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Chapter
Healthism and individual responsibility
DOI link for Healthism and individual responsibility
Healthism and individual responsibility book
Healthism and individual responsibility
DOI link for Healthism and individual responsibility
Healthism and individual responsibility book
ABSTRACT
This chapter examines health in more depth, and specifically from the perspective of an ideology and phenomenon of "healthism" - which draws profusely from a neoliberal rationale. It discusses the links between healthism and neoliberal governmentality. The chapter shows how the joint effects reinforce the idea that fatness be understood as an individual's responsibility and enforce the fat stigma, and the phenomenon of "wellness" as a gendered mode of neoliberal healthism and its effects. The notion of health and healthy bodies that is promoted by healthism is not only exclusive, it also serves a specific function in neoliberal culture, and is thus a part of the neoliberal governmentality that produces certain type of bodies and subjects. Wellness is basically a broader, less scientific, less hierarchical, and more commercially flexible mode of healthcare. Disguising aesthetic treatments as wellness (or "health") is clearly a calculated marketing tool on the part of the service provider.