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Abstract: Abstract During World War I, dieting instructions by popular health and beauty experts such as Lulu Hunt Peters, Susanna Cocroft, and Antoinette Donnelly were part of a food dispositif that produced gendered ideas of corporeal citizenship. Dieting was framed as an expression of patriotism and a civic duty. Instructing female readers in self-discipline and self-surveillance, diet discourses promised women initially political and economic equality if they subjected themselves to the new disciplinary regimen. After the war, dieting instructions reframed dieting as a liberating practice for women and associated weight loss with success, white superiority, glamor, and self-determination. Hollywood and fashion design helped dieting to become a wildly popular practice with which women asserted the control over their own bodies and lives. This produced a backlash staged by media and doctors, claimed female dieters to be irrational, in danger and in need of supervision. This article explores the role of advice literature in the subjection of female bodies. PubDate: 2023-09-04
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Abstract: Abstract The platform economy is an ecosystem of algorithmically-organised social–technical relationships. In the specific area of home food delivery via digital platforms, algorithmic mediation motivates agents to act in specific ways based on algorithmic logic, creating a distinct form of subjectivity. Based on an ethnography carried out with delivery riders in the City of Madrid (Spain) between 2021 and 2023, in this paper we explore the concept of participatory subjectivity, proposing a distinction between three categories: (a) systems in which the delivery worker seeks algorithmic recognition, (b) systems in which users act in such a way as to be ignored by the algorithm and (c) systems in which it is the design of the algorithms themselves that fosters participation by users. We believe that the concept of participatory subjectivity contributes to the debate on algorithmic mediation in the platform economy, while also affording new perspectives on its effects on workers. PubDate: 2023-08-29
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Abstract: Abstract This essay examines the dramatization of a new model of selfhood in U.S. naturalist fiction at the turn of the twentieth century and how it was taken up by advice literature during the interwar years. By tracing a lineage of the self through the characterological types of the caveman, genius, artist, and entrepreneur, the essay shows how the construction of the caveman as a more vital self than the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century morphed into a biologized notion of Romantic genius and further into configurations of artists and entrepreneurs as the century progressed. As the types shade into each other in naturalist fiction and advice literature, they represent a new model for successful working and living that fuses expressive and economic goals, and which anticipates contemporary constructions of work as a pursuit of creative self-expression and self-actualization. PubDate: 2023-08-08
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Abstract: Abstract This research explores the construction of a particular form of maternal identity described as the ‘good mother,’ an idealized form of motherhood within contemporary Western culture. Drawing on 133 interviews with 48 middle and upper-middle class postpartum women conducted in the nine months following pregnancy, we interrogate how maternal identity is uniquely intertwined and understood as associated with the body and health during the postpartum period. Specifically, we propose the good mother habitus, a theoretical construct that it is embedded in, and inseparable from, the presentation of an esthetically fit ‘good body’ and an appropriate lifestyle demonstrated through ‘good health.’ We argue that each of these constructs is individually significant as well as collectively enmeshed to produce a conceptual model of motherhood in which these themes operate dialectically to cultivate a postpartum lifestyle wherein bodies are the visible manifestation of maternal success. PubDate: 2023-07-28
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Abstract: Abstract The study presented here examines the subjective relationship of workers to their work in the historical context. More specifically, it looks at the influence of the transatlantic slave trade on behaviours that have been transmitted across generations on the island of Guadeloupe (French West Indies) and have resulted in collective defence strategies used by today’s workers. These are examined through historical documents and by means of interviews with a psychodynamic approach. The observed elaboration of defence strategies in the context of paid work in Guadeloupe could, thus, partially be the result of the combined effects of the habits formed during the period of slavery and the ascription (as explained by Jean Laplanche’s theory of translation) that happens in the context of the family. PubDate: 2023-06-20 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00160-z
