ABSTRACT
My task in this paper is to elucidate some of the social “imaginaries”’ that are relevant to concepts of health and the body in contemporary North American culture. 1 The nature of this task requires me to cover a range of topics that is wider than usual. The concepts of the right and proper life and death that make up social imaginaries are learned and developed in a multitude of diverse ways in families, organizations, communities, and institutions, but they are also developed in relation to (influencing and being influenced by) the vast and heterogeneous contents of the popular media. In part through such media, social imaginaries have an international life, carried along with the global flows of goods, ads, images and people. And in part through the force of media imagery, I will argue, social imaginaries have an important role within North America, in laying the groundwork for the oppression of disadvantaged groups in what amounts to a new incarnation of social Darwinism.
