular media. However, this approach was only evident in Good Medicine, perhaps suggesting that because Nature & Health targets readers interested in alternative philosophies, they may be less likely to interpret magazine editorial as a transgression of mainstream journalistic ethics. The following letter demonstrates a dissenting approach to Good Medicine: I loved the April issue of Good Medicine, but thought the May issue didn’t represent the same kind of magazine. For example, After Infidelity: How to Survive the Betrayal. I might as well buy Cleo.
Editor’s reply follows: Good Medicine presents a wide variety of topics aimed at a broad range of ages, but unfortunately we still can’t please all of the people all of the time, as hard as we try. We regret that you don’t enjoy articles such as After Infidelity: How to Survive the Betrayal but, in an age of high divorce rates and relationship breakdowns, it is a subject that causes people a great deal of pain. And as medical surveys show, unresolved emotional stress ultimately impacts on physical wellbeing. Therefore, we regard emotional health issues as being equally worthy of attention as physical health. – Ed174
The complaint that Good Medicine is beginning to mirror women’s ‘lifestyle’ magazines assumes that health magazines have a mandate to focus on women’s health, rather than their more general and social wellbeing. The editor’s reply is defensive, outlining a multifaceted approach to media production that includes emotional health within the total picture of women’s wellbeing. This reply also employs a standard response to the dissenting consumer: ‘...we can’t please everybody all of the time’.
Some dissenting letters are concerned with the health implications of magazine journalism, such as the sociological impact of publicising Viagra (a pharmaceutical treatment for impotence)175 or the psychological impact of children’s health education
136 books that include detailed illustrations of body organs.176 However, the topic that has received the most dissenting attention in these magazines is environmentalism. Although environmental sustainability and conservation have become publicly and politically validated discourses over the past few decades, the ethics of ‘pure’ environmentalism continues to operate as a position of dissent: As much as I love your magazine (the best on the market), I have to say how disappointed I was in your story about a woman who may have Parkinson’s disease (Free Spirit, June), yet seems to think it’s okay to hunt some poor buffalo. Who does she think she is killing these majestic, wonderful creatures?177
It was with disbelief that I read Good Medicine’s column in a recent Woman’s Day and noticed an article on Benefin, made from shark cartilage. Surely, there are too many slayings of these magnificent creatures already, without your magazine backing such a product.178
Both of these letters offer critical reviews of the normative assumption that the survival and health care of humans has priority over other species. Although the first letter did not receive a published reply, the second was published alongside an official response from the makers of Benefin, in defence of their commitment to environmental sustainability. Two issues later, the following letter was published: I have enjoyed reading your magazine for some time now, and trust Good Medicine’s judgement in featuring quality products. Thinking that I knew something about shark cartilage after being a consumer of an ocean- cleaned brand, it prompted me to study the article about BeneFin in the December issue. (Editor’s note: this was an advertising promotion paid for by Lane Labs, the manufacturer of BeneFin.) I was amazed at how much information I was given. So, I then questioned the manufacturers of the ocean-cleaned product about what it contained, what it could do for me, and if it was as good as BeneFin. The answers were not very informative. I then contacted Lane Labs and found they knew a great deal about their product and the importance of careful cleaning, processing and packaging. Many thanks Good Medicine.179
However problematic it is to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ reader letters, this letter is the only one of all three hundred and sixty-four letters used in this research that can be explicitly judged as ‘inauthentic’. The combined factors of the dissenting response published earlier and the sanitised language of this later letter, suggests that the manufacturers of this product were worried enough about the published accusations to facilitate a response in the form of an unbiased ‘reader letter’.
137 The final example of the dissenting consumer relates to the media promotion of ‘unhealthy’ attitudes and beliefs. These letters span a wide range of topics but tend to focus on common and contentious issues around women’s health. Most of these letters articulate a vehement critique of the magazine, for example, the following letter is an exchange between a Good Medicine reader and editor regarding the ‘correct’ body weight to maintain during pregnancy: I am writing to express concern with an article in March Good Medicine, What’s Wrong With My Diet? On page 97, Aristea Kartsona O’Dea was six and a half months pregnant and had put on only 5kg. I have put on 10 kg. At week 30, you should have put on 75 per cent of the total weight you will gain during the pregnancy ...
Editor’s reply follows: Despite an enormous appetite, Aristea – our deputy art director – indeed stayed very petite until the last 10 weeks of her pregnancy when she put on roughly another 10 kg and practically had to be wheeled around the office. It just goes to show that no two women, celebrities or ‘unknown’, are alike. Aristea recently gave birth to a very healthy 3.4kg baby boy Jacob, so there’s no cause for concern. Ed.180
This letter implies that to not adhere to the strict guidelines for ‘correctly’ performing a pregnancy is irresponsible and selfish. In fact, in this case, it is the editorial reply that articulates an alternative to the prevailing wisdom, by suggesting that the medical recommendations for healthy pregnancies are not necessarily appropriate for all women.
Another dissenting position common to women’s magazines is a critique of beauty culture. The next section on the ‘cosmetic’ consumer will examine letters that critique the ideals of femininity promoted by Good Medicine, but some letters clearly prioritise a model of the dissenting consumer. For example, Good Medicine published three letters that exposed the ageist lack of photographic representations of older women.181 Another letter articulated a disgruntled response to fashions in photography: I am not a big fan of faddish fashions or ideas. What has been the ‘bare boob’ fad of every woman’s magazine over the past 18 months or so is becoming really annoying. Whether it is advertising a product or a totally unrelated article on bad hair days, there is yet another bare-breasted model. Why! What has prompted me to write this letter is not necessarily the fact that you have featured yet another semi-naked model on page 98 for your December issue, but the fact that she looks so young. How old is she? Why do so many young aspiring models have to be willing to take all their kit off to work these days?182
138 This letter presents a series of rhetorical questions (‘Why!’ ‘How old is she?’) about the impact of consumer fashion trends on the media representation of women. It commences with a dissenting statement (‘I am not a big fan of...’) in order to establish a moral distinction between the mass media culture of ‘fashion’ and ‘fads’ and the private domain of ethical belief. This letter argues that naked representations of women’s bodies contradict the goal of promoting women’s wellbeing.
The dissenting consumer is articulated in a variety of ways in the letters reproduced here, but a recurrent theme is the assumption that health consumers have the moral and ethical imperative to actively critique normative beliefs and attitudes. As Irvine reflects: The construction of a new subject position, the health consumer, created new possibilities for people to imagine alternative ways of thinking and talking about lay-professional relationships which were fundamentally different from the disciplinary regimes of the past. Consumer discourse provided patients with a number of other alternative images and ideals for subjective orientation which encouraged people to think of themselves and their relationships with health care providers in new ways (2002: 34).
Although this critical approach can be productive in terms of encouraging a more active appraisal of institutional norms, it can also encourage what Eckersley describes as: ‘The widespread perception that things are getting worse at the societal level ... whether [or not] it is “factually” or “objectively” true’ (2000: 23). The dissenting consumer operates as a breakaway from a dominant or consolidated paradigm, and certainly these letters demonstrate that positions of dissent tend to be predictably polarised, as in alternative health’s challenge to conventional biomedicine or feminism’s challenge to conventional stereotypes of women. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that all the letters advocating for alternative health were published in Nature & Health, and those critiquing the more mainstream domains of journalistic ethics and public attitudes were published in Good Medicine.
The cosmetic consumer: ‘I am now happy with the image I see’183
The ‘cosmetic’ consumer is characterised by a preoccupation with cosmetic markers of health, assuming that corporeal signifiers of youth and beauty can positively influence the experience of wellbeing. The term cosmetic is generally defined as ‘...decorative rather than functional’ (Lexico LLC 2002) and this distinction implies a clear moral
139 judgment regarding the superficiality of cosmetic health, as something ‘lacking depth or significance’ (Lexico LLC 2002). However, letters that prioritise a cosmetic approach make little distinction between beauty and wellbeing. Although only Good Medicine publishes cosmetic letters, Nature & Health nonetheless allocates a significant amount of editorial space to cosmetic issues, particularly to promote ‘natural’ skin care, alternative beauty treatments and herbal weight-loss schemes (see Figure 25). Nature & Health uses conventionally ‘beautiful’ models for their covers and editorial illustrations: a paradoxical policy in a magazine that differentiates itself from the politics of mainstream beauty culture. In a study of UK alternative health magazines, one editor explained the policy of using ‘normal’ photographic models: It helps the reader ‘feel safe and confident that it’s a mainstream sort of title – not something a bit weird and wacky. Whereas if we had someone ... on the front chanting or something, or lots of candles, it would turn a lot of people off. Whereas that [points to magazine] ... is just a happy, healthy- looking female’ (Doel & Segrott 2003: 140).
Figure 25: ‘Discover your skin’s natural beauty: A foolproof guide to gorgeous skin’ article, Nature & Health April-May 2000
As the rest of this section will demonstrate, the cosmetic consumer was prioritised in Good Medicine letters that addressed the social expectations of cosmetic beauty in women, whether or not those letters are specifically interested in achieving those expectations by accessing cosmetic therapies, defending beauty culture as pleasurable and fulfilling, or advocating for a wider range of aesthetic options for women.
The majority of letters that employed a cosmetic approach were not interested in debates around the social and political implications of women’s beauty culture. Instead,
140 they focused on a conventional rendering of the function and purpose of cosmetic therapies in women’s lives. These letters addressed a range of topics, but were grouped around the most common ‘problem areas’ for women: breast size, body fat, cellulite and skin care.184 Some of these letters were straightforward calls for more information, for example, ‘In September Good Medicine, you tell us about the bra to make your breasts grow. I want that bra now!’185 Others attempt to articulate their relationship to cosmetic ideals more clearly: ‘I think many women, including me, would love to hear more about how Julia [Morris] lost her weight and how she is keeping it off so successfully’.186 These letters demonstrate that this magazine, and it can be argued many commercial health magazines are, in many ways, beauty magazines under another name. Of course, this is not to say that it would be possible to produce a ‘pure’ healthy magazine that is somehow outside of the ‘corrupting’ influence of beauty culture. As Petersen and Lupton have postulated: The feminine ‘healthy’ citizen, it is suggested, should seek both soundness of body and physical allure ... In these discourses there is an elision between the ideals of commodity culture and public health, for both promote the slim, attractive, healthy, physically fit, youthful body as that which women should seek to attain (1996: 80).
Therefore, there is no real reason why a health magazine should not be interested in promoting the physical attractiveness of its readers, since the ideal healthy citizen has already been conceptualised in terms of a conventional model of ideal physical ‘health’.
Figure 26: ‘Looking good: Head to toe’ article (left) and ‘f.y.i. beauty’ (right), Good Medicine May 2000
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In January 1999, a series of reader letters were published in Good Medicine as part of a competition to promote a herbal cellulite treatment.187 The editor requested that readers justify their individual reasons for requiring this treatment, and extracts from two of the eight published letters are reproduced here: I am 36 years old and have six children ranging in age from two to 17. There has been some improvement in my cellulite since I started following a low-fat diet and exercising with free weights four months ago. However, I am overweight and have an underactive thyroid, so the results are slow.188
I am 40 years old and weigh 90kg. In 1988, I weighed 65kg and had liposuction. The operation went wrong. Instead of sucking out five litres of fat, doctors sucked out two litres of fat and three litres of blood ... Cellasene may be my only chance.189
Cellulite is here interpreted as a failure to achieve and preserve youthful beauty and these letters attempt to establish a tangible defence as to why the authors should be offered a last minute reprieve from cosmetic deformity: they beg for an opportunity to salvage their physical potential before an ‘inevitable descent’ into ageing. The cosmetic idealism of Good Medicine contributes to an unforgiving stance on beauty that is based upon ‘the logic of assembly-line beauty: “difference” is made over into sameness’ (Balsamo 1996: 58). However, what these letters show is that some women ‘...choose cosmetic surgery not because they or others feel they are worth ‘nothing’ unless they look young and beautiful ... but simply because they would like to look better than they do’ (Kirkland & Tong 1996: 158). These letters have a complex function, and it is not enough to differentiate between an extrinsic consumer imperative and an intrinsic physical one. This series of letters was followed in June 1999190 and June 2000191 by two apparently unrelated letters expounding the virtues of Cellasene, which was also promoted on the related Good Medicine television program.
Women’s magazines have been the focus of much feminist critique over the last few decades and reader letters demonstrate both a familiarity with this critique and an articulate defence of beauty culture. The following letter is written by a representative of the beauty industry: For quite some time now, magazines have been denigrating beauty salons and treatments performed by therapists. It is, I believe, time to look at the positives of salons and treatments ... I do trust that one day you may be in a position to write about the more positive aspects of beauty therapy. There
142 are many salons and spas where hygiene is of paramount importance ... Chairperson, CIDESCO Schools Australia Ltd.192
This letter suggests that not only has a backlash against beauty culture become widespread but that women’s magazines have participated in educating consumers to be critical of apparently neutral beauty therapies. As Black and Sharma write, ‘...beauty therapy is an ambiguous industry providing as it does both positive and negative effects for individual women and the regulation of femininity more generally’ (2001: 114). However, this letter also demonstrates the ethical ambiguities of operating a women’s ‘health’ magazine that is funded by advertising from the ‘beauty’ industry.
Other letters are more interested in defending individual readers against accusations of cosmetic vanity. For example: Mark Ferguson’s report on the breast liposuction (June 2000) of Justine Bolza has given me hope. Reading Justine’s story and her feelings about her size is like reading my own story. As an 18-year-old university student with size 14E breasts, I go through grief every day without fail. I am a very sporty person, but of late have been refusing to go to the gym because, even with the three sports bras I wear, my breasts still give me immense pain. I am not overweight and I have a well-proportioned figure. Unfortunately, my oversized breasts have caused a loss of confidence and, even though I know it shouldn’t, it often stops me from going out, as I get extremely sick of the sexist ‘boob’ comments everywhere I go. Thank you for enlightening me about this procedure – it has truly given me some hope for the future. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one going through such pain. And I think Justine Bolza looks fantastic!193
Although the original article was written as the story of a cosmetic ‘makeover’, this reader letter responds by focusing on the social and medical justifications for cosmetic surgery. There are doubtless good reasons for some women to engage in breast augmentation but this letter nonetheless demonstrates that ‘...women who involve themselves in the pursuit of youth and beauty do not take their body as something natural and given, but rather as raw material to be shaped and pruned to fit some external standard’ (Wijsbek 2000: 454). This letter implies that Good Medicine provides ‘expert’ evidence that cosmetic surgery is an option for even ‘normal’ female consumers.
Wijsbek has also suggested that ‘...the beauty imperative sets a new norm: those who refuse to submit to it will be become stigmatised’ (2000: 454). However, Good
143 Medicine reader letters demonstrate that there is some scope to challenge the parameters of this beauty imperative. Some letters argue that definitions of beauty are subjective and contextual. For example, the following letters are both written as retrospective commentaries on life ‘after’ body image disorders: ... it took me a long time to realise you don’t have to risk your life and be wafer thin to look good. I am now happy with the image I see in the mirror – I have an athletic body. Annalise should be an inspiration for a lot of young girls who dream of being a model and think they are too fat. It takes all shapes and sizes. 194
As a formerly overweight teenager, I know how it feels to be on both sides of the scale. If you are plump, you are teased. If you are thin, certain women become bitchy. Can I suggest to exercise-loathing people that they take up the fun and healthy art of bellydancing. I refuse to do exercise if it is no fun. When I took up belly dancing, I lost weight and ate more than ever. My low self-esteem also improved dramatically, and the dance helped my lower back problems.195
Although these letters critique the premise that only thin women are attractive, they do not challenge the associated premise that only thin women are healthy. The first letter is resigned to having an ‘athletic’ body and the second offers alternative exercise options for the exercise-phobic. But neither letter suggests that the cosmetic consumer is not obliged to at least consider the health benefits of body-shaping exercise.
In fact, the only letters that addressed the restrictions of ideal femininity challenged stereotypes about being too thin. For example: I enjoy Good Medicine, but I’m tired of reading articles about diets and losing weight. I’m sure there are people like me who’d love to gain weight, but can’t! I’m 27,178cm and 50kg, and get comments such as, ‘You’re so lucky’. I am in a way, but like the overweight person who isn’t content, neither am I being thin. So is there a Fat Pill or some special metabolism- slowing diet? If so, I’d rather read about that in Good Medicine.196
With regard to your article How to Stay Size 10 (June issue), how do you get it through to people that we are all created differently. I’m 32,150cm and 42kg. I have a very small bone structure and I am not a size 10. I am, in fact, between sizes 4-8. I’m often criticised for my size, being told I am just too small ... I wish society would get over the issue of size and start realising we were all created equally beautiful.197
The first letter attempts to expose the attention paid to diets and weight-loss in the magazine but rather than suggesting that there is something odd about this excessive
144 attention to women’s over-weight, this letter simply argues that the complement is required for those women who ‘suffer’ from under-weight. However, the second letter extends this same exposé of the prejudice experienced by ultra-thin women, by concluding that no single body shape should be prioritised as healthier than others.
Only two letters explicitly critiqued the beauty imperative of Good Medicine, one of which was published two months after the previous series of cellulite letters: I found the January letters page sad [reader feedback to our Cellasene trial offer]. What does cellulite matter if the thighs in question are functional and healthy? Did Mother Teresa, Mum Shirl, Queen Elizabeth I, Caroline Chisholm or Jane Austen ever suffer from cellulite? Who knows? They are remembered for better reasons! It seems to me the battle against cellulite has only one result – a better lifestyle for those who have set themselves up in the anti-cellulite industry!198
This letter asserts a powerful critique of the industries complicit in the perpetuation of women’s cosmetic wellbeing. Although it does not judge individual readers or the magazine itself, it does imply that all associated contributors are necessarily bound up in the commercial dictates of the beauty industry.199 Sometimes, however, this culture of critique can be seen to take on a momentum of its own: As an avid reader of your magazine, I would like to comment on How I Stay a Size 10 (June). I feel this article only fuels the debate that the media influences our youth to be unrealistically thin just to meet social expectations. I have never had the privilege of being a size 10, and to achieve what you refer to as a perfect size I would have to be mere skin and bones.
