Postfeminism and Health

Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives

Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans, Martine Robson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317301530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2021 BPS Book Award: Academic Text category, this groundbreaking book employs a transdisciplinary and poststructuralist methodology to develop the concept of 'postfeminist healthism, ' a twenty-first-century understanding of women's physical and mental health formed at the intersections of postfeminist sensibilities, neoliberal constructs of citizenship and the notion of health as an individual responsibility managed through consumption. Postfeminist healthism is used in this book to explore seven topics where postfeminist sensibility has the most impact on women's health: self-help, weight, surgical technologies, sex, pregnancy, responsibilities for others' health and pro-anorexia communities. The book explores the ways in which the desire to be normal and live a good life is tied to expectations of 'normal-perfection' circulated across interpersonal interactions, media representations and expert discourses. It diagnoses postfeminist healthism as unhealthy for both those women who participate in it and those whom it excludes and considers how more positive directions may emerge.

By exploring the under-researched intersection of postfeminism and health studies, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in psychology, gender and women's studies, health research, media studies and sociology.

1

Self-help

Nobody can be anybody else, but we can all be better¹

Two women talking in Scotland. One saying she had seen a counsellor for workplace bullying and found herself exploring how her responses to her colleagues were linked to a childhood trauma. The other looked incredulous. Her constant feelings of anger, now dealt with as far as she was concerned with medication, had at one point also led to counselling sessions. There she was made to do ‘stupid’ things like imagining a room upside down and filling in worksheets that were ‘like homework’.

Woven into this overheard conversation are three key themes of self-help: a ‘therapeutic attitude’ in which past experience is understood as affecting the current self, often in unconscious ways; an understanding that the self can work on the self, with the help of psychological experts who offer a ‘pedagogy of the self’ through tools like homework; and a normalisation of psychological discourse for making sense of ourselves. For example, that workplace bullying and anger are understood in terms of the women’s individual psychology and brain chemistry, rather than, for example, wider political, economic or societal issues that may create unhealthy contexts for women (or indeed that perhaps ‘anger’ is a bad character trait for women).

Making sense of the self through psychological discourse is part of a wider assemblage called the ‘psy-complex’ (aka ‘psy’). The psy-complex is a term used to describe the way that psychological institutions have developed to inform how we make sense of ourselves and what it means to be a good person. The psy-complex is a ‘material and ideological meshwork of psychological ideas and institutions that structure academic departments, professional interventions, and popular-cultural representations of mind and behaviour …[it] includes prescriptions for good behaviour in the fields of psychiatry, psychotherapy, education, social work, and self-help’ (Parker, 2015, p. 6–7). Within psy-discourse, a good psychological self is one who is able to look inwards and explore their motivations, cognitions and underlying frameworks that she or he uses for thinking about issues. These reflexive skills are understood as allowing the self to know itself better and, from this more knowledgeable position, work on itself so that thoughts and behaviours can be directed towards its chosen goals.

Psy-discourse provides the foundations for self-help, a huge global industry (reported to be an $11 billion industry in the United States alone; Groskop, 2013), which includes TV shows, magazines, books, DVDs, YouTube channels and a range of social media. Self-help hails in its audience an understanding that they can transform themselves. From one standpoint, this is an exciting prospect. Classic psychology suggests that self-actualisation is the pinnacle of human need (Maslow, 1954) and self-help offers a pathway to self-actualisation through self-mastery. Self-help offers the message that we can be agents of change to a better, healthier, happier life. What’s not to like?

But, as we show in the first section of this chapter, poststructuralist-informed work suggests that we treat self-help literature with caution. Critical perspectives of the self-help literature challenge the idea that therapeutic discourses are the route to freedom. Instead they argue that self-help can be understood as a form of control, tying people to a particular and limited understanding of the self that has profound implications for subjectivity and practice. From this perspective, discourses of self-liberation are harnessed in the service of control, in particular, directing people towards individualism which meets the needs of late capitalist economies.

