The Body and the Media

Given the recent and intense media coverage of healthy eating especially in women's magazines it is necessary to analyse and contextualise the role that the discourse plays in society especially in terms of women's performance and aesthetic precepts. This book traces the correlation between eating as a social act and the power relations that are exercised on a daily basis identifying the effects that discourses on quality of life and women's health have as a means of maintaining the controlling system that ends in patriarchy. The media then express a fragment of the macro system in which social culture maintains female subordination by using a variety of resources including food.