Editor’s reply follows: The purpose of this story was not to laud size 10 – in fact, quite the reverse. In our society, size 10 has become idealised as the pinnacle of dietary achievement, and many women are going to often ridiculous extremes to achieve a body weight and shape that is totally unsuited to their physiology. That is the point we were making, and we’re glad to hear that you’re happy with yourself whatever your dress size. Ed.200
This interesting exchange demonstrates an ambivalence between women’s health magazines and beauty culture. These magazines deliberately attempt to both critique and validate the commerce of the women’s consumer market, separating what is apparently ‘healthy’ about looking beautiful from the ‘sickness’ of unrealistic body expectations.
145 Although there has been an increase in the popularity of cosmetic therapies for men (e.g., Nakamura et al. 2000) and as the previous chapter demonstrated, a wider validation of men’s beauty culture, the bulk of the beauty industry is still marketed to women. Women’s health magazines splice their medical objectives with cosmetic ideals and the letters reproduced here demonstrate how this association is negotiated through a cosmetic approach to wellbeing. Recent research has questioned whether health magazines are in fact any ‘healthier’ than beauty and fashion magazines: The specific focus on dieting and body shaping and sculpting found in health and fitness magazine articles and photographs may actually encourage readers to engage in more frequent and intense body-oriented and specific body-part comparisons ... magazine reading also appears to contribute to the internalization of the cultural thin ideal, which, in turn, heightens concerns about body shape and size (Thomsen 2002: 1001).
Although only Good Medicine published cosmetic letters, Nature & Health is in no way outside of these ambiguities. For example, two recent editions of this publication (see Figure 27) included the following cover bylines: ‘Organic beauty: Detox your skin’ and ‘Burn fat faster!’ (June-July 2003); ‘Lose weight: Look good naked’ and ‘Look younger: Eat to beat wrinkles’ (August-September 2003). As this demonstrates, Nature & Health continues to perpetuate the popular over-representation of ‘thin, white women’ (Redmond 2003) whilst claiming to reject the emotional and physical health implications of commercial beauty culture.
Figure 27: Nature & Health cover pages (left to right) June-July 2003, Aug-Sep 2003
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Case study: Women’s pathographies
This chapter will conclude with a brief case study of the genre of ‘women’s pathographies’ in reader letters from both Good Medicine and Nature & Health. Focusing on seven letters (three from Nature & Health and four from Good Medicine), this analysis identifies pathographies in letters that include a narrative account of the experience of chronic illness, and an interpretation or ‘evaluation’ (McKay & Bonner 2002) of the meanings behind the experience of illness and/or illness recovery. The following Good Medicine letter typifies this genre: Most of us are mindful of ourselves and the image we present to the world. Many of us worry about the future, about money and all of the other stresses in life. I used to be like that, too, before I had a benign tumour removed from my head in 1996. I was a long distance runner at the peak of physical fitness. I had a good job and was independent. Now just walking can tire me. My hair falls out, I have pain every other day and often I bloat up from the cortisone that I take. Karen Duffy (A Model Survivor, April issue) is right when she says, ‘You mourn for the person that you were, because you’re not that person any more’. My life has taken an interesting turn, but its not over. I lost my job and still don’t work, but I’m in my second year of study in Multimedia. True, I move a little slower now, but I have more time to smell the roses. You only have one life, and you have a responsibility to make it as good as it can be.201
In their study of breast cancer pathographies in Australian women’s magazines, McKay and Bonner have suggested that ‘many stories of the experience of life-threatening illness follow the same basic pattern’ (1999: 564), commencing with ‘the sufferer’s retelling of the diagnosis, followed by treatment and then a re-evaluation of the experience in terms of what it could possibly mean and how the woman, and by implication her readers, could benefit from the experience’ (1999: 564). In this case, the description of the author prior to diagnosis (‘I used to be like that too’) is also used to evaluate the meanings of the illness (‘I have more time to smell the roses’). The most enduring theme of this letter links up with the others in this analysis: personal responsibility for maximising individual life potential.
Since one of the critical functions of reader letters is to establish a ‘reflexive circulation of discourse’ (Warner 2002: 90), it is unsurprising that all of these letter pathographies were written in response to a published article that reflected the reader’s experience of illness, as demonstrated in the following letter from Nature & Health:
147 Thank you for the most informative article I have ever read dealing with depression and creating peace in your life (February 1999). I was particularly encouraged by Angela Rossmanith’s advice; I finished reading, put down the magazine, and went for a four-kilometre walk. Now when I re- read that story after I come home from work just reading it makes me feel relaxed! With the help of natural supplements like St John’s wort, I can now see the red flags that signal depression, and no longer need a prescribed anti-depressant as a ‘bandaid’. If I am the only reader who responds this way to your article, may you rejoice that one reader has found her life again.202
As Charmaz writes about the mechanics of narrative, ‘the storyteller makes identity claims for being a certain type of person and reality claims for the audience to support’ (1999: 374). This letter demonstrates the circular model of claiming that is typical of women’s pathographies: first, the original published article constructs a representation of a particular health or illness condition; then audiences speculate on private experiences of those conditions; and finally, the magazine publishes reader letters that consolidate the journalistic merit of those original representations, drawing upon the ‘real-life’ evidence of reader testimonials.
All of these letters position magazines as central to the process of recovery, but there is a ‘special’ function of celebrity illness stories. Bonner and McKay observed a ‘major increase in [women’s magazine] health stories and in the use of celebrity pathographies ... in the 1980s’ (2000: 137), increasing exponentially with the introduction of the new genre of ‘tabloid pathographies’ (McKay & Bonner 1999) since that time. The following letter is a response to the Good Medicine celebrity pathography on marathon runner Heather Turland (see Figure 28): I love jogging and I have exercised all my life. I feel sad for Heather not being able to fulfil her dreams because of an illness. I can sympathise with her frustration, as I was hit by a virus two years ago. Before that, I was a highly energetic, motivated, single mother and corporate executive. Since I had the virus, I’ve never been the same. I suffered a nervous breakdown after the virus. Despite being exhausted all the time after the attack, I kept going at the same pace, thinking that the worst was over. It wasn’t. Instead, I went into a downward spiral. At times I was so exhausted that I could not get out of bed and take my daughter to school, let alone go to work. I am still suffering from the effects of the virus. But, although I am not yet back to what I was before, I still enjoy life. I believe that life is for living, even if I have to live with my virus! I just need to take special care of myself. I am now married to a very supportive and wonderful man, and I am still working for a large corporation, although in a less stressful job.203
148
This letter draws multiple points of connection between the experiences of the celebrity and the ‘ordinary’ reader. Both are runners who have experienced an unexpectedly disabling illness but have come through the other side, stronger and wiser for the experience. Again, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison is employed as proof that the subject of the pathography was once ‘normal’, thus emphasising the pathos of the illness experience.
Figure 28: ‘Marathon Mum’s Shattered Olympic Dream’, Good Medicine May 2000
Another characteristic of women’s letter pathographies relates to the ‘pragmatic consumer’ mode of audience participation. These letters are interested in the concrete tools employed in illness recovery. For example, the following Good Medicine letter implies that the experience of chronic fatigue syndrome can be transformed through pragmatic adjustments in health behaviour: I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome. I was stricken in the spring of 1996 at age 39. It began with a flu that never went away. Prior to this illness, I was full of energy and very healthy – I ran a gift shop for 10 years. It was incredible to realise that other people felt the same way I felt. My life has been put on hold. But through nutrition, supplements, chiropractic care and massage, I’m finally starting to feel a little better, though it is a very long process. Thank you so much for your article.204
This letter supports McKay and Bonner’s finding that women’s magazines tend to focus on individual preventive and healing behaviours: ‘stressing personal control and self help particularly through the beneficial effects of fitness and the desirability of controlling diet by reducing fat and eating fresh fruit and vegetables’ (1999: 569). The implication of this focus is that the individual may in fact be held partly responsible for
149 having a life ‘on hold’: ‘In quite complex ways, it echoes discursive shifts away from reliance on medical institutions and towards personal responsibility for health and well- being’ (McKay & Bonner 1999: 564). Thus, the assumed benefits of ‘fresh fruit and vegetables’ is complicated by the implication that the individual can somehow control their medical destiny by making these simple behavioural choices.
Cancer is a powerful theme in women’s pathographies and one that ties this notion of individual responsibility to gendered ‘stories of heroism’ (Seale 2002a: 123). Interestingly, there was a reader letter account of ‘cancer heroics’ from each of these two health magazines, both written as retrospective accounts of cancer treatments that do not indicate whether a successful recovery has been made: I have just read The Breast Report (October issue) as I recover from a minor skin graft operation. It couldn’t have come at a better time, as I was recently diagnosed with breast cancer – I never thought it would happen to me at 32. I have undergone both a mastectomy and reconstruction, and now I am having chemotherapy. For what is often a sensitive topic, much thanks for a most informative set of articles and stories. For me and many other women, and our partners, the more we know, the less we have to fear.205
I was in hospital, recovering from a mastectomy for my diagnosed breast cancer, when my husband dropped in the latest issue of Nature & Health. I had already decided against radiation or chemotherapy, hoping to find natural alternatives. But I was still feeling so very frightened. What strength and inspiration your magazine bestowed! It provided the right start to my search. Every article had something positive and helpful for me ... You helped keep me strong in my most vulnerable hours. Thank you. 206
Both of these letters stress the role of women’s health magazines in easing the trauma of cancer treatments. The first finds Good Medicine helpful in coping with the experience of chemotherapy and a mastectomy, whereas the second is relieved that Nature & Health supports the unconventional decision to refuse chemotherapy in favour of ‘natural alternatives’. Both letters associate information access with empowerment (‘the more we know, the less we have to fear’; ‘What strength and inspiration your magazine bestowed!’), illustrating the important role that health media plays in mobilising the consumer ‘right’ to make informed decisions about medical treatments.
Both letters imply a connection between consumer agency and ‘thinking positively’. The importance of a patient’s psychological attitude in illness recovery is a popularly
150 held belief, facilitated by women’s health magazines. Wilkinson and Kitzinger have argued that ‘the claim to be thinking positively is made, in part, to protect [patients] against accusations of complicity in the onset and progression of their cancer – of having brought their suffering upon themselves’ (2000: 809). This suggests that the claim to be reading actively may also be made, in part, to protect patients against those same accusations. Seale writes that in media cancer stories: ... both men and women are offered the opportunity to imagine that they can control cancer through an effort of will. This is a message that is ... largely in opposition to predominant scientific opinion about the main influences on the course of cancer, and it assists in explaining the popularity of non- orthodox approaches to cancer therapy. It is in fact a promise of human control over illness and the threat of death that is similar to that which was once offered to people by traditional religious authorities (2002a: 108).
It is interesting to consider that an ‘alternative’ health publication such as Nature & Health — which places such stock in the notion of ecological and spiritual awareness — is promoting an entirely humanist and individualist philosophy of the body. This magazine places particular emphasis on the importance of emotional and spiritual health, with the associated implication that illness can somehow be related to a lack of mind-body-spirit balance, and again, placing the greatest importance on individual ‘control’ of health and illness.
Arthur Frank has argued that neoliberalism is ‘our contemporary theodicy of good fortune’, suggesting that the neoliberal culture of medical consumerism ‘requires believing that one has caused one’s health and thus deserves it, just as others deserve whatever health they have caused’ (2002: 27). The paradoxes in living out this belief are evident in this final pathography, reproduced from Good Medicine: I am a 29-year-old with an incurable auto-immune disease. Chronic pain affects every aspect of your life. It changes your personality and the way you interact with those around you. Unfortunately, its those closest to you who get to see the negative effects. The hardest issue for me is the baggage that this takes to a relationship, with a chance of passing on the gene for this disease to future children. I’ve already lost friends who either couldn’t or wouldn’t cope with a friend suffering from an incurable illness. To anyone who has been diagnosed (with a serious illness), I urge you to become your own best advocate. I have found invaluable information and a support group via the Internet, which is extremely helpful. I have taken several articles to my doctor and used them as a starting point for conversation. I am optimistic about my future. I am not a depressive person by nature and I know there are thousands of people out there far worse off
151 than I am. Sometimes bad things happen to good people – It’s how you deal with them that determines how they will affect your life.207
This letter argues that the social response to chronic illness is ignorant and harmful (‘I’ve already lost friends’) and yet recovery is defined as taking control of a negative situation by mobilising the consumer rights of self-advocacy and pro-active information research. Many of the characteristics of letter pathographies are evident in this letter: the transformative impact of illness (‘chronic pain affects every aspect of your life’), the power of positive thinking (‘I am optimistic about my future’), the role of the pragmatic consumer (‘I have taken several articles to my doctor’) and finally, philosophical relativism (‘Sometimes bad things happen to good people’), are all offered as evidence for the importance of developing consumer agency (‘It’s how you deal with them’).
McKay and Bonner suggest that ‘the function of magazine pathography is a mix of self- discovery, finding inner strength, and a desire to help others in demonstrating how to overcome adversity’ (2002: 59). Interestingly, none of these magazine letters was written as a retrospective account of recovery; rather the letter-writer was always positioned within the recovery process. This indicates a key distinction between media pathographies and reader letter pathographies, in that audience testimonials seem to prioritise the importance of the media itself in facilitating the happy resolution of illness conflict. These letters also demonstrate many of the ambivalent implications of health media, including the liberating potential of access to medical information, and the simultaneously daunting imperative that magazine audiences take on the role of ‘owning’ their illness through knowledge acquisition. Health magazines imply that readers have the capacity to translate health information into the experience of good health, whether or not these diverse audiences have the cultural skills required to effectively manage that position of responsibility. And women’s pathographies demonstrate an attempt to embody this consumer responsibility in personal accounts of difficult experiences.
Conclusion
This analysis has demonstrated that the two consumer markets of Good Medicine and Nature & Health are necessarily engaged in the same cultural politics. Both publications are heavily reliant upon conventional definitions of femininity, and represent the
152 commodification of health in which various parts of women’s lives are targeted with consumer products and services. They are both also dedicated to a consistent representation of women’s interests via the genre of ‘personal narratives’ and whether in the form of reader letters or editorial rhetoric, these narratives are seen to be ‘...performative, and thus empowering. They represent action and, thus, agency’ (Becker 1997: 25-6). However, it must be recognised that this agency is regulated as a form of advanced liberal citizenship, in which ‘health’ becomes the central organising principle of the wider project of taking responsibility for personal wellbeing. Doel and Segrott present a positive evaluation of these functions: Women are certainly called upon to take control of their own health, but they are not expected to do this in isolation. The magazines attempt to forge ongoing relationships with readers, especially through the creation of networks amongst their readerships. A form of solidarity is being constructed that is not centred on a particular leader, programme or philosophy, but based on the collective achievement of individualised health care solutions by women ... The tone of these magazines is positive, and the focus is the meaningfulness of women’s everyday lives. Far from needing to identify with role models, women are assumed to be competent and skilled actors in the ongoing creation and negotiation of their own lives (2003: 142).
Although reader letters operate in complex ways and can have multiple functions, four models of the ideal magazine consumer were identified in this material. The pragmatic consumer prioritised behavioural wellbeing, prizing pro-active, self-regulating, self- improving consumption as central to the attainment and ongoing control of women’s wellbeing. The public consumer prioritised images of wellbeing, specifically concerned with media representations of health and illness. The dissenting consumer prioritised political wellbeing and was actively critical of various issues represented in the magazine or in society at large. And finally, the cosmetic consumer prioritised aesthetic wellbeing, focusing on the physical presentation of the body and engaging with cultural ideals around beauty and physical attractiveness.
Although there were many smaller distinctions, there was one major difference between the Good Medicine and Nature & Health representations of these four models of the health magazine consumer. That is, Good Medicine published a wide range of conventional and unconventional perspectives, whereas the Nature & Health letters were almost entirely supportive of the editorial approach of this magazine, contributing
153 to a circular justification of that approach. All of the thirty-four Nature & Health letters that included a claim to readership position (77%) claimed to be ‘committed’ and ‘regular’ readers (see content analysis in chapter four), so that even though these letters established a similar number of pragmatic, public and dissenting consumer positions, none of the criticisms were directed at the magazine itself. This is directly opposed to the reader letters from Good Medicine: of the forty-two letters (57%) that included readership claims, ten of these were ‘uncertain’ or wavering in their support and seven were explicitly critical. Thus, the more overtly ‘commercial’ publication demonstrated a much more radical representation of audience diversity, including letters critical of the quality of (pragmatic) health information and the (public) representation of reader experiences, as well as letters that were actively dissenting in their evaluation of the ethics and mission of Good Medicine and the idealised femininity promoted by its associated beauty culture. Therefore, although both magazines engaged with these varied consumer positions, only Good Medicine contributed a wide and varied representation of different social, political and economic perspectives, suggesting that the distinction between ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ approaches to women’s health is in many ways simply a question of different sets of consumer options, rather than different cultural politics.
154 CHAPTER SEVEN
Discriminating audiences: The politics of community in Talkabout,
User’s News and The Professional
Introduction
This chapter is concerned with how community health magazines are constituted as media counterpublics via the political interventions of magazine editors and the reflexive contributions of published reader letters. This analysis suggests that Talkabout, User’s News and The Professional construct ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) aimed at mobilising social change within an ethics of social responsibility for health. The first section of this chapter will consider how Wahl-Jorgensen’s typology of dialogist, activist and exhibitionist publicity can be used to productively interpret the explanations provided by magazine editors about their role in facilitating political action through their publications. The second section will identify three discursive repertoires common to both readers’ and editors’ explanations of the functions of each of these media counterpublics. The market repertoire highlights the economic functions of community media, investing audiences with the rhetorical capacity of consumer rights, whereas the identity repertoire focuses on the representational politics of community and the expert repertoire positions the reader and editor within an institutional framework of community expertise. This chapter concludes with a case study on editorial treatment of the solicitation of audience stories of discrimination.
