The Body in Consumer Culture

In his paper ’The Discourse of Diet’, Bryan Turner (1982) drew attention to the role of dietary management in the production of docile, disciplined bodies. Concluding in a speculative vein, Turner (1982, p 14) remarked that the emerging problem of ageing populations within late capitalist society has pushed a new discourse, demography, to the fore ’centred on a regime of diet, jogging and cosmetics to control the alienated and disaffected citizens of retirement compounds.’ This statement, which we will take as our point of departure, curiously draws together diet, cosmetics and jogging under the rubric of demography yet these activities have already had their meaning pro-defined within the context of a consumer culture. The vast range of dietary, slimming, exercise and cosmetic body maintenance products which are currently produced, marketed and sold point to the significance of appearance and bodily presentation within late capitalist society. Consumer culture latches onto the prevalent self-preservatlonist conception of the body, which encourages the individual to adopt instrumental strategies to combat deterioration and decay (applauded too by state bureaucracies who seek to reduce health costs by educating the public against bodily neglect) and combines it with the notion that the body is a vehicle of pleasure and self-expression. Images of the body beautiful, openly sexual and associated with hedonism, leisure and display, emphasise the importance of appearance and the ’look’.