“Unveil your Inner youth” science, gender and anti-ageing milk marketing in a Chinese society

Abstract

This chapter explores how big pharmaceutical corporations have capitalised on the advancement of nutrition science to enhance their power, image and position among consumers, leading to dietary changes in the market, while unintentionally reinforcing ageism and sexism. It traces the changing marketing activities of adult formula milk products to explore how science has been used to invent new products and rejuvenate existing brands, making claims visually and linguistically about gendered health, ageing and happiness. Academic debates have been critical of dietary health and narratives of social relationships and subjectivity. However, the transnational diffusion of the cultural meanings of nutrition science remains poorly understood, as do its implications for embodied experiences of ageing and self-identity among people of different genders and age groups in Asian societies. Grounded in a multimodal critical discourse analysis of milk product designs, advertisements, social media and websites in Hong Kong, this study argues that the success of adult milk in Chinese society is a result of the glocalisation of nutrition science and marketing, neoliberal governmentality and the unequal gendered relationship in modern Chinese families. These sociopolitical factors stigmatise the aged, the socially viable and the physically inactive as being non-productive, and thus less valuable and respectable consumer citizens.