Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 28

24

Popular Culture Review

this reason, analyses of cultural artifacts and texts are beginning to be seen as
integral to feminist understandings of the body, health, and gender (Clarke and
Olesen 1999).
Moreover, critical readings of popular culture spaces can make apparent
what is often obscured in distinctly biomedical spaces: that dominant discourses
such as biomedicine depend upon and are interimplicated with others, such as
mainstream feminism, fashion and gendered consumerism. In mainstream maga
zines, films and web sites, for instance, different languages of the body, informed
by multiple systems power, collude and sometimes collide to produce what we
might call unfixed “regimes of representation'’. To quote Donna Haraway, these
work as technologies “that turn bodies into stories and stories into bodies” (Haraway
1997:179, cited in Hartouni 1999: 254). These body-stories, I would argue, are far
more powerful than the messages that could come from the clinic alone, especially
for the new targets of health intervention, the undiagnosed or currently healthy.
Critical readings of popular culture sites can illuminate points of collusion be
tween and appropriation of discourses that together buttress larger messages about
gendered embodi