A second concern regarding self-help is the gendered aspects of therapeutic discourse. Self-help literature is taken up by significantly more women than men, even though it was originally a male genre (McGee, 2005; Schrager, 1993). And is often explicitly or implicitly focused on issues related to femininity. See for example, the bestselling books across the decades, such as Women Who Love Too Much (Norwood 1985), Men and from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray 1992) and Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (Sandberg, 2013). As Gill (2007c) states, ‘in a culture saturated by individualistic self-help discourses, the self has become a project to be evaluated, advised, disciplined and proved or bought “into recovery”. What is so striking, however, is how unevenly distributed these quasi-therapeutic discourses are … it is the women and not the men who are addressed’ (p. 262). Self-help thus constructs not just an ideal subject, but an ideal female subject: an issue that has received less attention in the literature on postfeminism or in critical psychology beyond it being mentioned as a key space of postfeminist sensibility. We explore the gendered character of self-help in this chapter as we attempt to develop an account of why there is such an uneven distribution. To explore and contextualise the gendered aspects of self-help literature, we use the second section of this chapter to consider the way gendered ideas of mental health and illness are culturally produced and transmitted. In so doing, we offer a (partial) genealogy of how women’s psychology has historically been tied to notions of emotional fragility, as represented through the figure of Ophelia in a range of media texts about girlhood.

Having critically explored self-help and located this analysis within wider historical discourses of femininity and mental health, in our third section we develop our analysis to examine contemporary self-help within postfeminist sensibility. Self-help is a key feature of postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007b), yet self-help is rarely (if ever) central to postfeminist analyses. To address this gap, we explore how discourses derived from historical notions of women as inherently emotionally vulnerable compete with postfeminist ‘girl power’ discourses. As we show throughout this book, postfeminism is produced and enabled through contradictory discourses and, here, we explore how, within a postfeminist sensibility, women are constructed as both inherently flawed and able to transform themselves into (postfeminist) perfection. We argue that self-help bridges the gap between this contradiction, offering a route map from flawed to perfect through the use of self-help techniques, techniques that become part of the repertoire for good citizenship so that women are held accountable for transforming themselves into particular cultural ideals of femininity. Returning to the idea that self-help produces a particular ideal citizen that aligns with the needs of the economy, we explore how contemporary self-help constructs ideal femininity in terms of economic citizenship: a woman who can contribute productively in a shifting economy. Underpinning these ideas is an individualist perspective, so that it becomes an individual responsibility and expectation to work on the self, finding individual solutions to individual problems despite the potential for them to be considered social problems with social solutions. Furthermore, the work of transformation is never done; there are relapses and new areas to improve, so that self-actualisation through transformative self-help remains an elusive goal. The promise of perfection is a cruel optimism.

Historicising our ‘inner self’

Self-help literature offers an array of apparently different routes to happiness and fulfilment. Some explicitly come from areas within psychology and psychoanalysis, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, neurolinguistic programming, acceptance and commitment therapy, sometimes even neuropsychology. Others draw their expertise from different arenas, creating an apparently eclectic range, including thinking positively (e.g. The Secret, Byrne, 2006), tidying up differently (e.g. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo, 2014) or self-hypnosis (e.g. Hypnotic Gastric Band, McKenna, 2016). Despite apparently drawing on a range of theoretical approaches, sometimes in eclectic ways, critical analysts argue that what is notable is how similar the vision of what makes us happy is across self-help literature, identifying a reoccurring trope of a highly individualised ideal self. This individualised ideal self is one who is able to use therapeutic language to think reflexively about its thoughts, emotions and behaviour in order to be autonomous, self-knowing and self-regulating (Rose, 1990). Such a self is able to take an ‘Olympian view’ (de Vos, 2015, p. 252; Blackman, 2004) and, using psychological language, turn ‘the psy diagnostic gaze upon itself’ (Hazleden, 2003, in de Vos, 2015, p. 252), identifying its faults and working on them to transform the self and move it towards self-actualisation and its vision of ideal self. This psychologised, self-managing self is thus the ‘wellspring of freedom, responsibility and choice … [a self who] possess the ability to choose happiness over unhappiness, success over failure, and even health over illness’ (Rimke, 2000, p. 73). To understand why a wide range of self-help literature, including anti-self-help literature, should articulate such a similar ideal self, we consider below the conditions of possibility produced from the psy-complex, feminism, religion, other historical attempts at self-betterment and contemporary neoliberal political economies.

