Technologies Of Self Research Articles

Power + Fashion

“Power dressing,” itself a women’s dress reform movement, as it came to be called in the 1970s, used to distinguish typical feminine dress styles and was seen as a necessary strategy for a more subdued image on par with the masculine, serious, and formal professional dress, namely the ubiquitous suit and tie. This new ‘career’ woman became visible by her appearance and choice of dress codes that reinforced her position as a businesswoman who was seriously committed to her work. But from the perspective of the first decades of the new millennium, power dressing and power and fashion have far wider meanings and ramifications. For Michel Foucault, power is a regulatory principle that is used to control social interactions and to impose structures that inform the ways in which we act and appear. In line with Foucault’s analysis, to dress is already to respond to tacit frameworks of power, and because it involves already accepted codes of visualisation and behaviour, to “power dress” is not simply to wield or enact power voluntarily but to succumb to it as well. Further, as this paper will reveal, power dressing can also be understood according to Foucault’s “technologies of self”, which sees the historical subject as both subject and object of a network of discursive forces that are considered normative as opposed to constructed. Power dressing still exists today but according to a more nuanced and multivalent configuration. It can also be thought of as a particular form of renunciation that facilitates an embodiment of power much as religious asceticism and privation is (purportedly) constitutive of a more authentic self.

"Olympic Hope": Fucoldian interpretations

The study of literary works devoted to running makes it possible to determine their plot dominant as a conflict between the feeling of freedom generated by running and such properties of professional sports as fierce competition of competitive activities and authoritarian regulation of the training process. Sociocultural tensions of this kind were fruitfully conceptualized in the works of Michel Foucault using the concepts of bio-power as a unity of anatomical and biopolitics; disciplinary practices as methods of normalization of bodies; supervision and panopticism as means of control, as well as technologies of self and subjectivation aimed at dampening the effects of excessive domination. The article uses the fantastic sports novel by Danish writer Knud Lundberg "Olympic Hope: The Story that Happened at the 1996 Olympic Games" published in 1955 and not translated into Russian as an object of application of the Fucoldian means of analyzing the above conflict situation. The research methodology is based on a conceptual analysis of M. Foucault's theoretical legacy and the reception of the French philosopher's ideas by Russian and Western scientists. The study revealed that the novel presents four variants of bio-power: German (genetic eugenics), American (hormonal eugenics), Soviet (crippling practices) and Danish (based on the free development of natural predisposition), used to organize the birth and training of top-level runners. The disciplinary practices of runner training are most pronounced in totalitarian states. The methods of their implementation are specialized closed training spaces; strict daily routine; daily monotonous running exercises; constant differentiation of athletes by rating; exams in the form of competitions; medical experiments. The realization of the technologies of selfhood and subjectivation by runners is carried out in the forms of resistance and transgression. K. Lundberg associates his Olympic hopes in sports running not with cruel professionals who are ready to give up their health (the problem of doping) and even their lives for the sake of personal awards and increasing the prestige of their states, but with educated means of humanistic sports by amateur athletes, for whom running has existential significance as a way of holistic, bodily and spiritual self-realization in the ethically loaded sphere of freedom.

Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea

Abstract This paper considers how a particular understanding of personality, as manifest in the way discourses about personality types are circulated and employed, may serve as a foundation for rationalizing the logic of human capital and its concomitant inequalities. Focusing on the recent popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in South Korea and the way it is adopted in online content offering advice on English language learning, this paper suggests that a conceptualization of personality as simultaneously enduring and inherent, on the one hand, and standardized and technologized, on the other, allows personality testing and personality type to serve as moral technologies of self that conceal the contradictions underlying the promotion of English language learning as a key to developing one’s human capital in neoliberal Korean society.

