Dear Abby

Abstract

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity.