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‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2022

Maeve Eberhardt Open the ORCID record for Maeve Eberhardt [Opens in a new window]
Maeve Eberhardt*
Affiliation:
University of Vermont, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Maeve Eberhardt, University of Vermont, 85 South Prospect Street, 517 Waterman Building, Burlington, VT 05405, USA meberhar@uvm.edu
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Abstract

In this article, I ask how the body is discursively constructed within the wellness industry. I analyze a corpus of articles from the Goop franchise, examining how bodies are constructed, and how subjects are impelled to act within contemporary neoliberal risk culture. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis reveals that the body is ultimately constructed as unwell and at risk, by virtue of its presence in the environment. Faced with this inescapable risk, the neoliberal citizen is responsible for managing the self in ever-increasing domains. I link the particularities of this discursive embodiment to larger cultural imperatives of self-surveillance, discipline, and control, and argue that it is particularly a white female subject who is interpellated within this discourse. Throughout, the wellness industry is revealed as propelling the interminable cycle of the project of the self, and as a contemporary mechanism for the reproduction of docile white female bodies. (Discursive embodiment, neoliberal ideology, risk society, corpus analysis, critical discourse analysis, feminist critique)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 47 - 69
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Editors of Language in Society, as well as two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments helped bring my arguments into sharper focus. Any remaining errors are my own.

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