Body, Capital, and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century

Christian Bonah, Anja Laukötter (dir)
Amsterdam University Press, Series: MediaMatters
2020, 344 p.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv12sdvgj

Lien vers l'ouvrage en ligne (open access).

Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth century in Europe and the U.S. that informed and educated people about life and health as well as practices improving them. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate the relationships between film/television, private and public actors of the health sector and economic developments. The book explores the performative and interactive power of these visual media on individual health understandings, perceptions and practices. Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century aims to better understand how bodily health has evolved as a form of capital throughout the century.

This is a publication of the ERC funded BodyCapital project.

Table of Contents

Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century: An Introduction by Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter

1. Playing the Doctor, Playing the Patient: The Performance of Health Identities in Live Medical Television, 1958 by Timothy M. Boon

2. The BBC’s Children in Need Telethon: The Currencies of Compassion by Karen Lury

3. Let’s Talk about S...: The Influence of Cinéma Vérité on Sex Education in French National Television around 1968 by Christian Bonah

4. Measuring Subjectification: The Reception of Health Education Campaigns and the Evaluation Conundrum by Luc Berlivet

5. Swimming the Crawl to Educate the Modern Body: Visual Material and the Expanding Market for Participatory Sports in the USA, 1890s–1930s by Olaf Stieglitz

6. Inside Magoo (1960): Comedic Commentary on 1950s America and Cancer by David Cantor

7. ‘One Feels so Much in These Times!’ Emotional Education and the Construction of New Subjectivities: Sex Education Films in Early 1960s GDR by Anja Laukötter

8. Revealing Norms and Sowing Confusion: VALIE EXPORT’s Body by Sophie Delpeux

9. ‘Before Education, Good Food, and Health’: World Citizenship and Biopolitics in UNESCO’s Post-War Literacy Films by Zoë Druick

10. From Colonial to Global: Visuals and the Historiography of Body Government beyond Europe by Jean-Paul Gaudillière

11. Zika Virus, Global Health Communication, and Dataveillance by Kirsten Ostherr