The art of governing smoking : discourse analysis of Australian anti-smoking campaigns

During the last 20 years, anti-smoking campaigns have been developed in Australia in an effort to reduce the prevalence of smoking. Existing research indicates that these campaigns have provoked an increase in the negative attitudes towards smoking, and messages encouraging people to quit have reached increasing numbers of men and women. While existing research shows that anti-smoking campaigns are ‘effective’ at reducing rates of smoking, there is a distinct lack of research that theorizes about why anti-smoking campaigns are ‘effective’. In this paper, Foucauldian discourse analysis is employed to examine a recent series of television anti-smoking campaigns in New South Wales Australia, and to explore the knowledges and techniques used to construct and disseminate an anti-smoking message. The aim of this paper is to use a number of examples from this series of anti-smoking campaigns to show that the medical knowledge, imagery, and language dominantly used, legitimates and confirms the ‘expert’ status of medicine in regard to smoking conduct, and normalizes health conduct according to the medical dichotomy of healthy/non-smoking individuals and unhealthy/smoking individuals. I argue that the anti-smoking discourse disseminated in these campaigns is underpinned by some of the key features of neo-liberalism, and passively coerces individuals into making ‘healthy’ choices. The paper concludes by problematizing both the universal applicability of these anti-smoking campaigns, and the notion of self-governance, specifically in relation to young people who smoke.