Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

2015-07-20This dissertation explores the commodification of health narratives, and the cultural shift from shame and silence to public displays of empowerment that make disease discourses speakable and integrated into a larger media therapy culture. This project seeks to examine how physical, mental, and emotional well-being motivates consumers to monitor, organize, and live embodied lives. As a critical feminist project, I situate well-being in a post 2008 economy that takes into account the effects of privatized policies that have produced a culture of corporate activism and individual self-help as a way to navigate and make sense of an increasingly harsh economic and political climate. At the same time, I root this project within a 20th- century historical conception of self-help and consumerism by examining how particular products and companies link spiritual and emotional health to consumer products and individual betterment that proliferates in the 21st- century environment. I argue that U.S. well-being culture intersects with gender and emerging mediated genres that center upon clutter and the home as part of how the middle-class has adapted, transformed, and internalized self-care as central to citizenship. ❧ In my three case studies, I investigate three modes of well-being: physical, mental, and emotional health. I demonstrate how these forms of health overlap and intersect in increasingly complex ways that play out across media formats and new media technologies. In doing so, I demonstrate how the intersections between these modes are used as a model of better living. As I am particularly interested in the construction and development of well-being as an economy, I use the term “well-being domesticities” to illustrate the most recent trend of health, self-actualization, social awareness, and media discourses that dominates how narratives of health as both intimate and feminine are produced, experienced, and historicized within the contemporary post-2008 moment. The relationship between the home and the female body becomes a key historical framework that continues to shape how health and wellness are visualized and internalized across media formats. I turn to newer online platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook and their relationship with television to examine how wellness and notions of well-being are increasingly at the center of what constitutes a “livable” life. I approach well-being through a critical and cultural studies investment in examining representations across media formats and genres, but also by examining the economic and industrial stakes that shape wellness as an institutional force within the United States