[Discourses about health risk behaviour and the moralization of the everyday life]

Cien Saude Colet. 2010 Jun:15 Suppl 1:1699-708. doi: 10.1590/s1413-81232010000700081.
[Article in Portuguese]

Abstract

The text analyses critically the polarity between discourses about healthy life styles and the sedentariness in the context of new technologies for health information research and dissemination. We argue that the techno-scientific rationality has grown an 'economy of trues' which, on the perspective of conducting to safe life styles, has prescribed a normative ideal of self discipline which tends to generate distress and consumerism of artifacts of burning calories. In the hegemonic production of systems of truth, sedentariness has been seen as a kind of unhealthy behavior that is ranked as moral failure. Emphasis is given about the multiple discourses embracing life styles and risk, taken as biopolitics devices imbricated in the communication processes in health, which has to be lightened up for their ethics and politics implications. The spectacularization of life styles associated to the consumption and the production of narratives that have badly influenced our culture, making bigger the distance of a socially possible notion of health. We discussed the regulatory essence of such a symbolic reference in the construction of knowledge systems that have been (re)defined what is to be healthy, normal and unhealthy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Life Style*
  • Morals*
  • Risk-Taking*
  • Sedentary Behavior