Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power

1 “It’s Down To You”: Psychology, Magazine Culture, and the Governing of Female Bodies

19 1 “It’s Down To You” Psychology, Magazine Culture, and the Governing of Female Bodies LISA BL ACK M A N Goldsmiths College “Applying the art of social conduct at the level on which the individual was constituted and regulated meant that power had to find a way into the minute and mundane reaches of the habits, desires, interests, and daily lives of individuals” (Cruikshank, 1999, p. 8). Throughout the last two centuries, particularly within the United States and United Kingdom, interrogations and understandings of the complex links between practices of self-help and arts of government, are now recognized as being integral to how populations were defined, specified, addressed, and transformed into particular kinds of citizen (Brown, 1995; Cruikshank, 1999; Joyce, 1994; Rose, 1990). In the nineteenth century, key sites for these “technologies of citizenship” to circulate and proliferate included welfare, education, the church, social reform, charity, and philanthropy (Smiles, 1864). However, it is now accepted among many contemporary commentators that “selfhelp ” as a particular kind of cultural logic—and set of practices of self-production and understanding—has extended across almost all aspects of our public and private lives (Furedi, 2004; Rimke, 2000; Rose, 1996). Nikolas Rose (1996) argues that neoliberal or democratic forms of government presuppose the very kind of “citizen-subject” (Cruikshank, 1999, p. 22) that is assumed within the psychological sciences. He refers to this subject as the “fiction of autonomous selfhood ,” and through a compelling genealogical investigation links its production more explicitly to the discourses of counseling and therapy. This psychotherapeutic logic, he argues, demands and requires people to take on increasing personal responsibility for their own health and psychological well-being. This logic appeals to the individual’s desires to exercise choice, autonomy, and self-control across a range of sites in lisa blackman 20 which they are subjects, through the alignment of their own ability and capacities to transform themselves with their possible achievement of success, happiness, health, and so forth. The desire to empower oneself, some argue, becomes a key process through which the democratic citizen is produced, maintained, and encouraged. One key question emerging from the range of studies investigating this link is one that seeks to understand why individuals comply with certain technologies without seeing them as cultural dupes. This framing has a long history and has been central to specific understandings of mass psychology, which have framed particular ways of understanding the so-called masses through a specific trope of social influence (cf. Blackman & Walkerdine, 2001). This chapter seeks to contribute to these debates by considering magazine culture as one key contemporary site where self-help practices have multiplied, framing problems of everyday life through what Ferguson (1983) has termed the “responsibility ethic” (p. 189). This ethic is one that presupposes that the resolution to problems, for women, is to be found through their own hard work, effort, and labor. These resolutions are such that “self-help” is the axiomatic set of practices proffered as the way out of misery, suffering, bad luck, and psychological and bodily troubles. The link between self-help and women’s magazine culture (and popular culture more generally) has raised questions about the relation between the psychology of women and the cultural purchase and potency of particular practices.1 However, cultural analysts’ understandings of the production of female subjectivities have often been hindered by essentialism, even when these reductive approaches have been most vehemently opposed. Implied psychologies are often brought in through the back door within accounts, which fail to engage adequately with how women cope with the competing ways in which they are addressed across the various practices, which “make up” their lives (Beetham, 1996; Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001). The question of how to understand the production of psychology and the relation of the psychological to consumer culture is a key focus of this chapter. Inventing the Psychological The question of how to approach the psychological in light of the mantra of antiessentialism is one that has engaged many sociologists (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Rose, 1996). These arguments focus on the production of particular kinds of psychology through the ways in which institutional practices and the discourses that help to support them create particular kinds of self-practice and understanding. “It’s Down To You” 21 Although this work is useful when exploring the relation between government objectives and practices of self-management, what is never given any serious analytic...