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From ‘immoral’ users to ‘sunbed addicts’ : the media–medical pathologising of working-class consumers and young women in late twentieth-century England
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Creed, Fabiola (2022) From ‘immoral’ users to ‘sunbed addicts’ : the media–medical pathologising of working-class consumers and young women in late twentieth-century England. Social History of Medicine, 35 (3). pp. 770-792. doi:10.1093/shm/hkac012 ISSN 1477-4666.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkac012
Abstract
Summary Drawing on the changing representations of sunbed consumers within everyday entertainment media and national newspapers from the late 1980s to early 1990s, this article will demonstrate how sunbed use was framed, at first, as an ‘immoral’ working-class activity, and later as a growing addictive threat to white adolescent women. Medical experts had finally confirmed that sunbeds increased the risk of developing skin cancer, and the media had taken this ‘public health’ matter into their own hands. As this occurred during a backlash against Thatcherism, their anti-sunbed coverage became entangled with moralised concerns about class, women and consumerism. These sunbed warnings stigmatised both ‘yuppies’ and young women who exercised their new economic freedoms. Unravelling these complex political, economic and social tensions will also show how historians can use fictional and ‘low-brow’ media sources (from television soaps, cartoons and the Daily Mail) to further develop the history of public health approaches.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine R Medicine > RC Internal medicine R Medicine > RL Dermatology T Technology > TT Handicrafts Arts and crafts |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||
| SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Tanning salons , Suntan -- Great Britain, Skin -- Cancer -- Risk factors, Moral panics , Health in mass media, Social classes in mass media , Public health -- History, Working class women | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Social History of Medicine | ||||||
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1477-4666 | ||||||
| Official Date: | August 2022 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 35 | ||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 770-792 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1093/shm/hkac012 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 11 July 2023 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 11 July 2023 | ||||||
| RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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