Augustine’s Confessions, written around 400ad are typically held as marking the first ever autobiography and a landmark transition of thinking that demonstrated a reflective, private self (Freeman, 1993; Rose, 1997). But, as Elias and others argue, it was not until the Middle Ages when a collective shift to this kind of private thinking happened. This move towards a more reflexive, private self related to changes in political organisation that required a calculating self, able to manage the intrigues of court, rather than a more vicarious personality suited to the battlefield (Elias, 1983). This psychologisation was further developed by a shift from sovereign to disciplinary power; as the power of monarchy decreased in favour of democratic government, so did the power of the monarch to use overt punishment to control people. Governments instead required ways to encourage its citizens to choose to comply with regulations and one technique to do this was through the development of a psychological understanding of citizenship, in which good citizens monitored and regulated themselves (Foucault, 2008; Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose, 1996; also see Chapter 2, where we develop these ideas of disciplinary power and governmentality). The stage was thus set for a psychologised culture receptive to the ideas of psychoanalysis that emerged in the early twentieth century.

Freud developed his theory of the self in a clinical context, mostly analysing women who were understood as suffering neurotic and hysteric symptoms, but the ideas he developed from these various case studies were presented as universal issues that could help make sense of everyone. Psychoanalytic constructs thus brought together the normal and the pathological (Illouz, 2008). Everyone had an ego managing the competing demands of the id and the super-ego. Everyone progressed through the tensions of psychodynamic development. Those who lost their object of desire in favour of gender identification and sexual normativity became melancholic and those who did not had attachment issues or were stuck, fixated in earlier stages of development. Key Freudian terms like ‘repression’ and ‘denial’ filtered into everyday talk, as well as being taken up by psychological, academic and media institutions, which in turn circulated these ideas, including into self-help literature. For example, Stephen Grosz’s (2014) The Examined Life: How we Lose and Find Ourselves was one of the Times Bestsellers of 2014. Grosz, a trained and practising psychoanalyst, offered a series of case studies of his patients in which unconscious responses to childhood traumas were identified. In ‘Emma’s’ case study, for example, her disagreements with her boyfriend were related to a childhood memory where her father embarrassed her because she had declared her love for a female teacher. In this account, Emma’s analysis allowed her to recognise her inability to feel emotions and her memory of lost feelings for her teacher grants her the space to reconnect with herself.

As well as psychoanalysis, the twentieth century also witnessed the development of another important psy-discourse, that of humanism. Humanism brought in a focus on the importance of individual actualisation so that the self could be freed. Humanism conceptualised the self as coherent and authentic, located in the person, able to be found and freed. Thus, although they are different schools of thought, both psychoanalysis and humanist psychology conceptualise the route to self-development in individualistic terms, through a person’s ability to look inward, identify their thoughts and feelings and reflect on these in a deep way usually with the help of an expert, such as an analyst. Through such reflection, a better understanding of the self can develop and from this understanding a more ‘choiceful’ life, since self-understanding is associated with self-mastery. Psychological language thus made the self intelligible in a particular way, which was taken up across a range of institutions and in everyday language. A therapeutic culture developed that normalised the ideal of a self-regulating, psychological self: ‘not confined to the schoolroom, the courtroom, the social work interview, the therapy session … [pys-discourse] proliferate across practices of everyday life – of domesticity, of erotics, of leisure, the gym, the spots field, the supermarket, the cinema’ (Rose, 1990, p. 264).