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Abstract: Abstract This article explores the critical tensions between the valorisation of “personal” registers in feminist and queer writing since the mid-1980s—including my own—and cultural theories of the “impersonal” subjects of memoir, family history and photography. Starting with Lauren Berlant’s reading of femininity as generic, the article seeks to situate feminist uses of the “I” within what Denise Riley calls the “outward unconscious, which hovers between people”. To articulate subjectivity not in the first person—or not necessarily—the argument follows Carolyn Laubender’s critique of the “plural self “of recent autotheory, pursuing instead the elusive psychic dynamics of historical and cultural formations in the writing of Gail Lewis and Janet Wolff. Looking at the sense of “wrongful narration” from the point of view of both the subject and the object of a story, the affective investment in personalised accounts is read alongside an intellectual affiliation to the impersonality of language. PubDate: 2023-06-14 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00161-y
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Abstract: Abstract The basis for this article is several sociological studies that have demonstrated contemporary socio-political transformations, such as the fragmentation of social ties or traditional communities, the breakdown of work or relationship spaces that used to provide safe havens for shaping identity, and analyses of neoliberal individuality, especially studies based on French philosopher Foucault’s research on ‘technologies of the self’ and his ‘entrepreneur of himself’ idea. To that end, we will study specific mechanisms for self-constructing subjectivities in a cultural space prone to these technologies: self-help literature. We identify three main mechanisms: reflexivity mediated by psychological categories, self-administered tests and management of emotions. These are all mechanisms developed to be confluent with the cultural needs of neoliberalism, in other words, depoliticising the understanding of conflicts and constructing subjects that can self-manage social risks. PubDate: 2023-06-14 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00162-x
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Abstract: Abstract The paper posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on postcolonial and critical disability theory I suggest that being human as praxis of People with Learning Disabilities is sophisticated and generative but is always enacted in a deeply disablist and ableist world. I explore being human as praxis in (i) a culture of disposability; (ii) the midst of absolute otherness and (iii) the confines of a neoliberal-ableist society. For each theme I start with a provocation, follow up with an exploration and end with a celebration (with the latter referencing the activism of people with learning disabilities). I conclude with some thoughts on simultaneously decolonising and depathologising knowledge production, the importance of recognition and writing for rather than with People with Learning Disabilities. PubDate: 2023-06-12 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00159-6
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Abstract: Abstract This essay connects the mass-produced books of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories since 1930 and the Hardy Boys Adventures since 1927, with the discourses of self-help and self-improvement and argues that the effects these books have on their young readers instigate the formation of a very specific (white, middle class) subjectivity. This modern mode of relating to oneself includes an adjustable, self-assertive, self-monitoring personality, which can be understood as an answer to the challenges of the Second Industrialization and the contingencies connected to the acceleration, fragmentation, de-familiarizations, and individualization of modernity. At the same time, the essay argues, the novels also include a very specific position in terms of gender, race, and class, which, in spite of the figure of Nancy Drew, remains fundamentally linked to the values of patriarchy, the middle class and whiteness. PubDate: 2023-05-06 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00154-x
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Abstract: Abstract The new coronavirus strain that spread across the globe in clusters and claimed millions of lives has significantly impacted how subjectivity and power are performed. The scientific committees empowered by the state have become the leading actors, lying at the heart of all responses to this performance. The article critically examines the symbiotic interaction of these dynamics regarding the COVID-19 experience in Turkey. The analysis of this emergency is divided into two basic stages: the pre-pandemic period, during which infra-level healthcare and risk mechanisms evolve, and the early post-pandemic period, during which alternative subjectivities are marginalised to hold a monopoly over the new normal and victims. Pivoting around the scholarly debates about sovereign exclusion, biopower, and environmental power, this analysis concludes that the Turkish case is an encounter in which these techniques are materialised within the body of the 'infra-state of exception.' PubDate: 2023-04-28 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00156-9
