The gendering of healthy diets

Abstract

Gendered identities are communicated in places as frequent and ordinary as food packaging, becoming mundane features of everyday life as they sit on supermarket shelves, in cupboards and on office desks. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) allows us to investigate how such identities are buried in packaging in relation to health and fitness. Despite observed broader changes in gendered representations of the body in advertising, in particular relating to the arrival of ‘power femininity’, the products analysed in this article are found to carry fairly traditional and prototypical gender representations, and products marketed at both men and women highlight the need for more precise body management. For women, however, this precision is related to managing the demands of everyday life, packaged as a moral imperative to be healthy, responsible and successful.

“Welcome to pure food city”: tracing discourses of health in the promotional publications of the Postum Cereal Company, 1920-1925

“…Specifically, the three types of promotional publications identified and the linguistic/semiotic strategies they use can serve as categorisation criteria for future marketing studies into the promotional publications of other food brands, as well as a starting point to track their evolution over the past 100 years. On a theoretical level, the historical application of MCDA is also important for the development of social semiotics as, too often, the theory is applied only to contemporary forms of advertising, which risks overstating the novelty of certain marketing practices (Makoni, 2012; Edwards and Milani, 2014; Brookes et al , 2016; Rodgers, 2020; Bouvier and Chen, 2021; Fernández-Vázquez, 2021; Chen and Eriksson, 2022). Now in the internet age, promotional pamphlets/books have taken a new form online on product websites and social media pages, yet many of the same strategies as those in the 1920s are used to convey openness and transparency, social consciousness and health.…”