‘It’s a balancing act’208: Editorial community interventions
Each of the three groups targeted by these health magazines – PLWHA, drug users and sex workers – are represented by community health organisations that have developed into social change movements. As Krug and Hepworth have observed, ‘what began as support and community lobby groups are now demanding larger shares in public health decision-making processes as they develop into more powerful and visible players in the public health field’ (1999: 103). Non-profit media have been an important vehicle in Australia for the communication of health promotion initiatives, designed to effect
155 behaviour change in order to reduce the risk of the transmission of HIV, hepatitis and related diseases. However, these media have developed into much more than health promotion, becoming central to the constitution of alternative models of community, and facilitating the development of politically radical identities. As Gillett has recognised, ‘...the use of media to create cultural spaces as a forum for those with marginalised or stigmatised identities has become a common feature of contemporary social movements’ (2003: 610). Although community health magazines prioritise audience participation as a remedy to the social exclusion facing marginalised audiences, this strategy also attempts to ‘responsibilise’ (Garland 2001: 125) imagined readers within a neoliberal ethics of self-care and self-development. Therefore, this chapter will argue that although the construction of media counterpublics evokes a radical politics of self-determination, these interventions are complementary to the neoliberal project of shifting of responsibility for social governance from a public to a counterpublic environment.
Community health magazines could be seen to prioritise a cultural rather than a material politics. That is, as Fraser (1995) might describe it, they are engaged within a politics of ‘recognition’ rather than ‘redistribution’. However, as this thesis is concerned with the political significance of audience participation, this distinction between the ‘hard’ politics of material change and the ‘soft’ politics of cultural change is seen to detract from the political significance of media symbolism. Instead, Warner’s description of counterpublics offers a more useful approach to the question of how community health magazines constitute marginalised audiences in order to achieve political transformation through cultural representation. As Warner explains: Like all publics, a counterpublic comes into being through an address to indefinite strangers. (This is one significant difference between a counterpublic and a community or group.) But counterpublic discourse also addresses those strangers as being not just anybody. They are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed not to want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene. Addressing indefinite strangers, in a magazine or a sermon, has a peculiar meaning when you know in advance that most people would be unwilling to read a gay magazine or go to a black church (2002: 120).
156 Although community health magazines are addressed to a public of ‘strangers’ (i.e., bigger than the circle of reader they ‘know’), they also imply that the readers are invariably ‘socially marked’ by their connection with these imagined counterpublics.
As suggested in chapter four, Wahl-Jorgensen’s typology of ‘modes of publicity’ (2001) makes some convincing distinctions between dialogist, activist and exhibitionist publicity. This section will consider how these three modes map onto the descriptions of media counterpublics given by magazine editors and in reader letters. However, it must also be recognised that this typology was developed in the context of commercial newspaper media and therefore may have limits in its usefulness in this quite different economic, social and political environment. Nonetheless, these magazine editors employ similar rhetorical strategies to those observed by Wahl-Jorgensen in commercial newspaper editors. The strategies employed by community magazine editors are here characterised as: 1) integrating a dialogist audience; 2) empowering an activist politics and 3) revealing an exhibitionist reader.
Integrating a dialogist audience
Drawing on Habermas, Wahl-Jorgensen writes that ‘...the mode of interaction in the dialogist public [is driven] by the ideal of dispassionate rationality and the pursuit of consensus’ (2001: 306). This mode is articulated in much theory on community, for example, in Friedland’s paper on ‘communicatively-integrated communities’, he writes: ‘...publics are necessary for the democratic discussion to rise above the level of small talk if problems are to be publicly formulated and resolved’ (2001: 359). And in a paper on the relationship between government and community media, Glaser et al state: ‘...the model of restoring community must necessarily include open and honest public debate of societal values and priorities’ (2001: 101). Community editors take a similar approach, prioritising the editorial responsibility to ‘...integrate a dialogist audience’. This involves blending disparate audiences into an imagined ‘whole’ so that each media counterpublic can function as a unified network of rational and autonomous actors.
The following passages are from interviews with a previous editor of Talkabout, a group of people involved with the production of The Professional and the current editor of User’s News. Each of these extracts illustrates the principles of dialogist publicity:
157 The Professional: because it’s a magazine that’s coming from workers, like, written for workers, it actually ends up not being what you might think, that workers need to know. It’s not all just about safe sex. It’s like, so much more – don’t you think? – it’s just so much more diverse and interesting ... I think there is an attempt to be inclusive, but it’s kind of a natural thing, because there is such a diversity of people that are involved with it.
User’s News: whoever writes a story or article, I do try to keep his/her voice. It’s not my voice, it’s their voice. I’ve tried to maintain a sort of a gender balance, but that’s determined by what comes in. I’m not going to put in a story just because it’s by a woman, or just because it’s by a man, for that matter. You know? If it’s a good story, I’ll put it in there. If that means I’ve got all men or all women, that might be it for that issue, you know, that may be how it turns out.
Talkabout: when I started it was all pretty much all-white, all-gay, all- young. When I left, I don’t think you could say that it had changed fundamentally, but there was a slight shift. There were more older people writing. There were more women writing. There were more straight men writing. There was, occasionally I could get a story out of the Multicultural HIV/AIDS Health Service ...
The first passage from The Professional interprets the magazine as ‘coming from’ and ‘written for’ sex workers as a synthesised group, asserting a dialogist egalitarianism between producer and consumer, editor and reader, community and audience. This passage also makes the paradoxical assumption that dialogism is both a philosophical choice (‘there is an attempt to be inclusive’) and an inevitable default (‘it’s kind of a natural thing’). In the second passage from User’s News, community media is interpreted as a space for the articulation of different experiences rather than singular political interests. Although the pro-active role of the editor is alluded to (‘I try to keep his/her voice’), agency is shifted onto the audience (‘It’s not my voice, it’s their voice’). The final passage from Talkabout contrasts an imagined monocultural past with an equally imaginary multicultural, dialogist future. It interprets the ideal of unmediated and direct participation by diverse audience members as central to the ‘space for all’ manifesto of dialogist publicity. One of the major dialogist strategies of this Talkabout editor was to increase the representation of HIV-positive women, and Figure 29 illustrates an example of such strategies at work: ‘...getting a pregnant woman naked on the cover was a big thing, and went down really, really well. That was probably my favourite issue’.
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Figure 29: Cover page theme ‘You’ve come a long way, baby: Women living with HIV’ (left) and ‘Community: A complex uncertainty [the experiences of women living with HIV]’ article (right), Talkabout November 2000
Empowering an activist politics
Wahl-Jorgensen describes ‘activist publicity’ as the attempt to empower and advance the social status of particular marginalised groups: In place of the unitary, singular public sphere, critics propose the idea of the ‘counterpublic’, consisting of subordinated groups that speak up in arenas of their own, using their own language ... [and] focusing on the achievement of activist goals as the locus of public action and interaction (2001: 4).
Activist publicity is common in political commentary that deals with notions of difference, change, and identity. For example, it is implicit within Triantafillou and Risbjerg’s description of ‘empowerment projects’, in which they ‘... seek to constitute beneficiaries as active and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own lives’ (2001: 63). This mode is used to explain the editorial responsibility to ‘empower an activist politics’. The verb ‘empower’ is defined as ‘...to provide with the means or opportunity’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2003) and has been central to the discourse of health activism (e.g., Kieffer 1984; Kar et al. 1999). This term was frequently used in these interviews to describe the editors’ function of advocating different forms of political agitation within the one community.
The following passages are examples of activist publicity, from the interviews with past or current editors of Talkabout, The Professional and User’s News:
159 Talkabout: I don’t think the role of community media is to shape the representation of that community. If the community is a deeply depressed community then you should bloody show it, because you need to make some political change there, and the only way you’re going to do it is if you show it.
The Professional: See A writes a lot of sort of ‘Inside the Industry’ tips. And then B will write social comment that is quite, like, radical. Like, some of the stuff that B’s written about what goes on at the strip clubs down the Cross, you think why are the Police not acting on this? You know, like it’s really radical stuff, really full-on stuff.
User’s News: the way that I approach the magazine is this: yes, it’s about health education, but part of health education is about self-esteem and community, and psychological, and mental and emotional health as well as physical health. And to the extent that this magazine can engender some of that, it is fulfilling its mission.
All three of these extracts demonstrate the editorial commitment to an ethics of media activism. The first passage from Talkabout refers to a debate about whether or not editors should deliberately construct affirmative representations of marginalised readers. This passage reveals an interesting ambivalence, as the editor resists occupying a position of political power (‘I don’t think the role of community media is to shape that representation’) despite a commitment to the political function of media representations. This passage also demonstrates a theme repeated throughout these interviews, which is that editors must attempt to channel the emotional experiences of their audiences into a form able to mobilise social change. The second passage from The Professional demonstrates an alternative view of activist representations, with the editor celebrating the activist potential of one contributor’s work. And in the final passage from User’s News, the use of the terms ‘engender’ and ‘mission’ suggest that reader participation is associated with a wider politics of social change. This embeds the description of a holistic physical, mental, emotional, psychological and community health within the ethics of media activism. User’s News has been particularly forthright in educating its audience to engage in effective forms of political activism, demonstrated in a series of articles on how to write letters to the editor (see Figure 30).
160
Figure 30: ‘Make some noise [Tips on how users can take part in the debate on drug law reform]’ article including ‘Sample letter’, User’s News Winter 2001
Revealing an exhibitionist reader
The newspaper editors interviewed by Wahl-Jorgensen prioritised an exhibitionist mode of publicity, implying a wider culture of exhibitionism. Wahl-Jorgensen suggests that this mode ‘...is distinct in its emphasis on the centrality of individual identity ... When we view the public realm as an expressive site, we turn the focus to the construction and perpetuation of individual subjectivity’ (2001: 5). This media focus on individual identity has been identified in research on television talk shows, radio talkback, and internet chatrooms (e.g., Orrego et al. 2000; Mandziuk 2001). However, narrative theory interprets exhibitionism as a form of ‘...story telling that enables healing, empowerment, and renewal of identity...’ (Rossing & Glowacki-Dudka 2001: 732), mirrored by the community media strategy of ‘revealing an exhibitionist reader’. However, this is not meant to imply that community media only accesses readers who behave or contribute in an ‘exhibitionist’ fashion. Rather, this strategy attempts to mobilise modes of exhibitionist disclosure in those who have conventionally been ‘silenced’.
Exhibitionist publicity was articulated when these editors interpreted the solicitation of ‘real’ stories as a politics of personal empowerment. The following passages are examples of exhibitionist publicity at work, beginning with Talkabout, followed by User’s News and The Professional:
161 Talkabout: But the stories that I was getting in ... Undoubtedly people had, ‘I’m HIV positive’ in the front of their minds. But they talked a lot about how that effected the way they operated in the world. So, their children, and their schooling, their friendships with people, how they interacted with people, how they interacted with utilities, shop-keepers, restaurants ...
User’s News: Being a person with HIV and Hep C, and all the other kind of shit that goes along with that, I’ve been through lots of medicine, lots of doctors, and lots of pills and lots of – and I just don’t think anybody’s got the last word about any damn thing. These things to me seem to be a matter of personal truth, so what I’m presenting in the magazine, I hope, is the kind of personal truths which may have a wider audience ... But I see my role as to present points of view. I don’t agree with everything that’s there either, but I’m there to facilitate points of view being seen and heard.
The Professional: I think the reason The Professional doesn’t get a lot of letters is because a lot of people are in denial. They don’t want to admit to themselves that they are doing that sort of work and there is a problem. They like to sort of go through and think, ‘Well, I’ll ride through this, it’s not an issue, I don’t want to bring it up’.
In the first passage, the Talkabout editor prioritises ‘unsolicited’ stories as the most authentic representation of counterpublic audiences, shifting attention from the political interests of the group onto the personal interests of the individual. In the second extract, the User’s News editor draws upon all three modes, synthesising a personal disclosure within an activist politics that is steadfastly committed to the social potential of dialogist representations. Disclosing a personal status as both HIV and HCV positive is interpreted as the founding principle of an editorial approach that prioritises exhibitionist or personal ‘truths’. And yet, this passage offers a dialogist solution to the problem of multiple and contradictory ‘exhibitionisms’. The editor suggests that multiple voices must be shared in order to achieve a civic harmony. Finally, in the third extract, a senior member of The Professional editorial committee talks about the difficulties in encouraging sex workers to contribute ‘exhibitionist’ narratives. This quote suggests that sex workers resist exhibitionism because of a ‘repressed’ self- stigmatisation, implying that ‘...those individuals who have the energy, time and motivation to become involved in programme activities may, in fact, not be supported by its members and may instead be considered as elites’ (Laverack & Wallerstein 2001: 180). Figure 31 illustrates some of the strategies that editors employ to solicit contributions from their audiences, demonstrating that exhibitionist participation may even be prioritised over other modes.
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Figure 31: ‘The SWOP Workshop [training new contributors]’ article with notice for ‘Upcoming Writing Workshop’ (left) The Professional Winter 2001; ‘Love to write?’ advertisement for PLWHA Writing Group (middle) and ‘Got a story to tell?’ request for reader contributions (right), Talkabout September-October 2000
Discussion
Magazine editors rarely articulate dialogist, activist or exhibitionist modes in isolation but instead, actively draw upon all three to optimise participation as a strategy for social change. But integrating all three modes is not simply a ‘natural’ response to the competing demands of counterpublic media production. Wahl-Jorgensen found that nearly all of the commercial newspaper editors interviewed prioritised exhibitionist publicity and while they had some respect for the fundaments of dialogism, they vehemently rejected activism as suspicious, manipulative and undemocratic. However, commercial newspaper production is an entirely different context and despite audiences being represented mainly through the exhibitionist genre of personal stories, these magazine editors demonstrated a greater commitment to a range of political responses.
‘Many shapes and forms’209: The market, identity and expert repertoires
The community reader letters and editor interviews included in this research drew upon three discursive repertoires that can be best described as the ‘market’, ‘identity’ and ‘expert’ repertoires. The term ‘repertoire’ is here taken to mean the set of interpretive frames culturally available to those participating in particular discursive environments, and constructed in dialogic competition between hegemonic norms and counterpublic vernaculars (Steinberg 1999). Similarly, reader letters negotiate these three repertoires
163 to construct a valid authorship position. These repertoires do not operate independently: they are necessarily complementary and simultaneous. Letters and interviews will often draw upon all three without appearing contradictory. The full results of this analysis are presented in Figure 32 but the main finding is that the market repertoire dominated, despite the very different function of consumer culture in these three media-produced counterpublics. The rest of this chapter will look in more detail at what is meant by each of these three repertoires, offering some examples from letters and editorial comments.
Figure 32: Discursive repertoires in community health magazine reader letters
The Professional 6 6 13 (n=25)
User's News (n=26) 14 11 1
Talkabout (n=59) 26 18 15
0 10203040506070 Number of letters
Market repertoire Identity repertoire Expert repertoire
Alternative media markets and the politics of community magazine advertising
Reader letters mobilise the ethics of consumer activism by drawing upon a ‘market’ repertoire. This repertoire is most explicitly articulated in letters dealing with issues about services and commodities available to PLWHA, sex workers or drug users, such as medical treatments, welfare services, and general consumer products. The following three letters illustrate this counterpublic appropriation of the market repertoire: Talkabout: You will be happy to know that after much thought, discussion with free-thinking human beings and the support of an excellent GP, I have started HIV treatments and I sing the praises of these individuals and the treatments themselves from the rooftops. However, I continue to fight the extremist dictates of those who would deny individuals the right to make their own decisions free from harassment.210
User’s News: I am putting a question out as to the quality and life of today’s heroin. Me, personally, I have used for 18 years and now more than ever I
164 feel like giving it away. I seem to get a taste and, unless I have a couple of cones, can’t seem to get that feeling. Is it just me, or has the gear changed from import to homebake with the GST?211
The Professional: Decisions, decisions again! My! My! My! How will dear old sweetheart Australians Democrat leader Meg Lees work out what to do with us and the GST? First of all are we classed as fresh meat and if we are not Australian made are we classed as an imported product? If we do outcalls are we in the taxable takeaway package of goodies? And what about us as a service industry? How will we be worked into the GST system if we let the clients do all the work? We then are not servicing them. They are servicing us!212
The first letter defends the consumer right to choose (or refuse) HIV treatments, whereas the second letter links economic changes to the quality of heroin available, and the final letter satirises the economy of sex work. Each prioritises consumption as a mandate for audience participation but the third letter is particularly interesting as it playfully subverts the normative definitions of market culture. The rest of this section will consider how this market repertoire is employed in reader letters and in interview extracts on the topic of community magazine advertising. Figure 33 reproduces a regular Talkabout column on financial management for PLWHA.
Figure 33: ‘Money’ column accompanied by commercial advertisements for community centre, medical practice and AIDS council (left) and commercial advertisements for an employment service and sexual health clinic (right), Talkabout September-October 2000
In Talkabout, letters that drew on the market repertoire covered the following topics: access to personal computers,213 returning to work after a period of illness,214 living on a pension,215 access to treatment trials216 and alternative therapies,217 community fundraising,218 HIV services in regional areas,219 changes to HIV clinical and support
165 service policy,220 facilities for positive people at gay and lesbian parties,221 HIV services for older people,222 and the standard of health ‘retreats’ for positive people.223
In the interview with an ex-editor of Talkabout, this repertoire played a dominant role in validating the economic functions of community media, including reconciling budget restrictions, targeting particular readership markets and engaging with new internet and e-mail technologies. Advertising is a critical function of any magazine and as these community magazines take on the production standard of the glossy lifestyle titles, they are also reconfiguring their audience as a potential source of revenue: There were people in the organisation that felt that there wasn’t a commercial imperative for people to advertise with us. But I disagreed very strongly and I felt that there was. That they were getting a very good result for their ad, and they could do it a lot cheaper with us, than they could with anyone else. And, they were directly linked with the target group.
This editor argues that advertisers can access a captive and loyal market of consumers by investing in this publication, and that consumers benefit from this arrangement by being drawn into an economic relationship that has been ‘screened’ for reliability. For this editor, the perceived benefits outweigh any moral commitment to resisting market forces (see Figure 33 for examples of paid Talkabout advertising).
In User’s News, reader letters that drew on the market repertoire addressed the following topics: bulk purchase of drug-using equipment,224 cheap disposal of used equipment,225 decriminalisation of heroin to standardise supply,226 price and value of rapid detoxification clinics,227 government policy on methadone programs,228 access to pain medication during drug withdrawal229 and access to rehabilitation services.230 Figure 34 illustrates a User’s News article on commercial rapid detox clinics, recommending greater consumer scepticism of such profit-driven services. The interview with the current editor of User’s News included discussion of many economic issues, including consumer rights to access reliable drug-user services and administering a payment system for reader contributions. User’s News is more interested in consumer marketing than consumer targeting and so this editor employed the market repertoire only to stress the importance of access to health services and general consumer information. This is apparent in the following interview extract about paid advertising: The question is, you know, who wants to advertise in a users magazine? Because users may not be a prime money-spending demographic. Drug
166 users wanna spend their money on drugs, not buying stuff from XX. I’m being facetious. So yes, I will accept ads from organisations that appear to be providing a service, a valuable, useful service, for our readers.
