Abstract

The agencies of the state possess a variety of disciplinary mechanisms that shape and limit subjectivities, and circumscribe social action. Public health policies constitute one of these mechanisms, and those concerning diet and health, because they focus on good nutrition, tend to go unquestioned by the public. This paper analyzes public policies concerning nutrition in Chile as an instance of how the state inserts itself into the subjectivities of middle-class persons in the nation’s capital, Santiago de Chile, focusing on the definition of gender roles and relations and their associated spaces. This unidirectional focus on the transmission of meanings from macro to micro does not, however, imply that individuals are unable to develop their own strategies. By bringing together diet, health and gender, the state constructs a durable framework of meanings that define the domestic sphere as subordinate, thus contributing to the perpetuation of gender inequality. Public health policies on nutrition should be understood as a space of power, and making them visible as such is a necessary step in the process of understanding contemporary shifts in diet and eating practices.