Forbidding your cake and eating it too: health performance strategies in U.S. middle class families

Abstract

Interviewing 67 primarily middle-class parents and children in a southern U.S. city, we learned that families know a great deal about the dangers of excess sugar consumption. However, in the private spaces of family life, families let down their guard and enjoy sugary treats, often treating them as symbolic markers of love and comfort. Theoretical concepts emerging from the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman (1959) and from contemporary symbolic interactionists illuminate how sugar consumption is simultaneously shunned and celebrated in private family life. Moving beyond previous research, we track the ways sugary products facilitate love, sanity, and privacy to make daily family life bearable for both parents and children. We call the rhetorical and physical practices that enable excusable sugar indulgence Health Performance Strategies. Our findings on how families engage in these health performance strategies have broader implications for many other efforts to govern the health habits of families.