This extract establishes an ethical polarity between consumer services that are in the interests of drug users (e.g., syringes, pharmacies, HIV services) or in the interests of the market (e.g., rapid detox services). The remodelling of the User’s News audience as a consumer market is a necessary political strategy in the anti-drug climate of contemporary Australian law and policing policy. However, as Henderson and Petersen suggest: ‘The view that citizens should be consumers of health and health care, and that they do indeed conduct themselves as such, however, is by no means uncontentious or uncontested’ (2002: 1). The User’s News editor demonstrates such a contestation by acknowledging that the remodelling of drug users as consumers does not necessarily open up political opportunity: ‘They say they want drug users to be considered consumers along with everyone else. But they don’t often make many concessions to the views of drug-using health service consumers’. Figure 34 illustrates one of the few paid advertisements accepted in User’s News.
Figure 34: ‘No magic bullet: The private rapid detox clinics’ article (left) and commercial advertisement for pharmacy (right), User’s News Spring 2000
Finally, letters published in The Professional that drew on the market repertoire covered topics such as: providing free condoms to sex workers,231 working conditions in brothels,232 workplace exploitation by managers233 and consumer advice on safe sex.234 Figure 35 reproduces editorial and advertising for financial advice for sex workers.
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Figure 35: ‘GST ‘n Me’ article accompanied by commercial advertisement for home loan service (left), ‘Money, money, money’ article accompanied by commercial advertisement for sex industry insurance brokers (right), User’s News August-October 2000
Sex work is necessarily implicated within an economic discourse, since it is a consumer-led industry recently remodelled as a consumer service. The editor and Editorial Committee touched on this issue of approaching sex work as an industry at several points during our interview, particularly in discussions about the financial incentives of sex work, the ‘myth’ of strategic, ends-focused sex work opportunities, and economic exploitation in the sex work industry: ‘...even though the industry is legal now a lot of, sort of, exploitive practices still go on around bonds and fining girls, so they don’t get their proper wages and stuff like that’. Here, the editor positions the magazine as a source of information on worker’s rights, investing community media with the capacity to agitate for structural changes in the workplace. The following extract takes a similar line in discussing the SWOP policy on advertising: ... we do do advertising, but we’ve got a policy ... Here we are: Sex Workers’ Outreach Program can advertise projects; Other organisations can advertise services; General commercial enterprise will not be allowed to advertise any product or service. Now this has changed: if it is a service which we as the editorial committee deem to be, you know, beneficial, it can. So we’ve got XX condoms, we’ve got a professional insurance thing, but we don’t list commercial parlours and stuff like that.
This extract again establishes an ethical distinction between ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ consumer products and services. Interestingly, it also distances The Professional from the advertising strategy employed by Talkabout (i.e., pro-actively sourcing advertising revenue), explaining that advertising in this magazine is a reactive
168 concession to commercial interests rather than a deliberate attempt to capitalise on the sex worker market.
These three magazines demonstrate a critical shift in the conceptualisation of media- produced counterpublics as consumer markets. This illustrates that the market repertoire can be exploited for social activist purposes: The identity label ‘the consumer’ and the language of consumerism have proved useful to numerous groups in their efforts to make visible their claims of health disadvantage and to protect and advance their interests ... Thus, consumerism has a complex ‘double-edged’ character by providing (a) the basis for regulation over bodies and lives and obscuring, through its focus on the individual consumer, the need for social change; and (b) an identity label and language for (re)claiming rights for disadvantaged groups (Henderson & Petersen 2002: 4).
However, a necessary implication of the increasing dominance of the market repertoire is that the less ‘marketable’ facets of these counterpublic audiences will become increasingly difficult to represent. The following section will therefore consider how these communities are also constructed via the repertoire of cultural identity.
Representing the diverse cultural identifications of media counterpublics
Reader letters engage with representational politics by drawing upon an ‘identity’ repertoire which focuses on the cultural and self-identifications of magazine audiences. This repertoire is most explicit in letters dealing with issues of representation such as media stereotypes, ‘pride’ movements and cultural diversity. The following three letters draw upon the identity repertoire to examine the public representation of media counterpublics: Talkabout: Thou shalt not have hot, male, ‘porn’ – a winged guy wearing speedos is porn? – on the cover of Talkabout, thou shalt not rabbit on about gay men coz HIV/AIDS is not just about toxic queens, thou shalt, in fact, not reproduce any image of a healthy-looking bloke at all unless his sero-status is confirmed along with his treatment regimen on the apparent basis that the conjunction of ‘healthy-looking’ and ‘HIV positive’ is a contradiction in terms. Well, frankly – bullshit!235
User’s News: The reason I read User’s News is for the user’s stories, and so I can feel like there are other humans out there going through what I am. If I wanted to read patronising articles by screws and done doctors, I’d subscribe to the ‘Screws Weekly’ or the ‘‘Done Doctors Daily Planet’. It
169 seems that you guys are moving further and further away from your roots ... C’mon, guys, let’s get back to giving users a voice.236
The Professional: In the September issue of Cosmo, the ‘Cosmo Counsel’ climbed onto a very high pedestal before telling the general public’ ... in this day and age no sensible women wants to make love with a man who is sleeping with women who are, in turn, sleeping with countless men. Diseases are rampant and this is how they spread.’ ... I’m writing to you because I feel the issue is important, and ask your help to spread the message amongst the industry, that we are being stepped on again, and held responsible for the ills of society. 237
The first letter addresses media representations of HIV+ bodies, while the second argues for greater attention to the ‘voices’ of drug users and the third challenges mainstream stereotypes of sex workers. These letters assume that the public ‘performance’ of images of PLWHA, drug users and sex workers has a cultural and political effect which impacts the life experience of their audiences. It is interesting that the first two letters address representations in these counterpublic magazines whereas the final letter moves the debate outwards to address stereotypical representations in a mainstream women’s magazine. The rest of this section will consider how the identity repertoire is employed in reader letters from each publication and in interview extracts that address the issue of effectively representing diverse audience identifications.
In Talkabout, reader letters that negotiated the politics of identity addressed such topics as: terminology to describe the experience of living with HIV or AIDS,238 representational politics of local, community arts projects and events,239 support for the public disclosure of HIV+ status in regional areas,240 HIV discrimination within the gay and lesbian communities,241 stereotyped representations of positive bodies242 and PLWHA pride events.243 And in our interview, the Talkabout editor employed the identity repertoire when discussing the active encouragement of greater participation by marginalised groups, such as women and drug users, the empowerment of heterosexual men in the context of a primarily gay male HIV epidemiology and the social functions of personal ads for PLWHA. Figure 36 reproduces a Talkabout cover story about HIV+ participants in the Torch Relay held at the commencement of the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
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Figure 36: ‘Light up our lives’ cover and feature article [Contents blurb: Positive people are well represented in the Sydney Olympics torch relay], Talkabout September-October 2000
The following extract addresses the issue of determining how to best represent the diverse community of people living with HIV/AIDS in New South Wales: ... they were never quite clear whether they were gay or whether they were positive, that was the thing. So the demographic breakdown of the readership I would always do by sexuality, or gender ... Now it’s also transmitted by needles, I mean it’s bloodborne, so, you know, it’s needles and sex. Our readership, I felt, was pretty much on the sexually transmitted side. I never got a sense that it was on the user side ... So when people wrote it was very hard to tell whether they were writing as a positive person, or ... But I always felt like it wasn’t the health issues, it was the discrimination issues. That was more the issue, than the health.
First, this editor suggests that the demographics of the reading audience can be distinguished firstly by gender (positive men vs. positive women) and then by sexuality (gay PLWHA vs. straight PLWHA). This dynamic is problematised by the question of routes of HIV transmission, and so a further division is established (sexual transmission vs. needle transmission). This editor finds the question of transmission the most problematic issue in audience identification, and so resolves this issue through prioritising ‘discrimination’ as an exclusion common to all counterpublics. This supports Warner’s (2002) assertion that counterpublics are formed in self-awareness of exclusion from dominant publics.
In User’s News, reader letters that drew on the identity repertoire addressed the following topics: drug users in prisons,244 Aboriginality and drug use,245 shame and
171 stigma in illicit drug use,246 employer prejudice towards drug users,247 legal and social misunderstanding of young people who use illicit drugs248 and pride in the identity of a recovering addict.249 Figure 37 reproduces a User’s News article on drug users from an Asian background, focusing on culturally specific beliefs about withdrawing from a drug addiction.
Figure 37: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell: Listening to Asian-background users talk about detox’ article, User’s News Spring 2000
And in our interview, the current editor of User’s News discussed identity issues such as the difficulties of representing drug user ethnicities and attempting to incorporate party drug and poly-drug users into what has historically been an intravenous drug user publication. As this editor explained: ‘Drug users come in many shapes and forms ... We don’t all stand up and say, “Hey I’m a drug user”.’ These subjects are further problematised by the question of how editors access this ‘imagined’ audience: ... you’ve got lots of different lifestyles, lots of variations in behaviours and incomes and ... The only thing in common is that, you know, we all use illegal drugs. Is that enough to bind a community? I don’t know ... That’s why I try to get a lot of different perspectives in the magazine, because I assume I’ve got a very diverse audience. When we were at XX, we’d have people pulling up outside in Mercedes Benz’s to come and pick up their fits. Is this magazine going to speak to them?
This editor’s strategy is to assume that his readers identify primarily as drug users and are therefore most interested in the shared issues that face drug users rather than issues specific to different cultural identifications. What is most interesting about this passage, however, is that the editor concludes by suggesting that the only way to interpret audience identifications is to be able to physically ‘access’ readers as socially
172 performative beings. Thus, the position of editor is remodelled as one of spectatorship, in direct relation to the performative ‘realities’ of the drug user identity.
In The Professional, reader letters that drew on the identity repertoire addressed the following topics: the social difficulties facing sex workers attempting to leave the industry,250 observations of the international experiences of sex workers,251 sex worker stories shared from various Australian locations252 and petitions to government regarding sex worker discrimination.253 Figure 38 illustrates a cover story from The Professional which included the cultural background and life reflections of a local Sydney ‘sistagirl’ (transgender person of colour), in an attempt to broaden the representations of sex worker identities.
Figure 38: ‘Carmen: In full circle – the making of a lady [sistagirls column]’ cover and feature article, The Professional August-October 2000
In an interview with the current editor and members of the editorial committee for The Professional, identity issues were addressed in relation to the ‘closed publication’ policy and the international politics of sex worker organisations. This publication clearly prioritises a restricted circulation in order to facilitate the ‘safe’ development of sex worker pride. The following interview extract explains how the varied cultures within the sex worker community are negotiated in this context: ... we have, going from like young workers and people who are a more ‘zine kind of audience, and then you’ve your older workers and people who’d want more of a Woman’s Weekly type thing ... We’ve had different styles, for instance, like X edited for a while and that was a bit, kind of, grungy, ‘zine-y. And now C’s designed something that’s much more sophisticated ... but the audience is actually very diverse ‘cause it’s rural, it’s suburban
173 workers, it’s inner city workers, it’s transgender, Aboriginal and Islander, sistagirls, male workers, predominantly female workers, because of the demographic of the industry ...
In this extract, the editor suggests that audiences can be differentiated through their media preferences, age groups, ethnicities, geographical location, sexualities, gender identity and so on. However, the ‘problem’ of producing a magazine that represents all of these different identifications can only be resolved through an overarching commitment to ‘quality’ journalism and production values. The editor implies that the performance of the magazine, including design quality, can engage various audiences despite their many differences. This problematises the distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘community’ magazines by suggesting that audiences can identify with representations across different industries, including non-profit and mainstream commercial publications.
Negotiating ‘expert’ testimonials in media counterpublics
Reader letters engage with the politics of community development by drawing upon the discursive repertoire of expertise which positions the reader as either an ‘expert’ or a ‘novice’. The term ‘expert’ is used here to expand the definition from the traditionally venerated corpus of professional knowledge to include cultural expertise in which ‘ordinary’ people can also take on an expert role. Likewise, those conventionally invested with the authority of expertise in mainstream contexts can be reinscribed as ‘novices’ within counterpublic contexts. Declarations of expertise were distinctly identifiable in this research, particularly when letters were authored by community or government organisations. The following three letters illustrate the expert repertoire: Talkabout: ACON is committed to providing good service to people living with HIV/AIDS. ACON welcomes feedback from those who use our services. In particular, we are committed to listening carefully to complaints and taking action to correct problems where they exist. ACON has a formal complaints mechanism and we encourage clients to use it when they do not feel they have received appropriate service. 254
User’s News: My flatmate passed on a copy of User’s News to me – the prisons issue – which I really enjoyed. Makes a nice change to get a different lot of viewpoints, especially when I’m working on the ‘law and order’ side of things. I’ve passed the issue on to my colleagues and hopefully the information, especially the stuff on hepC, will prove useful to their work.255
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The Professional: Our experience is that infection rates have improved over recent years. This has led us to change our advice on the required frequency of sexual health check-ups. We now recommend that staff only require check-ups every one to three months. Monthly is more appropriate for newer staff ... Kind regards, Basil Donovan, Director, Sydney Sexual Health Clinic256
The first letter is written as an ‘expert’ response from an HIV/AIDS organisation to a previous letter about changes to HIV care services, whereas the second offers an external judgement of professional ‘approval’ of counterpublic media and the third is written as a kind of community press release, updating audiences in best medical practice. Each of these letters articulates an expert position to substantiate letter content rather than facilitate community membership. Instead, as Karpf has observed, ‘the very act of propaganding the audience about the need to change their habits reinforces their subordinate position as the objects of other people’s expertise’ (1988: 226). Although some magazine editors may also identify as community members, this does not necessarily influence their position as community experts. The rest of this section will consider how the expert repertoire is employed in reader letters from each publication and how magazine editors self-reflexively evaluate their own role as community experts.
In Talkabout, reader letters that drew on the expert repertoire were predominantly authored by representatives of HIV organisations, including the AIDS Council of New South Wales,257 the National Centre in HIV Social Research,258 PLWHA (NSW),259 Positive Heterosexuals,260 Western Sydney Positive Women’s Committee,261 the Australian Complementary Health Association,262 the NSW Department of Housing263 and international HIV and AIDS organizations.264 Some of the topics of these letters included: organisational responsibilities for HIV services and subsidies,265 community arts support,266 the history of the epidemic in Australia267 and in developing countries,268 and organisational support for PLWHA who inject drugs.269 Figure 39 demonstrates some of the content dedicated to ‘expert’ communications in Talkabout. These two pages include a ‘Dear Doctor’ column written by a local medical professional, summaries of international developments in HIV/AIDS medicine, behavioural recommendations for HIV+ people for the stressful Olympic period in Sydney and an
175 advertisement requesting nominations for the ‘World AIDS Day Awards’ in recognition of excellence in services and support for people with HIV/AIDS.
Figure 39: Treatment briefs and ‘Dear Doctor’ column (left), Community notice including ‘A PLWHA guide to the Olympics’ from the AIDS Council of New South Wales and NSW World AIDS Day Awards 2000, Talkabout September-October 2000
In the Talkabout interview, the expert repertoire was articulated in discussions about the community media industry, networks between community magazines in different sectors and HIV stakeholder community organisations and services. The following extract addresses how this editor negotiated the thorny issue of editing submissions from novice writers: People would write, because they were writing so honestly ... they would say just what they bloody well thought. And some of it was highly discriminatory ... just right dodgy, you know, like racist or sexist or whatever ... And there was no way that I was going to let sloppy writing get through, either. So, that was a touchy subject, because some people would just say, ‘Do whatever you like’, and I would edit the shit out of that. And always being very, very careful to keep their voice, because that’s the powerful thing, the voice.
This extract begins with the editor passing ‘expert’ judgment on ‘novice’ audiences who have contributed magazine content, suggesting a close association between lack of expertise and political incorrectness. This editor happily acknowledges the major influence of editorial style, but consistently prioritises the authentic ‘voice’ of her audience as an authority to which editorial expertise must be subsumed.
Interestingly, only one letter from User’s News drew upon the expert repertoire (reproduced in the introductory section) suggesting an editorial policy to exclude
176 ‘expert’ testimony from the genre of reader representations. However, the repertoire of expertise is still present in this magazine: Figure 40 demonstrates the many expert authorities to which audiences are directed and the frequent behavioural instructions published.
Figure 40: Community resources listings (left) and ‘Be Blood Aware’ hepatitis C prevention campaign (right), User’s News Spring 2000
Expertise was also a key topic in the User’s News interview, discussed particularly in relation to professional affiliations with other community magazines and the workplace interactions between editor and editorial board. The following extract addresses how this expert role is negotiated in relation to competing standards for written communications and print media: Literacy is an issue. That’s something I’ve had debates about with people ... Because at various times I’ve been accused of ‘dumbing’ the magazine down, or alternately, making it too ‘intellectual’ ... I read quite a lot, but I’m sufficiently ignorant of so many things that I’m a pretty good test case, right? So if it doesn’t sort of get me the first time, if I have to go back and read it again, then I think there’s something wrong there. And in this magazine you should not have to go back and read something again ... on the whole [laughs].
This extract suggests that the problem of literacy dissolves the distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ in the context of community media. The editor attempts to find a happy medium that is neither too ‘dumb’ nor too ‘intellectual’ for his audience. And the editor’s own position as a media expert is tempered by a disclaimer of ignorance in an attempt to locate a workable middle point between these two extremes.
177 The Professional published many more letters that drew upon this repertoire, including letters that addressed: expert medical advice for sex workers,270 sex worker liaison within the police,271 the coordination of a sex worker float in the Mardi Gras parade272 and innovative administration and security procedures within brothels.273 Figure 41 reproduces two ‘expert’ columns including medical and legal advice for sex workers, and the provision of detailed instructions on the safe use of contraceptive devices.