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Abstract: Abstract The body as a thick and complex materiality has been populating social sciences in the last three decades in a critical mode toward both naturalism and social constructionism. The body has been progressively theorized in terms of what is established, even though flexible. In other words, as the structural metaphor of knowledge. The co-construction of bodies is not reduced to the politics of mirroring, truth-discovery, and what I was interested to highlight is how the cosmetic and photographic tactile gaze operates on the body as a tabula rasa. The focus on the skin allows precisely to challenge the flat/flattering approach to the body that negates its multilayered subjectivity. How does the beauty labour transform the body and attitudes in YouTube skincare culture and cinema' How does the photographic rupture shape the embodied reactions of new digital identities' The present study investigated visual culture through which the skin has become a subject-matter per se in cinema and YouTube. PubDate: 2023-04-28 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00157-8
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Abstract This paper focuses on how therapeutic culture is used to reshape the experiences of motherhood. Through childbirth supportive groups, raising children counselling and doulas’ emotional support among other activities, women learn to build their experiences as mothers in terms of personal growth, self-development and spiritual healing. Here, I examine these notions and the creation of new normative ideals that link an experience of personal growth with the experience of motherhood. The article is part of an ongoing qualitative study on the experience of mothers who practice “attachment parenting” and “respectful parenting” in Buenos Aires. This style of parenting involves “full-term breastfeeding”, co-sleeping, baby-led weaning, baby wearing, among the main practices. This paper contributes to understanding the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses in everyday life. PubDate: 2023-03-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00149-8
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Abstract: Abstract The concept of “the achievement society” is a framework that has often been used for explaining and addressing an increase in psychological distress among Nordic teenagers, particularly in girls. This article provides an historical account of how “the achievement society” became influential in countries like Norway and Denmark, even giving birth to a generational label (“Generation Achievement”). We show how this framework can help us comprehend why adolescents often struggle to become the right kind of subject in order to live up to the idealised norms, and examine the possibility that this perspective also might lead to overly individualistic framings of youths’ mental health, and correspondingly alluring societal demands for resilience training as a necessary prevention. Finally, we discuss the class implications of this framework. To the extent that achievement is associated with ambitious upper-middle class children, it is vital to show extra awareness of the people who fall outside this description, so that intervention based on this analytical framework does not inadvertently further enhance social inequality under neoliberal rule. PubDate: 2023-02-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00147-w
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Abstract: Abstract Behavioural advertising and algorithmic data trade found fertile ground in Turkey in 2014 as government sponsored corporations demanded “image adjustment”. Based on five months of participant observation and work as a “digital strategist” in a digital advertising agency, JazzRabbit, I analyze the significance of algorithmic data in relation to workers who negotiate work and life through predictions based on data traces and consumer categories. Devaluing their embodied labour, they construe online interactions as fungible things while social classes are rendered as tangible digital collectivities. I demonstrate that visions of corporate social welfare and workspace control precarious working conditions against the background of an economy undergirded by high youth unemployment and flexible digital labour markets. I argue that the conditions of digital work reproduce the differential constitution of algorithmic technologies and worker subjectivity. I call for research about multiple histories of algorithmic work and how they give rise to specific imaginations about social classes. PubDate: 2023-02-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00148-9
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Abstract: Abstract Is vulnerability a poisoned conceptual chalice from which only individualized notions of suffering and responsibility can emerge' What would the concept of vulnerability have to do in order to be considered valuable in advancing social justice' In this article I utilize critique of the ‘vulnerability turn’ in child and youth policy as a launch pad into rethinking an emboldened account of vulnerability. In particular, I am drawn to the urgency of vulnerability, understood as an immediate openness to wounding, and find ethical and practical value in the unfinished business of struggling to justly define what constitutes vulnerability and who counts as vulnerable. Grounding theoretical exploration in reflections on unique Australian research on unaccompanied homeless children, the article seeks to advance vulnerability as a potentially radical tool for research and welfare policy that can grip the lived complexity of systemic and personal adversity. PubDate: 2023-01-18 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00146-3
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