Marketing Sexual Health in Britain: Visual and Commercial Lives of Infection, 1913-1996

This thesis examines British sexual-health advertising in eight distinct periods between 1913 and 1996 by drawing on a diverse pool of historical materials, including manuscripts, letters, reports, medical journals, advertising journals, and newspaper reports. Alongside these, the thesis interrogates a representative selection of sexual health imagery – including posters/billboards, newspaper advertisements, leaflets and flyers, films, and television advertisements. Using these sources, the thesis highlights key moments for British sexual health advertising within the examined periods–such as significant changes in social conditions, legislative changes, and changes to administrative bodies.
It is argued that a complex and changing network of stakeholders was active in both shaping and responding to sexual health advertising. These stakeholders fell into four broad groupings: policy-makers; volunteers/activists; the advertising industry; and commercial enterprises. The thesis has three core arguments: [1] these stakeholder groups interacted in complex, shifting ways which had both direct and indirect consequences for the content and context of sexual health advertising; [2] there were various shifts in power and influence within the stakeholder network; [3] techniques of advertising sexual health changed over time, and these shifts were often related to the shifts of power within the network of stakeholders.
Collectively, the visual representations of sexual health and infection guided cultural and national discourses of contagion around sexual health. One example of how advertising specifically influenced these discourses was the use of the infected subject, a motif with a key role in many sexual-health advertisements. This motif was inflected in different ways within the eight periods examined. Analysing the utilisation of the infected subject is one way the thesis hopes to provide insight into how sexual health advertising contributed to the cultural and national discourses that shaped the visual and commercial lives of infection in twentieth-century Britain.