Figure 41: ‘Doctor Wendy’ health column and ‘Judge Rudy’ legal column (left) and ‘The femidom files [Your questions answered]’, The Professional August-October 2000
In The Professional interview, the expert repertoire was employed in relation to the functions of the editorial committee, liaisons with sex industry ‘experts’, brothel managers, strip club managers and so on, negotiating government censorship and developing community-led and institutionally sanctioned sex worker policies. This repertoire can also be seen in the following interview extract: ... it’s supposed to be exclusive and it’s supposed to be, you know, sort of, another way of supporting workers. And it is frustrating when you do think it’s getting, it’s going to the, like, to somebody that is not from that community. So that can be really frustrating. Like maybe going to – because it’s a closed publication and is supposed to be going to workers – like, ends up going to health professionals, or university students ... Maybe it doesn’t make a big difference, but it’s actually just kind of ... It’s so funny, I think we all feel very protective in a lot of ways, about The Professional, as well. Like it’s a very ‘loved’ magazine! [laughs]
Many different notions of expertise are negotiated in this extract from a staff member involved in the production of The Professional. This person is particularly interested in justifying the ‘closed publication’ policy by arguing that opening up access would close down the politics of community. Excluded from the zone of complicity are both ‘health
178 professionals’ and ‘university students’, a deliberate critique of the ethics of conducting social research on The Professional. However, a withdrawal of the full implications of this challenge (‘maybe it doesn’t make a big difference’) shifts the critique towards cultural ‘experts’ in general: ‘we all feel very protective in a lot of ways’.
Discussion
In many ways, the market, identity and expert repertoires are mutually supportive, representing different stakes in these media-produced counterpublics. Talkabout published a similar number of letters that employed each repertoire, suggesting that not only have PLWHA been constituted as an economic market but that they have also been developing a politics of community identity. In some ways, this may also be related to the high number of ‘expert’ letters published in this magazine, since there are considerable stakes that expert individuals and organisations hold in the development of both the market and identity repertoires in relation to HIV/AIDS in Australia. Letters to User’s News were dominated by the consumer topics of drug markets and user services but there was also an increasing presence of the repertoire of the ‘drug user’ identity and the beginnings of a culture of user pride. However, there was only one letter written from a position of expertise, suggesting an editorial policy to exclude voices of authority from what is explicitly regulated as a ‘user’ publication. It is interesting to observe, then, that The Professional was distinguished by a disproportionate presence of the expert repertoire, although this over-representation can be partly explained by the high rate of letters that came from one particular reader who used the letters page as a forum for social advocacy, writing long and complex manuscripts about the legal, political and economic dimensions to sex work. 274
Case study: Profound discrimination and bad poetry
One of the key themes of reader letters in these three community health magazines is ‘discrimination’, particularly institutional (e.g., medical professionals, employers) and social (e.g., lovers, friends, family). This theme founds the philosophy of empowerment that is both explicitly and implicitly deployed in the interviews with these magazines’ editors and so this chapter will conclude with a case study on the topic of the representation of discrimination. Reader letters offered many examples of the
179 experience of discrimination and often these narratives advocated for a more collective response to medical and social inequality, in order to open up the ideal of neoliberal self-actualisation to all. However, the editorial evaluation of discrimination was in some ways dependent on the forms in which that discrimination was described. In particular, editors drew a clear distinction between adequate and inadequate modes of textual expression, in which narrative forms of public self-reflection were encouraged and ‘bad poetry’ was not. The notion of quality in textual self-representation was surprisingly prevalent in the editorial interviews and thus, must be read as indicative of the particular politics of community empowerment prioritised by these editors. Perhaps, indeed, this has influenced the choice of reader letters published in these magazines, and thus, the narratives of discrimination analysed in this case study.
Talkabout published several reader letters on the topic of discrimination, however, only one of these directly addressed the issue of HIV-related stigma or social discrimination. This letter advocates for PLWHA who live west of the central Sydney area who, it is claimed, face a double-discrimination from society at large and from the HIV service organisation that is funded to represent them: ‘Positive people face the same discrimination and issues, no matter where they live. The community in the west will not continue to swallow the smooth talk of ACON bureaucrats telling them how much they are doing for them’.275 All of the other accounts of discrimination in Talkabout letters relate to different forms of social exclusion, including gender discrimination against positive women: I believe women don’t get the same support as men in relation to HIV. When I went to my doctor to let him know I was going on the KM1 trial he said ‘oh, you had better stay in touch as you will get sick!’ I beg to differ and ask why, when I went on AZT for just two months, didn’t he say this, as the headaches and vomiting were unbearable. But then my doctor said it was okay. Maybe for him, but not for me.276
This letter implies that individuals cannot be held responsible for their own health care, since wider social forces such as gender discrimination will impact on equitable access to health services. A similar approach is taken in another Talkabout letter that attempts to defend alternative approaches to HIV therapy, in this case, non-pharmaceutical treatments: I continue to fight the extremist dictates of those who would deny individuals the right to make their own decisions free from harassment ... I
180 have experienced first hand discrimination in attempting to access a service from an employee and adamant treatments fascist of a community service organisation ...277
This letter argues that discrimination against unconventional medical therapies is strongest within the HIV/AIDS community itself and takes a firmly consumerist position in order to ‘empower’ this reader with the consumer right to think differently about medical beliefs.
Another Talkabout letter focuses on the ‘hypocritical’ discrimination against HIV- positive and gay injecting drug users: There was a session for positive people who inject at the National Association of People with AIDS Conference in November 1996 ... The stories told by people at the session focused on examples of prejudiced treatment by GPs, clinics and various government departments. Others talked about userphobic comments and attitudes of people they met in bars and clubs. Although it was hardly surprising that the main concern raised was the discrimination they face in their daily lives, it was disheartening to hear that some of this discrimination, perhaps the hardest to take, is coming from within their own communities. In the gay community this discrimination is often hypocritical: drug use is condoned, even smiled at, unless those drugs are injected ... This is not a demand for preferential treatment, it is simply a call to acknowledge that these people are deserving of inclusion in our existing community health programs and that discrimination in all its forms only works to prevent this ... Community Legal Centres in NSW are advocates for law and policy reform who can help you to take action when you are discriminated against. They can help you direct your complaints to the right person, tell them what happened (the right way), and argue for what you would like done about it ... Challenge and report discrimination when it happens!278
The notion of discrimination in this letter hinges on an assumption about the politics of community. It argues that discrimination against injecting drug users is hypocritical because of the widespread use of party drugs in the gay community, assuming that the gay community itself can be described as a singular, bonded entity. This letter makes broad connections between ‘userphobic’ medical professionals, government departments and everyday citizens and concludes with a general statement of empowerment, encouraging those who have experienced discrimination to take legal action to defend their rights. This suggests that the complex forms of stigma experienced by injecting drug users might be able to be challenged through legal action
181 against those who are officially prohibited from acting in discriminatory ways: medical and public service professionals.
The Talkabout interview described discrimination by focusing on individual cases of social exclusion as barriers to PLWHA opportunities for self-development and quality of life. The following extract describes this editor’s evaluation of unsolicited reader contributions: I got a lot of unsolicited stories about how they got it, discrimination, how it had changed their lives ... They were the unsolicited stories I got. Love, I got a lot of stories about love, and I reckon that just feeds straight back into discrimination, and feeling like you’re a leper, you know, or an outcast.
This passage suggests that discrimination fuels an audience desire to reflect on private experiences in a public forum, to make sense of life with a chronic and communicable disease. Discrimination is contrasted to the ideal of ‘love’, suggesting that social exclusion works in direct contradiction to the normative prerequisites of a happy and ‘fulfilled’ life. This editor also suggested that some PLWHA experience self- discrimination, compounding the effects of social intolerance: And in the straight community there is some really heavy discrimination going on, and a lot of self-discrimination going on. And the gay community has sort of been through that internalized homophobia. And gotten over it, you know? But the straight community hasn’t, so it’s very new. So there is a lot of internalized discrimination amongst straight guys and I don’t think so much amongst straight women, but amongst straight guys, there’s heaps.
This quote assumes a linear pattern to social discrimination, in which fear and ignorance about a ‘new’ health condition such as HIV/AIDS is believed to inevitably fade with time. The evidence for this is drawn from the notion of self-discrimination (perhaps relating to popular notions of ‘internalised homophobia’), arguing that homosexual men have had time to develop a sense of pride or, at the very least, acceptance, of HIV- status, whereas heterosexual men are still attempting to come to terms with a stigmatised illness. Interestingly, ‘straight women’ are seen to have less of an issue of self-discrimination, which in itself suggests that the problem of straight men accepting their HIV-status is somehow related to social expectations of masculinity or machismo.
Two User’s News letters dealt with the issue of discrimination. Unlike the Talkabout letters, both were specifically concerned with discrimination against the presumed
182 audience of this magazine: illicit drug users. However, the social context of the two narrative descriptions differ significantly. The first letter describes discrimination against drug users in gaol, signified by a ban against prisoner’s reading User’s News: ‘It seems the magazine is being discriminated against because of all that good information and advice on drug addiction and drugs in itself’.279 This letter represents the legal difficulties of advocating for illicit drug users when the social discrimination they experience reflects the legal and political prohibition of drug use. The second letter takes this further, arguing that even drug users who move on from their ‘illegal’ behaviours are subject to the same social discrimination: Have you ever felt discriminated against by the so-called straight people in ‘society’? I have used various drugs for the past twenty years. During the last four years, since I have been on methadone, I have been the victim of more prejudice than I can believe possible in this so-called enlightened society. When applying for a job, if the truth is told to the potential employer, the attitude change is obvious as soon as drug use or hep (hepatitis status) is disclosed. This treatment is more soul destroying than if they just said piss off, we don’t want you. Instead it is the old case of sorry, you are not qualified, or over qualified, or even, we’ll call you. Appearance is not given any consideration. One could go to an interview in an Armani suit but tell the truth and you are shitcanned without further discussion. As far as the police are concerned, they are one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. If a cop asks if you have been in trouble and you admit it, they go out of their way to make you feel like shit. IS IT ANY WONDER USERS DON’T DISCLOSE THEIR PAST, WHY WOULD ANY SENSIBLE PERSON INVITE A KICK IN THE TEETH.280
This letter describes the overwhelming conviction that drug users, or even ex-users, will face lifelong discrimination that restricts them from engaging in the ‘normal’ functions of contemporary citizenship, such as getting a job. This letter suggests that drug users will not be forgiven past behaviours simply because of the desire to take part in mainstream society. Instead, the drug user identity is seen to be permanently ‘tainted’ by the social stigmas against injecting drug use. This letter also suggests that the disclosure of hepatitis status will negatively compound this stigma and further contribute to the exclusion of drug users from normative society.
The editor of User’s News interprets his role as one of facilitating social change, particularly in regards to the social representations of drug users: ‘I’m trying to get more participation out there, to change the notion of, you know, what constitutes a drug user, because the mainstream media profile is usually negative and uninformed’.
183 Interestingly, this account of discrimination against drug users also employed a linear model of social change and invoked a singular image of the ‘gay community’ as a standard against which user discrimination could be judged: Other people may have different views about this, but it seems to me, as if the drug-using community’s kind of where the gay community was about 10- 15 years ago in terms of wanting to ‘come out’.
I haven’t actually solicited articles specifically dealing with gay and lesbian, transgender, bisexual issues. That’s an interesting subject, I think, because, I’m not sure how those people identify. Whether they identify first as being gay and lesbian and then drug users, or drug users and then gay and lesbian. From the stuff I’ve read, I get the feeling that, certainly in the past, if you were a drug using gay man or lesbian, it was much easier to be accepted within the drug using community as a gay or lesbian, than it was to be a drug user and be accepted in the gay and lesbian community.
The first of these quotes assumes that it is possible to juxtapose a drug-using community against a gay community and yet the second quote problematises this distinction, acknowledging the possibility of gay and lesbian drug users as a unique population subject to another set of discriminations. The editor evokes a hierarchy of stigma, in which drug users are seen to experience a greater level of discrimination than ‘gay and lesbian’ people and thus suggesting that gay and lesbian people are more likely to find community acceptance in the drug using community, than vice versa. Here then, the definitions of community become flexible, subject to greater forces of social and political bias than simply cultural identity.
Although many of the reader letters in The Professional deal with issues of workplace mistreatment,281 they are less concerned with discrimination and more focused on workers’ rights. However, two letters were specifically concerned with exposing social and legal discrimination against sex workers, on the basis of the stigma associated with this profession. The first of these extracts describes a media story that published the name and address of a local ‘prostitute’ who had been charged with robbery for ‘stealing’ money from a client who had refused to pay for sexual services provided: 1) Why was she refused bail? 2) Why wasn’t the 68 year old man charged with theft? 3) Why print her name and address in The Telegraph, and not the old mans name and address? 4) Why label her a prostitute and him not a sexual pervert!? ... Doesn’t she have any rights as a person at all? WHERE IS THE JUSTICE?282
184 This letter effectively exposes some of the presumed injustices experienced by sex workers as a result of police discrimination. In particular, the hypocritical tolerance of clients in comparison to the overt demonisation of sex workers demonstrates some of the complex ways in which social stigma operates in this domain. The following letter explains, in a similar way to the letter from User’s News, that this kind of stigma ‘lingers’ whether or not the individual attempts to adopt a normalised lifestyle: I’m attempting to leave the sex industry and am finding it increasingly difficult, because on a mental and emotional level there is virtually no-one but the counsellors at SWOP to encourage you and discuss things with. This is one of the most difficult transitions to make back into the real world and workforce of the straight world, especially without adequate support. (Let’s face it, people in the straight world just wouldn’t understand.) Therefore I would love it if other girls in the same situation would like to meet perhaps once a month possibly at SWOP, just to discuss what we’re going through and act as a support network for each other.283
This letter draws upon the potential for a collective response to social exclusion, exaggerating the transformative objectives of this counterpublic in order to make social discrimination seem less threatening. Both this and the letter from User’s News on employer discrimination described normative publics as ‘straight’, suggesting that Warner’s model of publics and counterpublics may in fact be experienced as a distinction between ‘straight’ publics and ‘bent’ counterpublics.
A similar definition of discrimination was articulated in The Professional interview, linking social discrimination and workers’ rights more closely associated than in the reader letters. For example, the following was a response from an Editorial Committee member to a question about the purpose of The Professional: I think it’s to connect, with other sex workers, and to keep them updated with what’s going on in the industry ... And to let them know that they’re not alone, and it’s not a job where they feel like, that they’re living on the edge of society and they’ve got no-one to help them, or ... Just to feel like they’re recognised as a professional, I think ... And it’s good to have a magazine about us, because there’s so many people out there that’ve said to me, ‘Oh, why don’t you get a normal job’. What’s a normal job?
This extract relates ‘industry’ politics to ‘identity’ politics, suggesting that education about workers’ rights will directly influence pride in the sex worker identity, which can also contribute to social changes in discriminatory attitudes. The Professional is seen to function as a space for the negotiation of these two issues as a simultaneous project of
185 empowerment: ‘There is a lot of unfair dismissal in this industry, but it all sort of gets hushed-up, because no-one wants to expose themselves as a sex worker. So this is perhaps the only outlet some people have to express themselves’.
However, as stated in the introduction to this case study, the forms in which people are permitted to express themselves in community magazines are not as flexible as the political approach might suggest. In fact, there is a clear hierarchy of textual representations that prioritises journalistic descriptions of personal narratives over the more ‘trivial’ and certainly less respected genre of poetry. This issue was touched on in the following exchange during The Professional interview:
B: Not everybody can write. It’s very hard to sit down and write an article, on any subject ... A: I wasn’t the best writer before I started doing this, this has improved my writing. I was just doing poetry. B: I’ve met women who’ve tried to write an article, or write something, and they can’t because they cannot ... But they could be expert on other things. I had a few friends in the sex industry and they’re nail technicians. When it comes to actually typing out their thoughts, they can’t do it!
This extract demonstrates that the politics of empowerment prioritised in The Professional is subsumed to the greater authority of ‘quality’ writing. That is, although the audience is encouraged to contribute in any way they can, these contributions are in fact subject to strict regulation. These two Editorial Committee members are reflecting on their own experiences of being ‘trained’ as writers through their involvement with The Professional and yet, even though they are committed to the idea of an open and inclusive policy of audience representation, they still discriminate against those without the necessary skills in media writing.
This textual ethics was even more explicit in the interviews with the Talkabout and User’s News editors. Both were emphatically opposed to the publication of sub-standard writing, and were particularly repulsed by what they both described as ‘bad poetry’. As the Talkabout editor explained: ‘ ... there’s nothing worse than bad poetry, and you know, poetry has got its place in personal development and it should stay there. So anyway, I banned poetry’. This quote suggests that although community health magazines are committed to the ‘personal development’ of their readers via education
186 and participation, the extent of this politics was limited by the priorities of the medium: this editor was not willing to lower journalistic standards to incorporate what might otherwise be an honest and ‘authentic’ attempt at self-representation. The User’s News editor explained a similar policy in much greater detail: I get a lot of poetry. I think I’ve published one poem. You know, people tend to write poetry when they’re really down and depressed ... But, you see, this is one of the interesting things about this audience. It’s horrible when you’re hanging out, but that’s when people want to write poetry! [laughs] And frankly, I don’t want to publish that kind of stuff, not because it’s about hanging out, but because it’s usually about how miserable my life is, in iambic pentameter. It’s a balancing act. Being a drug user is often very hard, in the circumstances in which one is forced to use. And harder for users of some drugs, more than others, I think, too. On the whole, I will try to steer away from ‘poor me’ stories. I’d rather have someone who says, ‘Poor me, I’m gonna do something about it’. Rather than, ‘Poor me, I’m gonna sit here on my arse and stay here’.
The resistance to poetry suggests that the politics of community media is premised on an assumption that the emotional experiences of audiences are only valuable when channelled into normative genres of communication. This final quote also articulates a clearly neoliberal interpretation of the utility of narrative. This editor encourages narratives of self-improvement and the mobilisation of individual agency, and actively discourages narratives of dislocation and the incapacity to act.
