Healthy Femininity and Post-feminist Subjects: A Study of Swedish Health- and Fitness Magazines

During the last decades of the 1900’s, a commercial health industry transformed a previous Swedish public health regimen characterized by strong state control. Running and exercising at gyms are widely practiced, and new products, diets and trends appear constantly.

An ideology of “healthism” has been identified as salient to neoliberal late modern society, where health and a fit body are important lifestyle markers and metaphors for the good life. This includes historically new gender ideals – the well-trained female body and the appearance-oriented (“meterosexual” or “spornosexual”) man – closely associated with diet and exercise practices.

The paper explores the changing discourses on health through an analysis of Swedish health- and fitness magazines from mid-20^th century until present time. These magazines have, since the 1990’s, become influential elements in popular culture, available in most supermarkets and with an increasing number of titles and niches. The paper argues that the body emerge, in gendered ways, as a means as well as a goal, and that the individual is increasingly cut off from her contexts (society, politics, the environment).

The paper also specifically discusses the “fit” woman as a new cultural ideal (since 1980) and engages in the feminist debate on how to understand her. Is she a norm-breaking emancipatory figure, challenging historical notions of feminine weakness and inferiority, or rather a post-feminist celebration of the strong individual, communicating the message that there is no longer a need for feminist struggle? (Bordo 1993; Dworkin & Wachs 2009; Heywood & Dworkin 2003; McRobbie 2009).