Goop - Embodied Health Movement

The image displayed shows Gwynth Paltrow in front of her brand name, Goop, which bleeds down upon a background of many different health problems. The brand Goop calls itself a "modern lifestyle brand" whose mission is to ensure that the beauty industry is clean, straying from the typical toxin filled health and wellness industry. The advertisement puts Gwynth at the center. She is the image of the brand. In front of a list of diseases she sits, showing that she is above modern western health problems. Gwynth is a former model, she is white, blonde, beautiful and rich. By buying into her brand she conveys the impression that you too can sit in front of these illnesses. This ignores the fact that many of her products and concepts of health are stolen ideas from indigenous groups and rebranded to be "new age" and "luxurious." Also disregarding that her own health and beauty do not simply come from these products rather from a life of privilege. Her products include, a one thousand dollar wellness table lamp, $55 jump rope, a $220 vibrator, and a 1 oz $165 face oil. Somehow the products she sells, which are only accessible to the absurdly rich, are meant to cure infertility, depression, hypertension, pain, anxiety, eczema, and uterine problems. By claiming that she is veering away from all of the dirty ingredients that contribute to the health problems that many western people face, she is able to create an embodied health movement that is only obtainable through the purchase of her products. 

An embodied health movement builds on collective illness experiences which contrast mainstream science. In Claire Decoteau's "The Western Disease" Somali parents create an embodied health movement after rates of Autism skyrocket following migration to Canada. These parents are aware that their children's behavior drastically changes when they are in their home country in comparison to when they are in the West, which inspired the coinage of the term, "the western disease." Autism is not a widely recognized condition in Somalia and therefore the increase in behavioral abnormalities and thus high rates of diagnosis lead the parents to believe that this disease is caused by Western problems. These western issues include unhealthy food and the environment contrasting what professionals have to say about the epidemiology of Autism. There is a clear connection between these two instances of embodied health movements. The Somali parents’ embodied health movement in response to Autism diagnosis and Gwynth Paltrows’ embodied health movement as a modern lifestyle brand both display how groups of people contrast professionals. For the Somali community the reason for these anti science claims is because of a lack of trust in Western medicine. For Paltrow it seems as though the anti Western medicine narrative is a way to commodify health and wellness for the benefit of those who are already privileged.