[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

(p. 127). Both suspect that a more aggressive form of exploitation
is at work here, where women s agency and power are enabled and
celebrated if only it is harnessed to the construction of a self that
subscribes to and inflames heterosexual male fantasy and heteronor-
mative fictions of appropriate gender performances. There is, then, a
powerful re-sexualisation of women s bodies and agency enfolded in
giddy notions of empowerment. This may be illustrated in the title of
Ian Kerner s 2008 self-help book. Passionista: The Empowered Woman s
Guide to Pleasing a Man.
Of course, there s a risk here of sounding prudish and  anti-sex
and Gill takes us back to the wider social context in which women
and men negotiate their lives  a context which houses the intelli-
gibility of domestic violence, and a cultural imagination that makes
sexual double-standards, trafficking, prostitution, sexual abuse and
rape possible. We need only to return to the Christopher Williams
(2008) bleak observation, in the previous chapter, that  where our
interpersonal realities are defined by difference and dissimilarity, the
promise of injustice is amplified (p. 7), to be concerned at how
women s difference is being so overdrawn and so targeted. Further,
as the sexy body becomes the key site for identity, other resources
of identity construction are marginalised (education, employment) 
privileging the young, sexy body, or rather its public appearance, as
means for viable selfhood. As Diane Negra (2009) states, this reduces
152 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
women s  lives, interests and talents (p. 4) to sites culturally marked
 feminine , which, as Ros Gill argues, fills women with an endless
anxiety to hold on to the little power they are afforded. Gill s discus-
sion of popular magazines that aggressively scan and ridicule even
the best of bodies for sweat stains, veins, visible panty lines, wrin-
kles and the ultimate transgression  cellulite  serves, she argues,
to condemn all women to negotiate their  choices with the tower-
ing expectation that all women need to constantly manage, monitor
and mould their bodies. There are two points we can draw from this.
The first is that Jeanie s choices and jubilant empowerment operate
within regulated parameters. The second is that the movement of the
makeover culture is not driven by narcissism, or even consumption,
but by survival  a life-long struggle for viability:  it is this constant
quest for change in becoming a  better you that speaks to women
performing under the norms of heterosexuality (Hall Gallagher and
Pecot-Hébert, 2007, p. 76).
The volitional imperative
It s timely at this point to reiterate that these cultural representations
matter and cannot be dismissed by demeaning popular culture, such
as  chick-lit or lifestyle TV makeover shows for their  trivial nature
and content (Skeggs, 2009). Joffe and Christian Staerklé (2007) have
argued in these pages that cultural representations influence com-
monsense everyday imagination and knowledge. To underscore this
point in terms of gender, I d like to add the argument made by Jane
Ussher:
Representations of  woman are of central importance in the con-
struction of female subjectivity. We learn how to do  woman
through negotiating the warring images and stories about what
 woman is (or who she should be), among the most influential
being those scripts of femininity that pervade the mass media.
(Ussher, 1997, p. 13, original emphasis)
We thus return to the pedagogical function of lifestyle media that the
book is concerned with so far. Although reading, viewing and general
engagement with popular cultural forms are complex and uneven
enough to make any claims of propagandist ideology highly suspect,
Repatriated and Repaired 153
nonetheless, popular culture resources reflect the cultural imaginary
and help resource the ways we make sense of our lives and the (gener-
ative) stories that we tell of ourselves as Ussher argues above. By way
of example; Joanne Baker s (2010) interviews with 55 women, in
Australia, aged between 18 and 25 years, led her to identify what
she calls a  volitional imperative in the women s accounts. By this
she refers to the ways the postfeminist stress on individualism in
combination with the  can-do mentality of neoliberalism, encour-
aged women to present their lives as if they were produced through
choices and determination. Baker s participants all spoke their lives
through postfeminist markers of personal success, individual respon-
sibility and enterprise (p. 198). This framing meant an avoidance of
any talk of vulnerability, discrimination or disadvantage; any  prob-
lems were divorced from any structural/cultural explanation and
instead recast as medical or psychological issues, which it was one s
duty to repair. Indeed, Baker suggests that problems of discrimination
or disadvantage were cast as obstacles to be overcome  it was infacing
and managing them that selfhood was done.
The wider social implications of these interviews lies in ways
the  volitional imperative shapes (mis)-recognition of Others. Baker
notes that as vulnerability and dependence were shunned from
the self they were projected onto Others to form a causal and
essential trait:
Volitional talk facilitated a disinclination to regards other as  legiti-
mately disadvantaged . There were consistent example of negative
comments about Indigenous Australians, asylum seekers, unem-
ployed people, women experiencing violence and young sole
mothers [ ...] it was most common for reduced empathy to be
articulated in relation to such group s receipt of welfare support
and criticism consistently cohered around a perceived lack of
personal effort and initiative.
(Baker, 2010, p. 199)
Baker warns that this reduced and contingent compassion for the
socially disadvantaged is attributable to  the fetishizing of a height-
ened personal responsibility (p. 200). We could add here that this
fetish smoothes the way for more right-wing, conservative policies
and lends credibility to its rhetoric. For example, it hardly needs
154 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
stating that the recent launch by the new UK s coalition government
to end  sick note culture (and get a million people off benefits and
back to work) is fuelled by the assumption that the sick and vulnera-
ble are malingering/corrupt or lack a personal responsibility that will
now be forced upon them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]