Constructing the “Good Citizen”: Discourses of Social Inclusion in Swedish Civic Orientation

Sweden has long been described as a beacon of multiculturalism and generous access to citizenship, with integration policies that seek to offer free and equal access to the welfare state. In this article, we use the policy of Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants as a case with which to understand how migrants’ inclusion is discursively articulated and constructed by the different constituencies involved in interpreting the policy and organising and teaching the course. We do this by employing Foucault’s closely interrelated concepts of technology of self, political technology of individuals, and governmentality. With the help of critical discourse analysis, we illustrate how migrants’ inclusion is framed around an opposition between an idealised “good citizen” and a “target population” (Schneider & Ingram, 1993). In our analysis, we draw on individual interviews with 14 people involved in organising civic orientation and on classroom observations of six civic orientation courses. Firstly, we show how migrants are constructed as unknowing and in need of being fostered by the state. Secondly, we illustrate how social inclusion is presented as being dependent upon labour market participation, both in terms of finding work and in terms of behaving correctly in the workplace. Lastly, we show how migrant women are constructed as being problematically chained to the home and therefore needing to subject themselves to a specific political technology of self to be included.

Gifted and On the Move: The Impact of Losing the Gifted Label for Military Connected Students

Society is becoming increasingly mobile, which impacts all facets of the educational experience, including gifted education. Military students attend several different schools in their educational careers, and inconsistent criteria and identification practices among states and school districts result in a fluid gifted label for many of these students. While some aspects of school mobility are highlighted in existing research, limited attention has been paid to school mobility within gifted education. This research works to address this gap by exploring the impact of losing the gifted label on children of military members, whose relocations frequently require mobility across state and district boundaries, utilizing a unique framework, Foucault’s technologies of self. Research findings explore student perspectives on the impact of their own effort or hard work on their ability to retain the gifted label and serve as a launching point from which to explore the issue of school mobility in gifted education.

YouTube’s Yoga with Adriene as a somametamnemata: Exploring experiences of self-care and wellness in times of crisis

Drawing on the Foucauldian technologies of the self, this study explores how individuals re-envision practices of wellbeing outside of traditional organizational contexts during extreme events. Based on a thematic analysis of 7234 comments posted on the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel in 2020, this study unpacks a technologically mediated practice of self-care, which we conceptualize as somametamnemata. Our findings illustrate three entangled aspects of somametamnemata relating to yoga, a form of bodywork: Caring about self through practicing yoga online; caring about self and others through sharing about yoga in written comments; and caring about self and others through responding to shared verbalizations of yoga. This study distinguishes somametamnemata from known practices of self-care, advancing existing literature on technologies of self by overcoming the dichotomy between negative views of ill-being and positive views of wellbeing. By situating the potentiality of individual wellbeing within ill-being, we shift debates and discussions of “corporate wellness” beyond organizational boundaries.

An Impossible Job: How Self-Surveillance, Responsibilisation and Personalisation Shape Outdoor Leader Embodiment

Deploying Foucault’s panopticon and technologies of self, this article examines how discourses, practices, and norms that circulate within the outdoor recreation industry to produce, what we have called, an “impossible job” for outdoor leaders (OL). Drawing on a case study conducted in Australia, we examine and critique how the expectation discourses within outdoor leader employment work to produce panoptic modes of surveillance for individuals as they take up, embody and personalise outdoor industry discourses. These same discourses also work to responsibilise OL to deliver meaningful, safe, fun and positive experiences to participants in nature-based environments. We make visible and problematise the unrealistic demands, expectations, and relations of power within this impossible job, highlighting the dangers and personal costs of embodying these pressures. In this way, we open up discussions that challenge these practices and how we might re-imagine OL expectation discourses in ways that are sustainable and ethical.

Living within and outside a disciplinary bubble: a Foucauldian analysis of Brazilian gymnasts’ experiences in boarding school

ABSTRACT The gymnastics’ environment has been criticised for producing uncompromising coaching practices, emotional disorders, harassment and abuse. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the young gymnasts can be acute when they live in gymnastics boarding schools, where many aspects of their lives are controlled. Drawing upon a Foucauldian lens, this study explores power relations in the lived experiences of former artistic gymnasts who trained in a gymnastics boarding school in Brazil, and the pedagogical and policy implications. Qualitative data were produced from semi-structured interviews with five former Brazilian artistic gymnasts, who described their everyday lives within and around the gymnastics boarding school. First, we explore how technologies of dominance produced a specific docile gymnast subjectivity and how this subjectivation process impacted the lived experiences of the gymnasts during their careers. Second, Foucault’s later work on the technologies of the self helps us in the microanalysis of how gymnasts negotiated the process of moving out of a space with specific discourses and power relations, that impacted their everyday lives. In so doing, we explore the tensions between technologies of domination and technologies of self. We propose the following pedagogical and policy implications: (a) we question the notion that coaches, and even the gymnastics environment, automatically prepare the gymnasts for ‘real life’ through the application of disciplinary strategies; (b) we advocate for shifting from coercive and punitive strategies to discipline strategies that consider responsive pedagogies and (c) we highlight the importance of the co-responsibility and co-surveillance of stakeholders. Such pedagogical and policy implications might contribute to reflections in gymnastics, in elite athletes’ programmes, and boarding school systems.

