“Shameless” Sedentarism: Individual Responsibility for Health?

Abstract

The text critically addresses the polarity between discourses on sedentary and healthy lifestyles, contextualized by new technological resources for searching and disseminating information about health. The argument is that contempora-neous technoscientific rationality has created an “economy of truths” that, with the perspective of leading to safe lifestyles, have been prescribing a normative set of self-discipline ideals which generates anxiety and distress. In the hegemonic production of these regimes, sedentary lifestyle presents itself as a health risk, equivalent to moral failure and an unacceptable lack of self care. We highlight that the abundance of discourses about lifestyles and risk, seen as biopolitical devices imbricated in the processes of communication in health matters, deserves attention for their ethical and political implications. The display of lifestyles associated with the consumption and the production of narratives that perversely influence our culture has taken us far away from a socially possible notion of health. Finally, the regulatory essence of such symbolic references in building knowledge systems that have been (re)defining what means to be healthy, normal, unhealthy is discussed.