Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology

Abstract

This article brings together work at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural studies to explore the psychological and cultural significance of women’s magazine culture. Drawing on rhetorical psychology and Foucault’s later work on ‘techniques of the self’, it explores the complex injunctions and positionings that create the range of gendered anxieties and dilemmas produced within neoliberal relations. Self-help is discussed as a practice that condenses or brings together a range of cultural anxieties, bodily tensions, emotional economies and forms of psychopathology which are ‘already constituted’ lived realities for many of the readers engaging with these magazines. The article concludes that further engagement with critical psychology by cultural theorists will enable cultural studies to bring the body back into cultural theory and to consider the translation of cultural injunctions across the designations of race, class, sexuality and gender.