Accompanying parents through early childhood: The pastoral work of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Advisors

This paper explores expert guidance of parenting in Switzerland and discusses the work of the mothers’ and fathers’ advisors (MVBs), a state-funded service providing counselling to parents of preschool children. The data presented here draws upon ethnographic research which investigates parenting as a site of ‘governance’. Based on semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation with MVBs and parents, this paper examines (power) relationships between early childhood experts and parents. The findings demonstrate that the practices deemed appropriate for the surveillance and guidance of parenting today are a clear example of what Michel Foucault dubbed ‘pastoral power’ and include the gathering and archiving of information, as well as hierarchical observation. Reconnecting insecure or overly intellectual mothers with their ‘maternal instincts’, which some advisors felt were at risk of being lost, involves the facilitation of technologies of self. The paper also explores ‘resistance’ against pastoral care, which is not necessarily perceived as well-intentioned or helpful by parents, who may strive not to implement advice or completely reject ‘accompaniment’ by advisors.

Getting Under the Skin Trade: Towards a Global Sociology of Skin-Lightening Practices

Skin lightening cuts across multiple and intersecting areas of interest to sociologists. These include consumerism, capital, the body, femininities, masculinities, the power of the media in shaping people’s imaginations, constructions of beauty, and racialised and gendered social relations and representations, with the legacies of colonial pasts playing out in the present. Here, we set out some key themes, patterns, and frames observed in the multidisciplinary work published on skin lightening, and advocate for the addition of other frames for strategic reasons, which we argue in the second half of the article. Foucault’s technologies of self is recommended as a platform for critiquing individualism and the framing of choice; a political economy approach would help establish that skin lightening is a global business and grasp industry-wide patterns. Finally, a shift to looking at discourse and counter-discourse would reframe women as active agents in cultural resistance and change, and not just the relatively passive dupes of the colonial legacy. We thus map out a broad research agenda that would transform skin lightening into an object of broad, sustained sociological research.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Friends tell it like it is: Therapy culture, postfeminism and friendships between women

Feminist cultural studies researchers have produced a rich body of work showing how postfeminism and therapy cultures pervade a range of media. However, receiving less attention are questions of exactly how the neoliberal technologies of self implicated in these two cultural persuasions ‘land’, and are practised in everyday life. In this article, we forward an identity practice approach to understand the interrelated cultures of therapy and postfeminism using data from a qualitative investigation of women’s friendships in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are interested in how the cultural resources concerning postfeminism and the ‘psy complex’ are used flexibly within friendship interactions in concert with other identities, such as national identities and caring identities. Overall, aligning with previous feminist analyses of media artefacts, we find that as postfeminist and therapeutic subjectivity-making entwine with the moral orders of women’s friendships, women carry out their self-surveillance and self-transformation work collaboratively. Yet, remaining attentive to how women tailor cultural resources in their creative identity work leads us to a more hopeful reading. We suggest that the confidence gained by women through their therapised friendships should also be acknowledged for its nourishing qualities.

In the name of motivation: the procurement of social work and its technologies of self and power

ABSTRACT In recent decades, market reforms have paved the way for new forms to govern social work practice by means of procurement, cost efficiency, measurement, and freedom of choice. In this article, we draw attention to how clients are constructed in terms of motivation, in a context where social work is shaped by a procurement arrangement. Empirically, the article is based on interviews with social workers providing social services in a procurement setting, with a focus on how they describe their work in relation to presumptive clients, and specifically their work upon the motivation of clients. The analysis is informed by a constructionist approach to governing and the construction of clients. The results illustrate how the ideal client is constructed as motivated to choose a provider of social services matching their specific needs and interests as well as displaying a will to change and take part in the services offered. The social work appearing as desirable is based on a therapeutic rationality, with dialogue as the primary means of working upon the motivation of clients. The results further illustrate how different technologies (of the self and power) operate and intertwine in the work upon motivation of clients.