Seemingly related to this rejection of poetry is an almost complete absence of representations of the visceral, transgressive and pleasure-based character of these three communities. This is interesting, since these missing representations are very much present in the commercial magazines, which are far more interested in appealing to both the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ embodied citizen of the new public health: Against the ideal of the highly controlled ‘civilised’ body/self is the discourse which valorizes escape from the bonds of control and regulation, expressing a hankering after the pleasures of the ‘grotesque’ body, the body that is more permeable and open to the world. This discourse rejects the ideal of the disembodied rational actor for an ideal of the self that emphasizes sensual embodiment and the visceral and emotional flights produced by encounters with danger, of ‘walking on the wild side’ (Lupton 1999c: 149)
Perhaps the purposeless meanderings of ‘bad poetry’ and the sensual embodiments of pleasure are seen to distract from the counterpublic objective of achieving ideal
187 citizenship status for these marginalised audiences. By prioritising an image of the self- reflexive, self-regulating and self-improving community reader, these editors directly contribute to the reification of an advanced liberal politics of citizenship.
Conclusion
This chapter was concerned with the editorial ‘discrimination’ of community magazine audiences within a politics of community empowerment. These three magazines are produced for audiences that have only quite recently become ‘organised’ as social movements. As Hamilton has argued, ‘...what matters to political movements today is how alternative media are organised and how they might organise social movements through innovations in cultural form’ (2000: 373). Whereas commercial magazines restrict audience involvement to the genre of letters-to-the-editor, community magazines pro-actively engage their audience to participate through co-producing the media and contributing narrative texts in the form of journalistic articles, drawings and so on. The beginning of this chapter suggested that magazine editors interpret their function as community facilitators through the blending of three distinct but complementary modes of audience participation: dialogist, activist and exhibitionist publicity (Wahl-Jorgensen 2001). Editors and reader letters also drew upon the three discursive repertoires of markets, identities and expertise when commenting on or contributing to, their various communities. These magazines attempt to empower audiences with a sense of the responsibility required of advanced liberal citizenship whilst simultaneously mobilising those audiences to engage in social change. Thus, strict expectations of the forms of audience participation are put into place to ensure that audiences are represented in a politically salient fashion.
188 CHAPTER EIGHT
Conclusion
Reader letters cannot be used simply to ‘decode’ audience or editorial interests nor are they a technology for measuring media publics. Reader letters do not transparently indicate trends in consumer behaviour nor activate mass social change. However, reader letters do contribute to the construction of politically and commercially salient models of imagined audiences and thus are critical to the functioning of magazines as modes of public address. They also contribute to the circular constitution of a media mandate, performing ‘publics’ to justify the ongoing production of media industries. This thesis has explored what reader letters do in the context of a new industry such as health media, suggesting that the examination of how letters function might suggest a few things about why they are useful to the advanced liberal mode of social and political governance. As Ang has argued, ‘...studying media audiences is not interesting or meaningful in its own right, but becomes so only when it points towards a broader critical understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary culture’ (1996: 4). Three sets of cultural politics have been identified as being ‘at stake’ in health magazine reader letters: the de-collectivisation of health, the utility of media consumption and the embodiment of citizenship. This concluding chapter will consider how these cultural politics were negotiated by the reader letters examined in this thesis and how this might contribute to the interdisciplinary study of health media.
What Doel and Segrott have termed the ‘de-collectivisation of health care’ (2003: 142) could also be described as the individualisation of responsibility. Both commercial and community health magazines are concerned with emphasising the personal obligation to avoid becoming sick or disabled, constructively framed as the optimisation of health and vitality. However, if health is claimed as a personal responsibility then behavioural difference can be evaluated as civil irresponsibility. This theme was most apparent in the analysis of corporeality claims in chapter four, which found that although the commercial letters employed the greatest range of claims, this included a disproportionately high number of ‘improving health’ claims (21%), particularly in Men’s Health (36%). This suggests that media participation for commercial health magazine audiences is regulated via an ethics of self-improvement, monitored against
189 the ideals of physical health promoted in magazine content. However, the community magazines published more claims of a ‘serious condition’, ‘temporary condition’ or ‘health profession’, suggesting a different treatment of the notion of individual responsibility. Commercial health magazines assume that their audiences are already healthy and thus require advice on how to increase the effectiveness of their current self-improvement behaviours. However, the non-profit publications assume that their audiences are ‘compromised’ physically, economically, socially or politically and so require advice on how to engage in mainstream society. Thus, in the context of non- profit health media, the de-collectivisation of health care may in fact inspire the re- collectivisation of community action.
Forms of media re-collectivisation were apparent across all six magazines examined in this thesis. For example, chapter four described the fan collectives established in committed readership claims and the sharing of private stories with imagined audiences in exhibitionist genres. In some ways, these structures of participation can be seen to contribute to the development of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ social capital (Putnam 2000), particularly in establishing connections and increasing knowledge around compromised corporealities, including the blending of personal experience and medical expertise. Chapters five and six focused on gendered modes of re-collectivisation, including the construction of an imagined community of Men’s Health readers bound together as an authentically localised model of masculinity. The two women’s health magazines were more focused on establishing horizontal connections between readers through genres such as women’s pathographies and pragmatic information sharing and promoting positions of dissent in relation to conventional biomedical approaches to health care and the public representation of women’s health experiences. And finally, chapter seven focused on the unique forms of re-collectivisation represented in reader letters to community health magazines. Each of these counterpublic magazines attempts to mobilise active citizenship in those readers excluded from mainstream society. This included the articulation of a market repertoire in order to facilitate participation in a market economy as well as the formation of alternative cultural identifications and the development of a culture of community expertise.
190 Commercial health magazines are packaged as ‘good for you’ and thus, by implication, as morally superior to other forms of popular media. This theme of media utility is closely related to the self-care obligations of advanced liberalism, in that the consumption of health media is seen to involve a deliberate investment in the self, satisfying both health-improving and pleasure-seeking desires. However, media utility was equally as prevalent in the community magazines, which are marketed as more ‘useful’ to their readers than commercial media. Reader letters in all six magazines were organised around the issue of how each publication could (or should) remain pure of ‘corrupting’ influences, to ensure that health is consistently prioritised over commerce, vanity or politics. So, in chapter six, it was seen that Men’s Health letters were concerned with negotiating the spectre of cosmetic narcissism in relation to the new expectations of masculine physicality. The ‘authenticity’ of men’s bodies was deployed as an incontestable virtue at risk of corruption by the commerce of media globalisation. From this perspective, men’s body hair removal can be seen to operate as a pivotal problem around which the utility of health media is negotiated. The removal of men’s body hair provocatively expands the parameters of the ‘virtuous’ by insisting that a purely cosmetic fashion can operate as a central defining feature of the attainment and performance of ‘health’.
However, this paradox of cosmetic health was far less contested in the women’s magazines, where the purity of being and becoming ‘well’ was seen to be enhanced rather than compromised by an ethics of consumer choice, beauty and idealised femininity. Thus, the model of the cosmetic consumer could sit happily alongside those of the dissenting, pragmatic and public consumers, as though all four models were equally committed to health as a pure and uncontested virtue. But perhaps the most ambivalent interpretation of the utility of media consumption was evident in the non- profit health magazines, which promotes media utility for audiences excluded from both popular notions of ‘good’ health and legal and political definitions of ‘good’ citizenship. So in the context of counterpublic health movements, the utility of media consumption becomes one of translating media effects into political outcomes. It is perhaps for this reason that the community magazine editors demonstrated such a vehement opposition to publishing reader poetry. That is, while journalistic accounts of exclusion were
191 interpreted as politically ‘useful’, poetic explanations of the emotional experience of that discrimination were seen to undermine the utility of community health media.
Health magazines redefine the cultural functions of print media within an advanced liberal framework of care for the self which prioritises the embodiment of citizenship as a simultaneously private and public endeavour. Chapter four concluded that exhibitionism has become the primary mode of participation in health magazine reader letters, which clearly suggests that the previously ‘disembodied’ character of letters-to- the-editor has been modified through a combination of editorial and — perhaps — audience interests in material explanations of subjectivity. So rather than contribute rhetorical pieces that employ dialogist reasons or activist demands, both commercial and community health magazines were more likely to publish narrative tales about the physically and socially embedded nature of ‘real-life’ citizenship. However, the commercial magazines published far more of these letters than the non-profit publications, suggesting that social discrimination still restricts the capacity of counterpublic audiences to feel ‘empowered’ to disclose a marginalised version of embodied citizenship. Supporting this conclusion is the phenomenon of ‘extra- nomination’ in Men’s Health reader letters. In this context, the cultural identity of white, urban, professional, heterosexual masculinity is explicitly declared or marked out rather than being assumed as the ‘ex-nominated’ (Barthes 1973; Hartley 1994) default position. But rather than implying that these demographic characteristics have somehow lost their symbolic authority, this extra-nomination is more likely a strategy of ‘claiming’ the new and unfamiliar territory of men’s magazines, in order to normalise this genre within the conventions of hegemonic masculinity.
In any case, all six of these health magazines published letters that prioritised the corporeal and embodied nature of contemporary citizenship. Men’s Health letters demonstrated this in the most extreme fashion by reacting to the socially provocative representation of ‘everyday’ men’s bodies as visceral, malleable, perfectible, pleasurable and desirable. Good Medicine and Nature & Health letters were more concerned with the consumer ethics of corporeality and yet were nonetheless centred on how these ethics embody women’s everyday lives. Thus, questions about how to consume, act, plan, behave, advise and so on become focused around the presentation of
192 the female body as a gendered performance of civic duty. And finally, the community health magazines reordered stigmatised corporealities by claiming public space for the representation of ‘deviant’ bodies. Thus, the body that lives with HIV or AIDS, the body that engages in the illicit consumption of pleasurable drugs and the body that takes part in sex work, is mobilised as a contemporary expression of counterpublic citizenships.
So, health magazines are interesting as a form of media that contributes to the ongoing negotiation of the social meanings of health but they are also symptomatic of wider cultural, political and economic changes. Returning to Fairclough’s ‘three-dimensional conception of discourse’ (1992: 73) this thesis has focused on media representations, expanding the analysis of reader letters from the level of ‘text’ to that of ‘discursive practices’ by including editorial comments on the production, dissemination and consumption of magazines. However, several other ‘discursive practices’ are missing from this research which has somewhat limited the theoretical speculation that can now be made about how health magazines relate to ‘social practices’. In particular, three approaches are conspicuously absent from this research: content and discourse analyses of general health magazine content (rather than letters), empirical analysis of media production and reception strategies, and theoretical analyses of relevant government policy changes. Although this thesis has touched on these areas, further investigation of the content, audience and policy context of health magazines could offer significant contributions to the interdisciplinary study of health media.
It would be interesting, for example, to examine commercial health magazine content over time, to consider how this new industry develops in relation to consumer and advertising demands. This research would also be enriched by a deeper investigation of the production of health magazines, including observations of how editorial decisions are made in relation to magazine staff, contributors and advertisers. And although this thesis has negotiated the ‘spectre’ of the audience by situating reader letters at the level of representation rather than reception, these media are produced in order to be consumed and thus, there are many remaining questions about the relationship between imagined and ‘real’ magazine audiences. Focus groups with health magazine readers could shed light on how this new and provocative form of media is being used by
193 different groups of people and would be particularly interesting as a comparative interrogation of the presumed differences between commercial and ‘community’ consumers. In terms of the policy context, an analysis of government policy on health responsibility could deepen the speculations made in this thesis. For example, in 2000 the Australian federal government introduced ‘Lifetime Health Cover’, a policy ‘designed to encourage people to take out private health insurance earlier in life, and to maintain their cover’ (Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing 2001). It would be interesting to examine the relationship between these policy changes and media health representations to consider whether the social incentive to take up private health insurance is associated with media coverage. The possible underreporting of this policy change in commercial health magazines warrants particular investigation, as does a close examination of how ‘compromised’ citizens, such as people with HIV/AIDS or hepatitis, or those who engage in ‘risky’ behaviours such as intravenous drug use or sex work, are treated within this policy emphasis on compulsory health insurance. This will be an increasing concern in advanced liberal societies since those with pre-existing health conditions are often excluded from health insurance and are certainly discouraged from engaging in unconventional or ‘deviant’ behaviours.
As an introductory examination of the issues at hand, this thesis has suggested that health magazine reader letters are indicative of a changing cultural politics of health. A theme common to all six of these publications is ‘responsibility’. Both the commercial and non-profit health magazines prioritised a political potential to mobilise the ‘intrinsic’ capacity of audiences to become responsible, pro-active and self-directed citizens. Although articulated in a slightly different way in the community magazines, both industries seem to be convinced that, as Rimke has suggested, ‘...within this process of governmentalized self-constitution, individuals “naturally” choose to fashion a unique, better, more productive or spiritual self’ (2000: 72). Health magazines typify this increasingly naturalised ethics of self-improvement, in which the moral imperative to ‘look after yourself’ becomes a guiding mantra of contemporary citizenship.
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221 Appendices
Appendix I: Participant Information Statement and Consent Form
Reading and producing Australia’s health, sexuality and community magazines
Approval No: HREC 00195
You are invited to participate in a study of the readers and producers of Australian health, sexuality and community magazines. We hope to learn more about the perspective of those who make editorial and production decisions on these magazines, regarding magazine content and audience. You were selected as a possible participant in this study because of your role with one of Australia’s key magazines in these fields.
If you decide to participate, we will contact you regarding the most convenient time to meet for a brief interview to discuss these issues. We estimate that the interview will take approximately half an hour, at a date, time and location most convenient to yourself. Prior to meeting, we will provide you with a list of questions and will follow your instructions regarding any topics that you would prefer not to discuss. Once the interview is complete, we will provide you with a transcript of the entire interview so that your consent is formalised regarding any information that you would prefer to be excluded from further research use.
All information provided is entirely confidential and at no point will any participant be required to formally identify themselves for the study. A qualified researcher will conduct the interview and the discussion will be taped. These tapes will be transcribed, and the transcripts de-identified, apart from reference to the relevant publication. Tapes will be destroyed after transcription.
The interview will discuss questions like the following:
• How would you describe the sorts of people that read your magazine? Age? Gender? Sexuality? Ethnicity? Would you consider ‘Letters to the Editor’ as your main contact with readers?
• What do you consider to be your role as a media producer? Would you say that your role is more to ‘inform’ or to ‘entertain’?
• Do you think that your readers are very interested in health issues? Do you feel that you have a duty to communicate health information to your readers?
The questions will not be focused on particular editorial decisions, but on your experience of the media industry as a whole. However, as the interview questions address issues directly related to your profession and employer, there is some risk that you may feel you are betraying workplace confidentiality. We assure you that the process by which the interviews will be conducted, recorded and later analysed will give you sufficient opportunity to decide which of your statements are made available for
222 research purposes. We cannot and do not guarantee or promise that you will receive any benefits from this study.
Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with you will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission or as required by law. If you give us your permission by signing this document, we plan to publish the results as part of a PhD thesis, at conferences and in reports and journal articles for the purpose of improving theoretical approaches to Australian media. In any publication, information will be provided in such a way that you cannot be identified.
Your decision whether or not to participate will not prejudice your future relations with the University of New South Wales. If you decide to participate, you are free to withdraw your consent and to discontinue participation at any time without prejudice. Complaints may be directed to the Ethics Secretariat, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 (ph 9385 4234, fax 9385 6648, e-mail [email protected]).
If you agree to take part, please complete the form on the following page and send it to myself, Professor Philip Bell, at the address below. The second copy of this document is for you to keep. My associate Christy Newman will then call you to arrange an appropriate interview time in the near future.
If you have any questions now or later, please phone Christy Newman on 9662 4719 or 0412 060 341 or e-mail [email protected] or contact myself on the numbers listed below. We hope that you feel able to support this research.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Philip Bell Head, School of Media and Communications
University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052
Ph: (02) 9385 6811 Fax: (02) 9385 6812
223 Appendix II: Guidelines for interview structure
Introduction 1. Introduce myself and clarify purpose of the interview 2. How long have you worked at your magazine? 3. Are you involved with editorial decisions? Production decisions? 4. (Any other statistics about the magazine e.g., circulation, distribution, subscribers)
Readers 1. How would you describe your readers? Age? Gender? Sexuality? Ethnicity? 2. Has this changed over time or by geographical location? 3. Would you consider ‘Letters to the Editor’ as your main contact with readers? 4. How would you describe the purpose of your letters page? 5. How many are received in an average month? From any particular state/territory? 6. How are decisions made as to which to publish and which not? 7. Are personal replies ever sent to readers? Do you have any serial letter writers? 8. Do you consider your letter writers to be different from those of other magazines? 9. How important would you say that letters are to editorial decisions? 10. Do you think that reading the perspective of other readers is popular? 11. What do you see the future of the letters page as being? 12. Is e-mail a popular option for reader feedback? 13. Do you think that your website will change who writes in and why? 14. Is subscribing popular and are there any factors that influence its popularity? 15. Any other comments about your readers? Of other Sydney magazines?
Producers 1. What do you consider to be your role as a media producer? 2. Would you say that role is more to ‘inform’ or to ‘entertain’? 3. Does your magazine have a ‘mission statement’ that describes its purpose? 4. What sort of information do you seek to be included in your magazine? Avoided? 5. What role do you see your magazine playing in Sydney? Australia? Internationally? 6. Do you think that the way you present information influences the way it is read? 7. Is your website popular? If so, how has it changed the way the magazine is run? 8. How would you describe the sort of advertising you feature? Has this changed? 9. Would you say that advertisers influence editorial content at all? Other influences? 16. Any other comments on producing your magazine? On other magazine producers?
Health 1. Can you briefly describe how you approach health issues? 2. Do you think that your readers are very interested in health issues? If so, what sort? 3. Do you feel that you have a duty to communicate health information? 4. If so, what are the most significant areas of health information that you cover? 5. Do you think this has changed over time? 6. Do you think that this makes you different from other magazines? 7. Any other comments on health issues in your magazine? In other magazines?
