SELF-HELP BOOKS AND THE PURSUIT OF A HAPPY IDENTITY

This article is a longer version of the discussion of self-help books from the book Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction by David Gauntlett (2002).

View the full chapter here.

(Technical: It's an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document. When you click the link above, the reader should spring into action. If you have problems, you can download the Acrobat reader from this page).

WHY LOOK AT SELF-HELP BOOKS?

Popular media offers various kinds of advice about relationships, sex, and modern living. For example, women's magazines are about how to be a woman today, and men's magazines similarly provide directions on lifestyles for men. These things are discussed in Media, Gender and Identity. In the particular chapter available here, we consider self-help books because these books are the most explicit popular guides on 'how to live your life' for women or men. The chapter considers what contemporary self-help books tell us about popular modern understandings of gender roles, and the self, and the extent to which the self can be changed.

WHAT IS THIS "CHAPTER"? WHY IS IT NOT IN THE BOOK?

Originally it was a whole chapter in the book. That's what you can download here. It was subsequently compressed to just a few pages (which is what now appears in the book) because there wasn't enough room in the book for all of the things that I wanted to discuss. It wasn't rejected because it was full of lies or nonsense, though, if that's what you're worried about.