Technology of optimization: An emerging configuration of productivity among professional software employees

In this article, I draw from several months of fieldwork from 2019 to assess professional subjectivity in the software industry of Canada. I assess employees’ constructions of and feelings about their own productivity. I argue that the ways in which subjects understand and feel about their productivity says a great deal about how power is ‘willfully’ negotiated within everyday professional tech settings of neoliberal societies. My findings suggest that optimization is emerging as a technology of self among the individuals I studied, and bringing political consequences. In the first section of the article, I provide a brief overview of the productivity imperative’s cultural trajectory, and show its relation to optimization. Then, in the empirical analysis and discussion, I outline that the technology of optimization involves a discourse around bringing one’s best to public and private realms, offering a specific set of moral ideals. I then show that another facet of this technology of self is centered on willfully entangling public and private life. Finally, I theorize subjects’ reported feelings about their own productivity, assessing how the technology of optimization relates to a politics of privilege. With this study, I seek to make a contribution to the relation between the culture of productivity and professional subjectivity in the software industry, in an effort to expose how power is negotiated at the level of the self in an increasingly influential sector.

Profane Illuminations: Robert Anton Wilson’s Hedonic Ascesis

Abstract The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) played a significant intellectual role in the American counterculture in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Drawing from a wide range of discourses, as well as his own occultural fictions and personal experiments in “hedonic engineering,” Wilson presented a pluralistic view of reality that combined a pragmatic skepticism with a creative and esoteric embrace of the “meta-programming” possibilities of altered states of consciousness. In his 1975 Illuminatus! trilogy, written with Robert Shea, Wilson wove anarchist, psychedelic, and occult themes into a prophetic conspiracy fiction written with a satiric and willfully pulp sensibility. Ritually experimenting with psychedelic drugs and sexual magic – experiences related in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger – Wilson developed a wayward if deeply self-reflexive theory and dialectical method of visionary practice, one that, amidst the paranoia, presented its own deconstructive and libertarian vision of gnosis. This essay contextualizes and unpacks Wilson’s visionary pragmatism in terms of Foucault’s roughly contemporaneous notion of “technologies of self,” later elaborated by Peter Sloterdijk as “anthropotechnics.” It also traces the specific debts that Wilson owed to other esoteric and psychedelic technologists of the self, including Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly.

Exploring selfie practices and their geographies in the digital society

Drawing on a practical perspective and a posthuman approach, this article maps the quotidian digital geographies of selfie practices. The empirical analysis of this research is based on a qualitative study that took place in a Chinese city – Guangzhou. The empirical sections of this research investigate the digital geographies of daily selfie practices by focusing on the process of preparing for, taking, editing, and sharing selfies which are facilitated by both non‐human and human agencies. The findings of this article indicate that selfie practices are simultaneous a technology of self and a reflexive performance by which people construct diverse selves in extraordinary scenes and an obsessive way of seeing, consuming, and communicating shaped by wider digital cultures and social norms. More broadly, this article suggests that local contexts still matter in shaping the visual cultures and practices in contemporary digital society.

Source Criticism as a Technology of Government in the Swedish Psychological Defence: The Impact of Humanistic Knowledge on Contemporary Security Policy

“Source criticism” (källkritik) has become an essential part of the Swedish government’s activities against false information, deception campaigns, and propaganda, which are viewed as fundamentally destabilising forces that can potentially undermine the democratic system, the public debate, and political decision-making. The purpose of this article is to explore source criticism as a technology of government focusing on the Swedish Psychological Defence. I analyse the way in which source criticism is brought to bear on Swedish national security policy in the light of Foucauldian theories about modern governmentality and technologies of the self. Source criticism is seen as an example of a contemporary form of government that entails a redistribution of responsibility from the state to the individual, who is provided with certain “technologies of self” to master an unpredictable political environment. With this case study as empirical example, the aim of the article is to contribute to the research on the influence of humanistic knowledge in security and defence policy domains. This prompts further discussion about what happens with the democratic and critical potential of humanistic knowledge as it is enrolled in government operations.