224 Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Hlth cmrcl Talkabout User’s News The Professional cmnty Total % Appendix III: Content Analysis (n=136) (n=74) (n=44) (n=59) (n=26) (n=25)
Total number of letters: 136 37% 74 20% 44 12% 70% 59 16% 26 7% 25 7% 30% 364 100% MANIFEST CONTENT Sample size and period 1997 0 0% 0 0% 16 36% 6% 30 51% 4 15% 1 4% 32% 51 14% 1998 33 24% 5 7% 9 20% 19% 17 29% 8 31% 5 20% 27% 77 21% 1999 59 43% 57 77% 10 23% 50% 6 10% 2 8% 10 40% 16% 144 40% 2000 44 32% 12 16% 9 20% 26% 6 10% 7 27% 4 16% 15% 82 23% Other (pre-97 or post-2000) 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 0 0% 5 19% 5 20% 9% 10 3% Word length Words in shortest letter 53 35 34 41 63 31 30 41 246 41 Words in longest letter 272 331 172 258 571 469 629 556 2,444 407 Total word count 19,348 8,708 3,581 10,546 15,313 4,820 7,042 9,058 58,812 9,802 Mean word count 142 118 81 114 260 185 282 242 1,068 178 Editorial replies Letters with reply 22 16% 11 15% 15 34% 19% 8 14% 12 46% 7 28% 25% 75 21% Letters without reply 114 84% 63 85% 29 66% 81% 51 86% 14 54% 18 72% 75% 289 79% Words in shortest reply 5 13 11 10 9 5 7 7 50 8 Words in longest reply 88 103 75 89 271 547 280 366 1364 227 Total words in reply 579 595 389 521 734 1,002 525 754 3824 637 Mean word count 24 25 35 28 46 200 105 117 436 73 Name format Pseudonym 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 2 3% 2 8% 2 8% 5% 6 2% Initials only 5 4% 14 19% 2 5% 8% 0 0% 7 27% 0 0% 6% 28 8% Given/surname only 116 85% 10 14% 2 5% 50% 4 7% 13 50% 8 32% 23% 153 42%
225 Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Hlth cmrcl Talkabout User’s News The Professional cmnty Total % Appendix III: Content Analysis (n=136) (n=74) (n=44) (n=59) (n=26) (n=25)
Full name provided 10 7% 38 51% 38 86% 34% 48 81% 2 8% 11 44% 55% 147 40% Anonymous or withheld 5 4% 12 16% 2 5% 7% 5 8% 2 8% 4 16% 10% 30 8% Address format Via e-mail or internet 24 18% 7 9% 0 0% 12% 0 0% 0 0% 1 4% 1% 32 9% Overseas 9 7% 2 3% 2 5% 5% 2 3% 0 0% 0 0% 2% 15 4% New South Wales 24 18% 24 32% 11 25% 23% 16 27% 5 19% 5 20% 24% 85 23% Victoria 24 18% 13 18% 5 11% 17% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 43 12% Queensland 24 18% 12 16% 14 32% 20% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 51 14% South Australia 7 5% 1 1% 3 7% 4% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 11 3% Western Australia 14 10% 4 5% 1 2% 7% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 19 5% Tasmania 3 2% 2 3% 1 2% 2% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 6 2% Northern Territory 0 0% 0 0% 1 2% 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 1 0% Australian Capital Territory 4 3% 1 1% 0 0% 2% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 5 1% None claimed 3 2% 8 11% 6 14% 7% 41 69% 19 73% 19 76% 72% 96 26% LATENT CONTENT ENTITLEMENT CLAIMS Gender Female 12 9% 52 70% 31 70% 37% 7 12% 6 23% 11 44% 22% 119 33% Male 73 54% 2 3% 10 23% 33% 43 73% 11 42% 2 8% 51% 141 39% None claimed 51 38% 20 27% 3 7% 29% 9 15% 9 35% 12 48% 27% 104 29% Employment position Corporate / Professional 23 17% 6 8% 2 5% 12% 10 17% 1 4% 2 8% 12% 44 12% Trades / Services 8 6% 1 1% 6 14% 6% 0 0% 1 4% 10 40% 10% 26 7% Unemployed / Home Duties 2 1% 0 0% 0 0% 1% 2 3% 2 8% 0 0% 4% 6 2%
226 Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Hlth cmrcl Talkabout User’s News The Professional cmnty Total % Appendix III: Content Analysis (n=136) (n=74) (n=44) (n=59) (n=26) (n=25)
Student / Training 3 2% 1 1% 1 2% 2% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 5 1% Non-specific employment 6 4% 1 1% 1 2% 3% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 9 2% None claimed 94 69% 65 88% 34 77% 76% 47 80% 21 81% 13 52% 74% 274 75% Family position Parent 11 8% 13 18% 3 7% 11% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 27 7% Child / Grandchild 7 5% 0 0% 1 2% 3% 1 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1% 9 2% Partner / Husband etc 20 15% 4 5% 4 9% 11% 1 2% 1 4% 2 8% 4% 32 9% Sibling 2 1% 1 1% 0 0% 1% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 3 1% None claimed 96 71% 56 76% 36 82% 74% 57 97% 25 96% 23 92% 95% 293 80% Sexuality Heterosexual 43 32% 10 14% 6 14% 23% 1 2% 1 4% 2 8% 4% 63 17% Gay or lesbian 1 1% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 3 5% 0 0% 0 0% 3% 4 1% None claimed 92 68% 64 86% 38 86% 76% 55 93% 25 96% 23 92% 94% 297 82% Marital status Married partner 11 8% 5 7% 3 7% 7% 0 0% 0 0% 1 4% 1% 20 5% Defacto / Longterm partner 3 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1% 2 3% 1 4% 1 4% 4% 7 2% Boyfriend / Girlfriend 16 12% 1 1% 1 2% 7% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 18 5% Single 3 2% 2 3% 0 0% 2% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 5 1% Divorced / Separated 3 2% 1 1% 0 0% 2% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 4 1% None claimed 100 74% 65 88% 40 91% 81% 57 97% 25 96% 23 92% 95% 310 85% Age Less than 20 3 2% 1 1% 0 0% 2% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 5 1% Between 20 and 30 8 6% 5 7% 0 0% 5% 0 0% 0 0% 1 4% 1% 14 4% Between 30 and 40 7 5% 8 11% 1 2% 6% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 16 4%
227 Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Hlth cmrcl Talkabout User’s News The Professional cmnty Total % Appendix III: Content Analysis (n=136) (n=74) (n=44) (n=59) (n=26) (n=25)
Between 40 and 50 8 6% 3 4% 0 0% 4% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 12 3% More than 50 3 2% 5 7% 1 2% 4% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 9 2% None claimed 107 79% 52 70% 42 95% 79% 59 100% 24 92% 24 96% 97% 308 85% Global position Australian overseas 9 7% 0 0% 0 0% 4% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 9 2% Non-Australian overseas 0 0% 2 3% 0 0% 1% 2 3% 0 0% 1 4% 3% 5 1% City person in the country 5 4% 0 0% 0 0% 2% 1 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1% 6 2% Imprisoned 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 0 0% 6 23% 0 0% 5% 6 2% None claimed 122 90% 72 97% 44 100% 94% 56 95% 20 77% 24 96% 91% 338 93% Ethnicity White / Caucasian etc 1 1% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 1 0% Black / Indigenous etc 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 0 0% 2 8% 0 0% 2% 2 1% Asian 0 0% 1 1% 0 0% 0% 1 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1% 2 1% None claimed 135 99% 73 99% 44 100% 99% 58 98% 24 92% 25 100% 97% 359 99% Readership Committed regular reader 92 68% 25 34% 34 77% 59% 10 17% 7 27% 4 16% 19% 172 47% Uncertain casual reader 23 17% 10 14% 0 0% 13% 1 2% 3 12% 0 0% 4% 37 10% Critical non-reader 12 9% 7 9% 0 0% 7% 6 10% 0 0% 1 4% 6% 26 7% None claimed 9 7% 32 43% 10 23% 20% 42 71% 16 62% 20 80% 71% 129 35% Corporeality Physiological condition 9 7% 23 31% 19 43% 20% 37 63% 9 35% 7 28% 48% 104 29% Psychological condition 8 6% 5 7% 1 2% 6% 0 0% 0 0% 1 4% 1% 15 4% Cosmetic condition 1 1% 20 27% 1 2% 9% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 22 6% Body improvement 49 36% 2 3% 2 5% 21% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 53 15%
228 Men’s Health Good Medicine Nature & Hlth cmrcl Talkabout User’s News The Professional cmnty Total % Appendix III: Content Analysis (n=136) (n=74) (n=44) (n=59) (n=26) (n=25)
Body satisfaction 4 3% 5 7% 0 0% 4% 0 0% 1 4% 0 0% 1% 10 3% Medical expertise 12 9% 4 5% 7 16% 9% 10 17% 0 0% 1 4% 10% 34 9% None claimed 53 39% 15 20% 14 32% 32% 12 20% 16 62% 16 64% 40% 126 35% Entitlement totals Mean rate none claimed 53% 58% 58 56% 64% 66% 68% 67% 61% Mean rate entitlement claims 47% 42% 42% 44% 36 34% 32% 34% 39% POLITICAL GENRES Dialogist opener 3 2% 2 3% 3 7% 3% 3 5% 4 15% 12 48% 17% 27 7% Dialogist rejoinder 22 16% 16 22% 11 25% 19% 15 25% 1 4% 1 4% 15% 66 18% Total dialogist letters 25 18% 18 24% 14 32% 22% 18 31% 5 19% 13 52% 33% 93 26% Activist advo-endorsement 8 6% 4 5% 2 5% 6% 12 20% 1 4% 0 0% 12% 27 7% Total activist letters 8 6% 4 5% 2 5% 6% 12 20% 1 4% 0 0% 12% 27 7% Exhib. opener or rejoinder 12 9% 20 27% 11 25% 17% 11 19% 4 15% 2 8% 15% 60 16% Exhib. advo-endorsement 11 8% 10 14% 1 2% 9% 11 19% 11 42% 4 16% 24% 48 13% Exhib. commit. or confess. 80 59% 22 30% 16 36% 46% 7 12% 5 19% 6 24% 16% 136 37% Total exhibitionist letters 103 76% 52 70% 28 64% 72% 29 49% 20 77% 12 48% 55% 244 67%
229 Appendix IV: List of reader letters
1 Gleeson, R. (October 2000) ‘Keep on truckin’’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 22. 2 Beard, C. (August 1999) ‘Gutted’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 3 Campbell, I. (April 1997) ‘Out & Proud in Wagga’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 4 Rose, T. (December 1998) ‘Father figure’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 5 MB (Winter 2001) ‘Juvenile injustice’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5. 6 Choy, C. (June 2000) ‘Olympic inspiration’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 7 Jenny (September 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 8 Charaneka, S. (May 2000) ‘Stopping stress’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 9 Garland, R. (July 2000) ‘A working man’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 10 ‘Dissatisfied, disillusioned and dirty on society’ (Autumn 1997) ‘Prejudice’ N.U.A.A News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 9. 11 Williams, S. (May 1999) ‘Real inspiration’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 12 LL (Winter 1998) ‘Heroin Trial Long Overdue’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 32. 13 Aspinall, P. (July 1998) ‘A bit too smooth’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 14 Campbell, S. (November 1999) ‘A men’s magazine for Everyman’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 15 ‘Pansy Potter’ (May/June 1997) ‘Different voice’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. 16 Thorne, J. (October 1999) ‘Family ties’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 17 Anonymous (September 1991) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 5. 18 Name supplied (December 1999) ‘New understanding’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 19 Cherie S. (Autumn 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 40. 20 Name supplied (August 1998) ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 21 Hayes, M. (December 1999) ‘Home help’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 22 Scott, D. (June 1999) ‘Foul-weathered friend’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 23 Name withheld (Dec 1999 / Jan 2000) ‘Preconceptual testing’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. 24 Smith, M. (July 2000) ‘A true believer!’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 25 Baily, B. (May 1998) ‘Funny guys’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 26 Adam & Keith (July 1997) ‘Anvil Praise’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. 27 Buttenshaw, S. (June 1999) ‘Information Plus’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 9. 28 McKay, S. (July 1999) ‘More variety’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 29 Boorman, K. (May/June 1997) ‘Uncaring’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10-11. 30 Alderman, T. (July 1998) ‘Tim’s response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 31 Anonymous (April/May 1997) ‘Infertility’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 32 Tait, D. (June 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 33 Smolders, M. (September 1998) ‘The incredible bulk’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 34 Tonkin, D. (September 2000) ‘Fit for anything’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 35 SF (Winter 2001) ‘The real story of heroin’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5. 36 Macphee, F. (Jun/Jul 1998) ‘‘User pays’ and holistic medicine’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 37 Anderson, C. (August 1999) ‘Food for thought’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 38 Dallengore, P. (Aug/Sep 1998) ‘Ideas, ideas, ideas’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 39 ‘Sister Carmen Get It’ (June 1999) ‘Sisterley thanks’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 40 Fuller, S. (March 1999) ‘Forget cellulite’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 41 Young, R. (July 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (March 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (May 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 42 Porterhouse, A. (August 2000) ‘Dream or nightmare?’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 43 Coates, B. (August 1997) ‘ACON responds’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9-10. 44 Byrne, G. (December 1998) ‘Fighting the urge’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 45 Liquet, K. (Oct/Nov 1997) ‘Keeping the Faith’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. 46 Conroy, P. (April/May 1997) ‘Fruit Diets’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 47 Cat (Winter 1998) ‘Response to a Koori Page Feature’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 32. 48 Urban, J. (February 1997) ‘Free Choice?’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 49 Christie (March 1999) ‘Acne agony’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 50 Bridges, E. (March 2000) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 51 Harrington, L. (September 2000) ‘A healthy curve’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 52 Bryan, J. (September 1999) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 53 Maddie (May 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 54 Daley, R. (July 1998) ‘Better with age’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 55 Gleeson, R. (October 2000) ‘Keep on truckin’’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 22. 56‘A Company’ (September 2000) ‘Fit for duty’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Fisk, D. (December 1999) ‘On active duty’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Smith, M. (September 1999) ‘Fighting fit’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Valencia, S.M. (April 2000) ‘Fighting fit in Dili’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 57 Ogg, A. (February 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 58 Arnold, S. (December 1998) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Fraser, A. (December 1998) ‘Front-line fitness’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 59 England, M. (January 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 60 Brack, A. (December 1998) ‘Gym fans’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Ferraro, G. (April 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12.
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Reid, D. (November 1998) ‘Well-thumbed up’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 61 Mather, W. (August 1998) ‘More for less’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Williams, C. (January 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 62 Burgess, M. (February 1999) ‘Police strength’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 63 Jansen, R. (January 1999) ‘Stable advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 64 Mapletoff, D. (May 1999) ‘Action man’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 65 Rule, J. (August 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Jupe, J. (January 1999) ‘Health scare’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 66 Au, P. (May 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 67 Bridges, E. (March 2000) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Pike, B. (May 1999) ‘A heartening read’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 68 Jupe, J. (January 1999) ‘Health scare’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 69 Baade, J. (February 2000) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Brady, P. (May 1999) ‘Facing the mountain’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Thurbur, P. (August 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Wilson, P. (August 2000) ‘Smart dumbbells’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 70 Jazbec, M. (May 1998) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 71 Smith, S. (September 1999) ‘Peak condition’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. West, S. (April 1999) ‘Waffle-free workouts’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Hamawi, Y. (September 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 72 Holman, J. (February 1999) ‘A healthy alternative’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 73 Arhontopoulos, N. (June 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 74 Gill, C. (December 1998) ‘Hepatitis Alert’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 75 Hoekstra, A. (July 2000) ‘Glandular geography’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 76 Stone, A. (February 2000) ‘Dangerous ground’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Elliott, L. (July 1998) ‘Overcoming the demon’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Beard, C. (August 1999) ‘Gutted’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Gainer, E. (January 1999) ‘Wash our mouths out!’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Darling, C. (November 1998) ‘No jacket required’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Anonymous (May 1998) ‘High cost of hardness’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 77 Freitas, F. (January 1999) ‘Quaint qualities’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. McColl, M. (October 2000) ‘Making food stories easier to swallow’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 22. Donnelly, P. (March 2000) ‘No time to train’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Elijah, M. (April 1999) ‘Don’t take your medicine’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 78 Faulkner, M. (May 2000) ‘Where’s there’s smoke, there’s ire’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 79 Bryan, J. (September 1999) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 80 Gosman, A. (September 1998) ‘Airport noises’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 81 Gagliardi, E. (October 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 82 Johnson, R. (March 2000) ‘Excellent advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 83 Name withheld (October 1999) ‘A father’s story’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Price, S. (February 2000) ‘Divorce details’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 84 Mutton, S. (June 1999) ‘Tabloid terror’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 85 Hayes, M. (December 1999) ‘Home help’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 86 Marston, A.S. (March 2000) ‘Force’s favourite’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Tait, D. (June 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 87 Name withheld (May 1999) ‘Familiar fear’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 88 Charaneka, S. (May 2000) ‘Stopping stress’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Teoh, K. (September 1999) ‘Stress-free studying’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Waters, M. (July 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 89 Veldze, C. (March 1999) ‘Invaluable advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 90 Wilson, D. (October 1999) ‘Surviving single’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 91 Wright, M. (August 1999) ‘Days of wine and roses’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 92 Karakolis, K. (July 2000) ‘Female fandom’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. King, K. (March 2000) ‘Perfect torture’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Nyhuis, S. (March 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Politi, Y. (August 1999) ‘Satisfied customer, satisfied lover’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. SC (January 1999) ‘Lessons in love’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Scott, D. (June 1999) ‘Foul-weathered friend’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 93 Brentnall, S. (December 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Leyshon, D. (November 1998) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. Phin, A. (December 1999) ‘New goals’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Tryphon, M. (August 1999) ‘Healthy investor’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Baily, B. (May 1998) ‘Funny guys’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 94 Collins, S. (October 2000) ‘Growing pains’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 22. Minchin, S. (July 1999) ‘Good advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Dent, B. (November 1999) ‘Young concerns’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Rose, T. (December 1998) ‘Father figure’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. Thorne, J. (October 1999) ‘Family ties’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 95 Veldze, C. (March 1999) ‘Invaluable advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 96 Anonymous (August 1998) ‘Letter of the Month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 97 Birt, A. (October 2000) ‘Fatherley advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 22. 98 Hendriks, P. (December 1998) ‘Unhealthy advice’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 99 Collier, S. (June 2000) ‘Another view’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18.
