Ideology and resistance in young people’s experiences of health under the ‘imperative of enjoyment’ Kathrine Vitus Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark Abstract This article explores upper secondary school students’ understandings and experiences of health in Denmark, where public health promotions appeal to pleasure. Health promotion thereby taps into capitalist society’s ‘imperative of enjoyment’, which reproduces ideological fantasies about the fulfilment of desires through the consumption of health. Based on qualitative empirical material produced through participatory and visual methods during fieldwork conducted in 2012, the analysis shows that relations between healthiness and pleasure are conflated and paradoxical: the students try to fit into society not only by being healthy, but also by enjoying healthiness; but if they fail pleasure, they fail healthiness and experience a loss of individual social value. Although the ‘enjoyment society’ has the potential to produce individualisation and marginalisation, the students in this study actively attempt to subvert its double bind by insisting that collective experiences with peers constitutes the foundation of enjoyable healthiness. Nevertheless, public health promotions that reproduce enjoyment as an imperative, even in the pursuit of health, risk reinforcing young people’s resistance towards health. Keywords: consumerism, psychoanalysis, public health, youth, interviewing (qualitative), visual methods I have written ‘happiness’, because I believe it is important that whether you have a healthy or an unhealthy lifestyle is not just about your body, but about enjoying life. I think happi- ness and pleasure are important [...] It is, like, up to you to make that happen [...] but for young people it can be difficult. (Gabriel, 16 years old) Introduction In Western societies, such as Danish society, health is ‘imperative’: ‘at once the duty of each and the objective of all’ (Foucault 1984, cited in Lupton 1995: 1). State agencies promote healthy lifestyle choices as a form of social medicine, which becomes constitutive of the ways in which we understand and ‘live’ our bodies (Lupton 1995). In Denmark, the promotion of public health has a prominent place in the welfare state, which sponsors institutional interven- tions ranging from anti-smoking and anti-alcohol consumption policies applied to all public institutions, to canteen subsidies at state schools and fitness membership subsidies at work- places in the public sector. Throughout primary and secondary school, Danish youth are © 2017 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. xx No. xx 2017 ISSN 0141-9889, pp. 1–15 doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12611