La filosofía (no solo) con niños: escuchar, cuidar, escribir, transmitir

In this article, I intend to link four topics or essential acts of philosophical practice: listening, caring, writing and transmitting, with special attention to children--what they inspire and teach us about philosophical practice, with special attention to the situation of confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. A first task is to recover the function of listening and desire, in the context of the concept and the game, and against any abuse or violence. Second, we emphasize the role of care--its expansion and reformulation in these difficult circumstances, especially in interrupting the logic of servitude and of the activity-debt-reward circuit by way of the pleasure of inquiry. Third, we practice writing as a technology of self that overcomes the dichotomy between personal and academic form, in order to become a practice of care and transmission, along with other self-practices: abstinence, self-examination, exercises, etc. Finally, we consider the question of the “Name of the Father”--how to understand the decline of patriarchy in relation to love, self-esteem, the transmission and the use of a symbolic legacy, given that the decline in question is not merely a weakening, but an unfolding of a singular-generic power that binds us together: learning to decline names, words, concepts, and traditions, which is what drives true subject formation.

The language of luxury fashion advertising: technology of the self and spectacle

PurposeUbiquitous Internet access and social media make visual consumption possibly the most vital characteristic of the experience economy. A cumulative, integrative framework for the analysis of visual artefacts has thus been called for as existing analytical tools and theoretical frameworks (such as semiotics, discourse analysis, content analysis, iconography, rhetoric and so on) each provide in isolation only a restricted perspective. To advance best practice towards shaping brand perception and consumer engagement, this paper provides a crucial analytical tool to uncover the unique and specific characteristics of identitary luxury fashion brand discourse by introducing and applying such an integrative framework.Design/methodology/approachA rigorous grounded theory approach was applied to a corpus of primary data, print advertising in Vogue (UK and US) and Vanity Fair (UK). Outcomes were distilled to first principles of meaning-making and aggregated in a framework which also integrates long-existing classics from diverse fields of knowledge to present a broad cumulative perspective for the analysis of visual discursive practice. This paper demonstrates the methodological rigour and validity of the framework, that is, its practical adequacy and explanatory power in uncovering the identitary brand discourse of luxury fashion.FindingsAn application of the integrative framework breaks new ground in uncovering the discreet identitary characteristics of the discursive practice of the luxury brands under investigation, Chanel and Gucci, which can be encapsulated as gendered technology of the confident self (Foucault) and spectacle (Debord), respectively.Research limitations/implicationsTo advance theory that illuminates understanding and shaping of brand perception and consumer engagement with luxury fashion brands, the proposed framework is the first to integrate insight from a rigorous analysis of primary data with long-existing classics from salient fields of knowledge. It, thus, provides a broader, more inclusive perspective that elucidates the multifaceted layers of meaning of luxury fashion discourse in a new and comprehensive way which existing approaches with focus on an isolated dimension such as semiotics or nonverbal behaviour and so on would not have been able to reveal.Practical implicationsThe inclusive, practicable theoretical framework provides a parsimonious and practical tool that can be applied by non-experts across disciplines to unlock meaning in fashion discourse as a route to shaping brand image and engaging consumers.Originality/valueThe paper provides a new perspective on the communication practice of luxury fashion advertising as the new integrative framework illuminates layers of meaning crucial to understanding the intricacies of identitary brand discourse and to shaping brand perception and engaging consumers.

Self Assembling Peptide P11-4 for Enamel Remineralization: A Biomimetic Approach

Treatment of caries through conventional modalities involves an invasive approach of excavation of the carious lesion followed by a restoration. This compromises on the strength and integrity of the tooth structure. Minimal invasive dentistry aims at early detection of the carious lesion and their remineralization. Self assembling peptides find its application in the medical field due to its ability to form a scaffold through a process of hierarchical organization into nano structures. Self-assembling peptide P11-4 is a novel technology for enamel remineralization through a biomimetic approach. The technology simulates normal enamel histogenesis. It induces de novo precipitation of hydroxyapatite crystals by forming a three dimensional scaffold matrix. The formation of the scaffold involves the conversion of the peptide from a low viscosity fluid to a nematic gel under low pH conditions. This scaffold matrix further attracts calcium ions and leads to formation of hydroxyapatite crystals. Being minimally invasive, it helps in preserving the strength and integrity of the tooth structure. The aim of the article is to review the technology of self assembling peptides for enamel regeneration and its potential as a material for successful treatment of early carious lesions through a minimally invasive approach.