the Female Body GOVERNING

Notes
“It’s Down To You” 37
1. Beetham (1996) draws on Kristeva’s account of feminine psychology to
argue that the qualities of women’s magazines, such as having more than one
authorial voice, the mixing of medias and genres, and resisting closure, meet
or refl ect the psychology of its readers.
2. “In contemporary western culture, we are encouraged to think of ourselves
as coherent stories of success, progress and movement. Loss and failure have
their place but only as part of a broader picture of ascendance” (Stacey, 1997,
p. 9).
3. This analysis is taken from a study funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board, “Inventing the Psychological: Lifestyle Magazines and the
Fiction of Autonomous Selfhood,” AN6596/APN10894. My thanks extend to
the research assistant, Dr. Laura Miller.
4. “Anchored in the familiar stories of progress, of liberation, and of the pursuit
of knowledge, individualized accounts of global self-health condense the
grand metanarratives of modernity, reconnecting individuals back into the
universal narrative of modernity” (Franklin et al., 2000, p. 136)
5. See a development of these ideas in relation to the concepts, explanatory
structures, and “rules of truth,” which psychiatry has developed to distinguish
the so-called hallucination from the pseudo-hallucination (Blackman,
2001).
6. As Morley (1992) argues, the key concern is to explore, “how members of
different groups and classes, sharing different cultural codes, will interpret a
given message differently, not just at the personal, idiosyncratic level, but in a
way systematically linked to their socio-economic position” (p. 88).
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