Constructing and Consuming Imagined Futures: Advertising Healthcare to Publics and Professionals in Twentieth-century Britain

Drawing upon gender and feminist studies, the project approaches healthcare advertisements as material-semiotic nodes in the production of expertise and authority, to examine the material and discursive entanglements of knowledge production and practice, through which healthcare producers and consumers engage. Within the study, healthcare is understood to be formed of multiple and overlapping markets, consisting of healthcare producers and both lay and professional consumers. The study examines the production and circulation of advertisements within these markets, the use of particular material-discursive practices to target and engage diverse consumer groups, and the ways in which these marketplaces were subject to change. Based on previous research into the depiction of cycling women in bicycle advertisements in 1890s, I expect gender and sexuality to emerge in healthcare advertisements in several distinct ways. Firstly, the construction of gendered and sexual subjectivities will be used by healthcare producers to define and enable the modes and terms through which health is perceived, articulated and practiced, or rather, to imbue 'health' with a social dimension. Secondly, nonhuman objects (i.e. pharmaceuticals, healthcare technologies and disease) will be inserted into human relationships (e.g. parental, marital or sexual) and embedded within the practice of relational subjectivities. Thirdly, 'imagined futures' will be ascribed to objects in advertisements, providing a space for consensus between healthcare producers and consumers in the practice of health. Imagined from the perspective of becoming rather than being, the promise of a healthy body will be displaced from the present into an ever-receding future. 'Health' will be revealed to be in a constant state of production and reproduction, subject to situated and competing interests and discourses.

Over the past three decades, the analysis and critique of scientific representation has expanded from language to include visual representation and materiality, as scholars turn to the embodied nature of scientific knowledge and practice. However, healthcare advertisements have remained relatively under-examined in histories of twentieth-century Britain. This study contributes significantly to the historiography in its sustained examination of healthcare advertisements and marketing practices. Methodologically, the project employs qualitative methods to select appropriate sources from the Science Museum and Boots Company Archive that will become the basis of three case studies. Possible topics include the diphtheria vaccination programme in 1940s, mass X-ray services between 1945 and 1960s, and the HIV/AIDs awareness campaign in 1980s.