Introduction: Vanity; Language, Bodies and Material Conditions

Abstract

It has become something of a cliche that Western culture is obsessed with celebrity, glamour, and with the opportunities ordinary people are now given (reality television, social networking sites, blogging) to become famous. These new engagements between fame and obscurity have been accompanied by energetic debates about the self, image and vanity. Similar debates are also underway in a domain apparently quite different from this digital realm — the corporeal domain of health, fitness, beauty and anti-ageing. Vanity, it seems, can be mobilised to account for both our least obvious and our most obvious corporeal modes of constituting the self. Despite these growing areas of debate, little or no sociological or cultural studies research into vanity has been conducted to date. Apart from two popular monographs — John Woodforde’s The History of Vanity (1992), published two decades ago, and Christopher Lasch’s even earlier The Culture of Narcissism (1991) — no book-length works of commentary on vanity have been published in the last 30 years, and very little exists in the way of scholarly journal articles. This absence is surprising, especially given concurrent major developments in the theorisation of the self — most obviously in governmentality theorists’ critical engagements with neoliberal individualism and reflexivity, and processes of subjectification — which offer tools capable of redefining vanity, or at least illuminating its functions and the tensions and paradoxes within it.