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100 Mullin, B. (August 1998) ‘Two sexes’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 101 Lipscombe, N. (November 1999) ‘Be nice to nurses’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 102 JMH (July 1998) ‘Skin deep’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 103 Porterhouse, A. (August 2000) ‘Dream or nightmare?’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 104 Hunter, T. (May 1998) ‘Fence Sitting’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 105 Filby, D. (February 1999) ‘The body beautiful’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 106 Antonas, A. (June 2000) ‘Vive l’Australie!’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Jones, T. (June 1999) ‘Mature tastes’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 107 Tonkin, D. (September 2000) ‘Fit for anything’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. Venier, J. (July 1999) ‘The pizza-and-beer fitness plan’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. Walker, C. (August 1998) ‘And so, to bed’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 108 Paddon, D. (April 2000) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 109 Bernard, D. (June 1999) ‘An average bloke’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 110 JG (July 2000) ‘Wake up, Australia’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 111 Lukin, L. (November 1998) ‘The real thing’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 112 Gerace, N. (February 2000) ‘Image conscious’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 113 Johnson, J. (May 1999) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 114 Nettle, L. (September 1998) ‘Letter of the month’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 115 Campbell, S. (November 1999) ‘A men’s magazine for Everyman’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 116 McKay, S. (July 1999) ‘More variety’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 117 Garland, R. (July 2000) ‘A working man’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 118 Longobardi, A. (January 2000) ‘Led down the garden path’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 119 Parish, R. (June 2000) ‘Tassie tiger’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 120 Miller, D. (August 1998) ‘The sophisticated male’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 121 Chapman, S. (October 1999) ‘Where there’s smoke’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 18. 122 Aspinall, P. (July 1998) ‘A bit too smooth’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 123 Seidler, D.R. (November 1998) ‘Sex on the brain’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 14. 124 Jacobs, A.H. (February 1999) ‘Physician, heal thyself’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 12. 125 Stone, B. (May 2000) ‘Hair we go again’ Men’s Health. Miller’s Point, Murdoch Magazines: 16. 126 SJ (June 1999) ‘In hot water’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 9. 127 Labate, P. (May 1999) ‘Healthy individual’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 128 McColm, L. (August 1999) ‘Recipe for success’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 129 Fukada, C. (June 1999) ‘Praise indeed!’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 9. 130 Hrlec, S. (November 1998) ‘Healthy attitude’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 131 Smith, M. (July 2000) ‘A true believer!’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 132 Ivanac, J. (Jun/Jul 1998) ‘Back issues’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Cheketri, C. (April/May 1997) ‘The Champion!’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Chant, L. (Aug/Sep 1998) ‘Newsagency Favourite’ Nature & Health. Willoughby NSW, Yaffa Publishing: 8 Hill, J. (Feb/Mar 1997) ‘Packed!’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Braniff, R. (Feb/Mar 1997) ‘Study in value’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 133 Wood, B. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘Love letter’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 134 Trembath, M. (Oct/Nov 1997) ‘Deep-Tissue Zentherapy’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. Brough, K. (Feb/Mar 1997) ‘Choose Life’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Guo, D.A.F. (April/May 1997) ‘Chinese Medicine’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 135 Stormer, C. (Jun/Jul 1997) ‘Reflexology’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 136 Bristow-Stagg, T. (December 1999) ‘Out of step’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. Name supplied (April 1999) ‘An embarrassment’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 137 Gladwell, J. (Aug/Sep 1998) ‘Vitamin C creams’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Goddard, A. (Feb/Mar 2000) ‘DLPA for pain relief’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. Tolley, M. (Aug/Sep 2000) ‘Hitting the right note’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 11. White, S. (Aug/Sep 1999) ‘DHA’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 138 Dallengore, P. (Aug/Sep 1998) ‘Ideas, ideas, ideas’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. JF (Feb/Mar 2000) ‘Alternative cancer cure?’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. Moss, L. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘Scleroderma’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Name withheld (Dec 1999 / Jan 2000) ‘Preconceptual testing’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. Vradenburg, J. (Feb/Mar 1999) ‘Breast implant surgery’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 139 Conroy, P. (April/May 1997) ‘Fruit Diets’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 140 Wornes, A. (April 1999) ‘Plea for help’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 141 Farmer, C. (Jun/Jul 1998) ‘Wheat Allergy’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 142 RM (Feb/Mar 2000) ‘Is there a cure for benign fatty tumours’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. 143 Pritchett, B. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘Can other readers help?’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 144 Bortelli, M. (April/May 1999) ‘Pump up the prostate’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 145 SJ (June 1999) ‘In hot water.’ Pp. 9 in Good Medicine. Australian Consolidated Press. 146 Quaedvlieg, W. (September 2000) ‘Grain of the gods’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8 147 Austin, M. (November 1998) ‘Winter Blues’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 148 Harrington, L. (September 2000) ‘A healthy curve’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 149 Byrne, G. (December 1998) ‘Fighting the urge’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 150 Christie (March 1999) ‘Acne agony’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 151 Name supplied (November 1999) ‘Self-hate’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 152 Name supplied (December 1999) ‘New understanding’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 153 Eberle, M. (Feb/Mar 1997) ‘HRT of the matter’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Marlock, R. (July 2000) ‘Selfish attitude’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. Powell, R. (Dec 1999 / Jan 2000) ‘Bouquet for cancer story’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9.
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Reid, G. (Oct/Nov 1998) ‘IBS Update’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Robins, K. (Oct/Nov 1998) ‘Thyroid Support Group’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Sefuiva, M. (December 1999) ‘Less to fear’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. Ward, L. (November 1999) ‘Genetic links’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 154 Name supplied (October 1999) ‘Too embarrassed’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 155 Christie (March 1999) ‘Acne agony’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 156 Gordon, L. (November 1999) ‘Personality Disorder’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. Name supplied (November 1998) ‘Mentally Aware’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 157 One other letter addressed the topic of using pharmaceutical treatments for overweight: Skafte, K. (November 1999) ‘Weight- loss kick-start’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 158 Anonymous (April/May 1997) ‘Infertility’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 159 Name supplied (August 1999) ‘Compassion please’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 160 Name supplied (August 1999) ‘Traumatic termination’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 161 Myers, A. (December 1999) ‘Patient concern’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 162 Maugerie, M. (March 1999) ‘To hell and back’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 163 Irving, C. (October 1999) ‘Not so lucky’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 164 Marlock, R. (July 2000) ‘Selfish attitude’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 165 LT (May 1999) ‘The real world’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 166 Dawson, A. (April 1999) ‘Viagra debate’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 167 Gillespie, B. (Aug/Sep 1999) ‘The Rosacea - Amalgam connection’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 168 Lyons, K. (Oct/Nov 1998) ‘Flying and blood clots’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 169 Liquet, K. (Oct/Nov 1997) ‘Keeping the Faith’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. 170 Keller, E. (April/May 1997) ‘Healing Music’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 171 Macphee, F. (Jun/Jul 1998) ‘‘User pays’ and holistic medicine’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 172 Borromeo, N. (Aug/Sep 2000) ‘Ecological news’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 11. 173 Zurkowski, H. (Aug/Sep 2000) ‘Dynamic Balance’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 11. 174 Wilson, K. (July 1999) ‘Different Views’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 175 Dawson, A. (April 1999) ‘Viagra debate’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. TB (April 1999) ‘Prescription only’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 176 McKnoulty, D. (July 2000) ‘Care for kids’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 177 Brown, D. (July 1999) ‘Disappointed’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 178 Snape, K. (December 1998) ‘Shark attack’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 179 KS (February 1999) ‘Good judgement’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 180 Braccioli, V. (May 1999) ‘Weighty thoughts’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 181 Hunt, B. (April/May 1999) ‘Older role models’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. Smith, B. (October 1999) ‘Still going strong’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. Tiffany (July 1999) ‘Young at heart’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 182 HG (February 1999) ‘Bare facts’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 183 Name supplied (February 1999) ‘Healthy attitude’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 184 Name supplied (August 2000) ‘Blueprint for youth’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 185 Kastanek, B. (November 1999) ‘Bra-vo!’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. Another letter dealing with this same bra is Hamilton, A. (November 1999) ‘It’s a miracle’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 186 Name supplied (March 1999) ‘Slimming inspiration’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 187 CG (January 1999) ‘Unbearable pain’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. DB (January 1999) ‘Prescription drugs’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. HG (January 1999) ‘Haunting problem’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. KP (January 1999) ‘Thyroid cancer’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. NS (January 1999) ‘Body wraps and seaweed’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. TM (January 1999) ‘Costly creams and surgery’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 188 SH (January 1999) ‘Low-fat diet and exercise’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 189 TD (January 1999) ‘Liposuction gone wrong’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 190 Jones, D. (July 1999) ‘Cellulite Success’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 191 Bennett, M. (June 2000) ‘Cellasene for cellulite’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 192 Blinman, N. (June 1999) ‘Salon hygiene’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 9. 193 Name supplied (August 2000) ‘Hope for the future’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 194 Name supplied (February 1999) ‘Healthy attitude’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 195 Copeland, K. (October 1999) ‘Sick message’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 196 Semple, M. (August 1999) ‘Weight gain’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 197 Dinn, A. (August 1999) ‘Small but beautiful’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 198 Fuller, S. (March 1999) ‘Forget cellulite’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 199 See, for example: LB (May 1999) ‘Going for bust’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 200 Kay (July 1999) ‘Shaping Up’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 201 Williams, S. (May 1999) ‘Real inspiration’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 202 Carroll, M. (Aug/Sep 1999) ‘Taking depression by the horns’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 203 Choy, C. (June 2000) ‘Olympic inspiration’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 8. 204 Mason, J. (April/May 1999) ‘Tired of being ignored’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 8. 205 Sefuiva, M. (December 1999) ‘Less to fear’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 206 Barrell, C. (Oct/Nov 1997) ‘Staying Strong’ Nature & Health. Willoughby, Yaffa Publishing: 9. 207 Menzie, K. (April 1999) ‘Chronic pain’ Good Medicine. Sydney, Australian Consolidated Press: 10. 208 Quote taken from User’s News editorial interview. 209 Quote taken from User’s News editorial interview. 210 Urban, J. (April 1997) ‘No more quandary’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 211 Scott (Spring 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 44.
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212 Susan (September 1999) ‘GST and Workers’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 213 Adam & Keith (July 1997) ‘Anvil Praise’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. 214 Alderman, T. (July 1998) ‘Tim’s response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8; Crystal, A. (July 1998) ‘Boss of the Bug’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 215 Barry, D. (September 1998) ‘A welcome cheque’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11; Name supplied (March 1998) ‘Housing gripe’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 12. 216 Gotlieb, K. (September 1997) ‘1592’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. Kelly, G. (April 1997) ‘Carbon copy’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10-11. Name withheld (September 1997) ‘Trial concerns’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 217 Kirk, A. (March 1997) ‘Free Choice’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. Kirk, A. (May/June 1997) ‘Singular’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. Meg (September 1998) ‘Advice for Jay McGee’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. ‘Pansy Potter’ (May/June 1997) ‘Different voice’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. Tietjen, M. (May/June 1997) ‘Choices’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. Urban, J. (February 1997) ‘Free Choice?’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 218 James, S. (September 1998) ‘Yes please!’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 219 Kennedy, P. (August 1997) ‘ACON smooth talk?’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9 Mahoney, P. (August 1997) ‘No response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 220 Lovett, K. (June 1999) ‘Maintain the skills’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10; Roberts, P. (April 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. 221 Name supplied (April 1998) ‘Mardi Gras’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 222 Name supplied (August 1998) ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 223 Name supplied (May 1998) ‘Deep north retreat’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10 Norton, G. (May/June 1997) ‘Better than sliced bread’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. 224 Sam (Summer 1998) ‘Buying barrels’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 29. 225 J.B. (Autumn 1998) ‘Think before you drop that fit’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 27; PM (Winter 2001) ‘Give something a try’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5. 226 LL (Winter 1998) ‘Heroin Trial Long Overdue’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 32 Lucinda (Spring 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 44. 227 Mark (Winter 1998) ‘Rapid Detox or Just Rapid Profit Making?’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 32. 228 Anonymous (Autumn 1997) ‘Hitting up methadone’ N.U.A.A News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 9. 229 Alaina (Spring 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 44. 230 Darren (Autumn 1998) ‘A drug user’s poem’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 27 Gary (Autumn 1997) ‘Safe cheap pure legal drugs’ N.U.A.A News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 9. 231 Ripped Off and Angry (Dec 1991 / Jan 1992) ‘Feeling ripped off!’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: no page numbers provided. 232 Annoyed (March 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 233 Jenny (September 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Sharon (July 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 234 No name provided (Aug/Oct 2000) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Chippendale, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 235 Honnor, G. (October 1998) ‘No wraiths!’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 236 Anderson, R. (Summer 2001) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 44. 237 Anonymous (September 1991) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 5. 238 Allen, G. (Dec 1996 / Jan 1997) ‘Postaids? No thanks’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. Cox, M. (February 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. Last, N. (October 1999) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. Tietjen, M. (Dec 1999 / Jan 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 6. Moulds, M. (September 1998) ‘More laughs’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 239 Baker, K. (May/June 1997) ‘Attack’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. Boorman, K. (May/June 1997) ‘Uncaring’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10-11. Canning, P. (May/June 1997) ‘Darlo success’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9-10. Jobling, D. (February 1997) ‘Uplifted’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. de Koning, P. (May/June 1997) ‘Paul’s response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. Scott, A. (May/June 1997) ‘Disappointed’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. ‘Sister Carmen Get It’ (June 1999) ‘Sisterley thanks’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 240 Campbell, I. (April 1997) ‘Out & Proud in Wagga’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 241 Dolman, P. (May 1998) ‘Tolerance starts at home’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 242 Alderman, T. (October 1998) ‘Positive spirit’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8 Roberts, J. (September 1998) ‘Beefcake? No thanks’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 243 Jobling, D.P. (Dec 1996 / Jan 1997) ‘A week for us!’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 244 An inmate (Autumn 2000) ‘User’s Story’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 11. Pete (Autumn 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 40. Richardson, C.D. (Autumn 1999) ‘Prisoner Rights’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 29. 245 Anonymous (Autumn 1998) ‘Making choices at the crossroads’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 27. Cat (Winter 1998) ‘Response to a Koori Page Feature’ User’s News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 32. LB (Winter 2001) ‘Bullshit!’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5. 246 Cherie S. (Autumn 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 40. 247 ‘Dissatisfied, disillusioned and dirty on society’ (Autumn 1997) ‘Prejudice’ N.U.A.A News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 9. 248 MB (Winter 2001) ‘Juvenile injustice’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5. 249 SF (Winter 2001) ‘The real story of heroin’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 5.
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250 Annaleisa (Jan/Feb 1996) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3 Kelly (Jan/Feb 1996) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 251 E-mail address provided (Aug/Oct 2000) ‘The whore from San Fran’ The Professional. Chippendale, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 252 Kira (Nov/Dec 1998) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 4. 253 Roundtree, C. (Sep/Oct 1997) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 254 Gration, C. and Coates, B. (August 1998) ‘ACON response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 255 Ailsa (Spring 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 44. 256 Donovan, B. (Jan/Feb 1995) ‘Open letter to all management of sex worker establishments’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 257 Gration, C. and Coates, B. (August 1998) ‘ACON response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. Stone, D. and Lovney, A. (April 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. Yould, P. (March 1997) ‘Users’ Challenge’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 258 Ezzy, Dr Doug. (September 1997) ‘HIV futures survey’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 259 Fabian, C. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘Thanks muchly’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8 van Reyk, P. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘High praise’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 260 Barton, D. (March 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. 261 Lavis, M. (February 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. 262 Bennett, J. (February 1997) ‘Complementary concerns’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10- 11. 263 Rees, P.N. (March 1998) ‘Housing responds’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 13. 264 McDaid, J.K. (October 1997) ‘Maasai appeal’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9-10 Murni, S. (May 1998) ‘Our good work’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 265 Barton, D. (March 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. Bennett, J. (February 1997) ‘Complementary concerns’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10-11. Gration, C. and Coates, B. (August 1998) ‘ACON response’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. Lavis, M. (February 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. McGlaughlin, R. (November 1999) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. Rees, P.N. (March 1998) ‘Housing responds’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 13. Stone, D. and Lovney, A. (April 2000) ‘No title provided’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 7. 266 Canning, P. (March 1997) ‘Performance +’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 267 Fabian, C. (Dec 1998 / Jan 1999) ‘Thanks muchly’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 8. 268 McDaid, J.K. (October 1997) ‘Maasai appeal’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9-10; Murni, S. (May 1998) ‘Our good work’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 269 Yould, P. (March 1997) ‘Users’ Challenge’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 270 Donovan, B. (Jan/Feb 1995) ‘Open letter to all management of sex worker establishments’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3 Kate (Sep/Oct 1998) ‘Spit or swallow?’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 5. 271 Hollingsworth, K. (Aug/Oct 2000) ‘News from Kim’ The Professional. Chippendale, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 272 Maddie (May 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 273 Morgan, J. (Nov/Dec 1998) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3-4. 274 Young, R. (Feb/Mar 2000) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (July 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (March 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (May 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (May/Jul 2000) ‘Sex in the Noughties’ The Professional. Chippendale, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Young, R. (Nov/Dec 1998) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 4. Young, R. (Sep/Oct 1998) ‘Employment Rational?’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 5. Young, R. (September 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3-4. 275 Kennedy, P. (August 1997) ‘ACON smooth talk?’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 9. 276 ‘Pansy Potter’ (May/June 1997) ‘Different voice’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 11. 277 Urban, J. (April 1997) ‘No more quandary’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 278 Yould, P. (March 1997) ‘Users’ Challenge’ Talkabout. Darlinghurst, People Living with HIV/AIDS (NSW) Inc: 10. 279 Pete (Autumn 2000) ‘No title provided’ User’s News. Newtown, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 40. 280 ‘Dissatisfied, disillusioned and dirty on society’ (Autumn 1997) ‘Prejudice’ N.U.A.A News. Bondi Junction, NSW User’s & AIDS Association: 9. 281 Ripped Off and Angry (Dec 1991 / Jan 1992) ‘Feeling ripped off!’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: no page numbers provided Annoyed (March 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. Jenny (September 1999) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 282 Roundtree, C. (Sep/Oct 1997) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3. 283 Annaleisa (Jan/Feb 1996) ‘No title provided’ The Professional. Darlinghurst, Sex Workers Outreach Project: 3.
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