Jayne Raisborough Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self (2011)

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the social world. Yet, lifestyle choices made freely are nonetheless
34 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
governed by a continuity demanded by the biographical trajectory
and hedged by the anxiety of getting it wrong. The defining and
guidance of how yummy mummy could or should be done suggests
something about the ways lifestyles are spun from a nexus of exper-
tise, consumerism, desire and identification to offer some security to
a jostled self in its search for meaning and identity. However, it is the
ongoing nature of acquiring security, the stress on being as a matter of
improvement (thinner, healthier, better organised) that returns us to
the question which started this section. The Fat Face buttons have it
right: just living isn t enough. For Giddens, Beck and others, living is
a site of choice-making, endless labour, design and creativity. Sociol-
ogist Micki McGee (2005, pp. 15 16) sees the self as a site of effort
and exertion, of evaluation and management, of invention and rein-
vention even the most ordinary of lives is a series of achievements.
And while Giddens nurses hopes for better, democratic relations as
a result, once the self is a site of labour, of choice and agency, it is
increasingly intelligible to then assess whether that labour is good
enough and to ask whether the choices were the right ones made:
once life is about doing it is a small step to ask if one is doing
enough. In this regard making something of one s self speaks not
only to self-construction (just being) but to a project of betterment
(being better).
It is tempting here to liken lifestyle media to a cat-walk of expert-
guided lifestyle options perused by a meaning-hungry and strategic
self. However, this slides us past some of the assumptions of the
self that are already starting to circulate in these pages: just who are
the selves that Giddens and others imagine as builders of their own
lives and authors of their own narratives? Who can be these selves?
These questions indicate that there is more that can be said about
the self that while we can accept that the self may be now more
a site of labour and of choice than ever before, there is, rightfully,
some suspicion of the ways ordinary life and the ordinary self might
be specifically imagined as reflexive self-designers.
The jostled self and the fallacy of the blank slate
The Fat face buttons suggest that the choice to just live or not is an
individual one. Nike s popular strap-line Just Do It is very similar in
this respect you can just decide to change your life: there is a get
When Life is not Enough 35
going mentality here, a rally call to action that privileges individual
choice and agency over all else. What both ads share with the self-
authored, jostled self as it is presented so far is its overwhelming
neutrality. I want to discuss this neutrality through Plumridge and
Thomson s notion of a blank slate explained in the following quote:
Giddens understanding of the making of self-identity as a con-
stant imperative presumes an equal starting place in which choice
and reflexivity are fully formed and in the possession of the indi-
vidual. Empirical work, and particularly longitudinal empirical
work, makes it clear that there are no blank slates from which
to theorize individuals, including children, are always already
situated and in relationship.
(Plumridge and Thomson, 2003, p. 221, added emphasis)
The self as a blank slate presumes a self that is unmarked by inscrip-
tions of class, gender, ethnicity and other social divisions, suggesting
that we can all be the selves Giddens imagines we can all just do
it there are no class barriers or race inequalities to overcome or to
block our progress. Yet, this presumption sociologist Beverly Skeggs
(2004) and other critical voices would argue is the result of a theoret-
ical sleight of hand. It is an illusion that magics the self away from
the contexts in which it is defined and from which it garners the
knowledge, ways of interpretation and understandings, and resources
to know itself and to be itself contexts which, Skeggs argues, are
both inscribed and are inscribers of class, gender and other points
of social inequality a point I want to return to below. For social
theorists Lisa Adkins (2000) and Lois McNay (2000) the trick of the
self as a blank slate demands a deliberate exaggeration of the effects
of detraditionalisation. McNay questions whether the self has been
so effectively dislodged from old roles and traditions as Giddens and
Beck presume. Meanwhile, Adkins charts the ways a retraditionalisa-
tion shapes a different individuality for men and women. In her
analysis of work and management, she critically notes how men can
be rewarded by harnessing new feminized modes of management
in the workplace. However, as these new management strategies
are also coded as essentialised natural qualities of women, women
are not rewarded or indeed might only attract negative attention if
they depart from them. The grounds of doing a self are then still
36 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
characterised by engendered power relations. For these theorists, gen-
der relations and identities persist and thrive in such ways that cannot
be simply shrugged off through the flexing of reflexivity.
For other critics, such as Ian Burkitt, the trick dismisses the rela-
tional, dialogical dimensions of selfhood, whereby the ways we see
and know our selves can never be disconnected from the ways oth-
ers see us (2008, p. 171). Burkitt s argument gestures towards the
emotional investment and return, pleasure and security gained from
being a socially recognised and socially approved self (Butler, 1997).
Carol Harrington (2002, p. 110), drawing on Butler, explains that
pleasure comes from living out a recognised identity it is the plea-
sure of being somebody and of escaping not-being . For Butler it is
also about escaping the punishments that are corralled in support
of authoritatively recognised identities, helping to make particular
lifestyle choices intelligible and right (1990). The dialogical nature
of selfhood necessarily situates the self in relationship as Plumridge
and Thomson argue above, but Burkitt helps to situate the self more
specifically within relations of recognition to be seen, recognised
and approved (or not) brings into play a host of culturally specific
norms and values against which the self is evaluated. This point con- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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