The filtering of psychological language into everyday life gave people a universal language with which to make sense of themselves: all have a self who would benefit from ‘emotional healing’ and associated transformation towards greater wellbeing. This psychological language offered a liberationist vision of self-actualisation and freedom ‘the emancipation of transformation, and an understanding that through working on the self we can achieve happiness and the good life: fulfilment in our work, our relationships, our lifestyles, minds and bodies’ (de Vos, 2015). But equally, therapeutic culture was predicated on understanding that all people are in need of transformation, always already vulnerable and dysfunctional. Therapeutic culture (and associated self-help) thus produces a subjectivity interpreted ‘through a prism of illness’ (Brunila and Siivonen, 2014, p. 61). Therapeutic culture also required a self that was the agent of its own transformation. But to be an agent of self-transformation, people need to learn skills and techniques of reflection and interpretation and to do this they must turn to psychological experts (counsellors, therapists, self-help books, websites etc.). Therapeutic culture is therefore predicated on the self only being able to help itself by turning to experts. The ‘freedom’ of self-help thus comes at a price: to understand ourselves as always already flawed, in need of transformation, able to help ourselves but only with experts of psy and only in the direction of an individualised, psychological self.

Psychoanalytical and humanistic psychology have been significant in proposing a self with an interior that can be ‘fixed’ by self-help and the expert. However, already existing constructs made the entry of these disciplines into cultural life smoother. Of the various historical contexts that facilitated the normalisation and resonance of these psy-discourses across a range of institutions, both feminism and religion have been important precursors. Illouz (2008), for example, argues that the focus on the psychological interior as the source for self-development and happiness was facilitated by twentieth-century feminist emphasis on ‘the personal as political’. The second-wave feminist standpoint that public and private lives were connected by ideology contributed to a blurring of distinctions between public and private, since what went on in the home was understood as representing wider gendered power relations. Feminist ideas combined with therapeutic culture so that, in a range of public and private life, from factory management to intimate relationships, a healthy self was understood as one which could look inward, identify problematic patterns in thinking and then work on this thinking to facilitate change.

This process of looking inward and identifying faults as a stepping-stone to self-improvement had earlier antecedents in Christian religious dictates of pastoral care, purification and confession. Parallels have been drawn between the focus on self-reliance and self-control in contemporary self-help literature and historical and contemporary religious practices concerned with self-betterment and transformation (e.g. Hochschild 1994; McGee, 2005; also see Chapter 4, where we explore links between confession and subjectivity further). Hook (2010) draws parallels between psychology and the historical role of the pastor and other religious positions. Comparing contemporary psychology with historical Western cultures structured by Christianity, Hook argues that both involve a ‘shaping of the private self’ by providing norms and rules to follow and schemas of self-transformation and guidance. In this comparison, both psychology and religion come to define what is normal and acceptable (Rose, 1999; Hook, 2010).

Religion and psychology offer transformational tools for understanding who we are and what we hope to become. But, rather than see psychology as supplanting religion, Rose (1997) argues that we should pay attention to the subtle ways in which self-help, psychology and religious ideas interact. For example, one of the reasons that the new (psychological) ideas of the self were able to percolate into cultural norms was because they interconnected with established (religious) knowledge. Similarly, Illouz (2008) suggests that in drawing on the narratives around Greek characters like Oedipus and Narcissus, Freud refashioned older concepts of the self into psychoanalytical theory.

Religious institutions and practices thus offer important conditions of possibility for the rise of self-help in the twentieth century. Other historical antecedents contributing to an understanding of the self as able to transform with the help of expert advice include books designed for social mobility. For example, the first book with self-help in the title, Self-help by Smiles, published in 1859, offered a manual that advised men on how to become wealthy and famous. Another example includes Victorian manners books (e.g. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, Hartley, 1860/2014). Usually written for a female audience, the authors took on the role of expert to instruct the reader in etiquette, so that they would able to understand and act in the world differently with view to increasing their class status. Like the therapeutic culture that was to fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Self-help
• 2 Weight
• 3 Technologies
• 4 Sex
• 5 Pregnancy
• 6 Intimate responsibilities
• 7 Pro-ana
• Epilogue
• References
• Index