the Female Body GOVERNING

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lisa blackman
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.