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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From policy to personal practice, injunctions to harness the positive effects of positive affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links the push for positivity – and other seemingly "entrepreneurial" affects – to neoliberal cultural formations. Within and beyond psychology, feminist analyses are highlighting the gendered address of these formations and their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While this raises important questions about the gendered implications of positivity imperatives, an absence of fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how positivity discourse is taken up and lived out. We draw from interviews with 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers and service workers) to investigate how positivity inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on to explain positivity: positivity as attractive relationality and positivity as agentic cognitive style. We also identified four figures who are central to positivity talk, and three affective – discursive practices linked to positivity: keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity and triumphant positivity. We conclude that, while offering new and appealing feeling positions, positivity discourse may also reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns of emotional practice and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the analysis of depression narratives has become increasingly common practice within critical mental health research, this work rarely investigates how these accounts intersect with particular social identities. The recent emergence of the 'top girl' identity, a new cultural slot on offer for young women, is underpinned by the rise of neoliberal and post-feminist discourses in the Western world. To explore whether this new feminine subjectivity is indeed taken up by young women and how it shapes their experience of depression, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Based on a dialogical approach to theorising and researching subjectivity, we identified repetitive inter-relations between different voices-of-the-self and the voices of depression. The most pervasive pattern in the sample consists of what we have termed demanding voices associated with the 'top girl' position, which construct depression as an individual deficit thereby discouraging young women from exploring the sociocultural origins of their distress. In contrast, resistant voices emphasise relationality and a (re)connection with meaningful values and, therefore, seem to be productive for individual recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those investigating neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivities have argued that continuous self-improvement and self-surveillance have become everyday life strategies for many women. It has been suggested that these strategies have also re-organised women's friendships, so that this is now a significant field of practice for women to support each other in the anxiety provoking work of self-perfection. Using talk-data from a sample of women in Aotearoa New Zealand we explore these claims, and report on how our sample of women describe their friendships, not so much as a site for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self, but as a place of reprieve from conventions of relentless productivity – a site of ease, escape and refuge. We are not suggesting that accounts of postfeminist, neoliberal subjectivities are inaccurate or that these modes of self-making are not relevant to our participants, but that the discursive environment of women's close friendships is plural, combining neoliberal emphases with potentially subversive counter-narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wairua, a Maori (indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand) concept, somewhat restrictively translated as spirit or spirituality, resonates with many indigenous peoples globally. While spirit is recognised as an important human dimension, the denigration of non-western spiritual understandings means that indigenous peoples often choose to remain silent. Transferring these concerns to research approaches, we edit our voices, with a view to what we think will count as knowledge and what we choose to share with academic audiences. This article discusses the challenges we face when we enter into conversations about wairua and how this might be approached in research. With reference to emerging social science innovations in affect and emotion, the article draws on audio visual recordings of people's experiences of significant national days in Aotearoa New Zealand. Issues of analysis and representation are explored, along with the potential of these methods to explicate feelings, emotions and spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hayter and Hegarty argue that Discourse and Social Psychology (DSP) is a text sustaining late capitalism as surely as Taylorism sustained the Fordist capitalist epoch. In response, we first situate DSP in its intellectual context; second, highlight limitations in Hayter and Hegarty’s use of Harvey’s work on the history of capitalism; third, note the importance of analysing contexts and effects in genealogical research on psychology; fourth, show how the argument fails to clearly explicate different senses of reflexivity in DSP and; finally, consider the platform DSP built for the study of ideology and the implications for Hayter and Hegarty’s own project. All of this highlights a need for psychologists to be more sophisticated in their historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a discursive analysis of interview material in which single women reflect on their relationships and reasons for being single. Despite changing meanings of singleness, it remains a ‘deficit identity’ ( Reynolds and Taylor, 2005 ) and the problem for a woman alone is to account positively for her single state. Our analysis challenges theorisations which would suggest autonomy and agency in how identity and self are constructed. It employs the methodological approaches developed in critical discursive psychology (for instance Wetherell, 1998 ) to look at the detailed identity work of speakers as part of the identity project proposed by Giddens (1992, 2005) , Bauman (1998) and other writers associated with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis ( Adkins, 2002 ). By approaching ‘choice’ as one of the cultural resources available to speakers, we present a more complex view of the dilemmas around a speaker's identity work in her accounting for her relationships and the course her life has taken [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has demonstrated that heterosexual men receive enhanced health benefits from their relationships with women. Explanations for this gendered pattern often focus on women's role as the main caregivers and arrangers of health care. However, what remains unclear is how these benefits are mediated. In this article, we describe the micro-politics evident in negotiations between 12 heterosexual couples us they discuss the serious illness of one of the pair with an interviewer. The interviews were transcribed and subsequently analysed using a synthetic approach to discursive psychology. We argue that in these co-constructed stories, women potentially trouble men's identity performances. For instance, by interjecting emotional assessments, women supporters allow men the opportunity to discuss aspects of the illness experience that might be otherwise viewed as at odds with hegemonic masculinity. We suggest that women's positioning of men is a form of complicity with hegemonic masculinity and urge that further research should follow this line of enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates recent developments in research on the domestic division of labour. It focuses on the Distributive Justice Framework developed by Thompson (1991) in an extension of Major's (1987) work on the psychology of entitlement. This framework states that in order to explain the persistence of gender inequalities in domestic labour, researchers must consider the factors that determine women's sense of fairness in close relationships. Whilst acknowledging its contribution to the field, the article argues that existing work on the Distributive Justice Framework has misconceived important aspects of the social psychology of distributive justice. By way of contrast, an approach is advanced that is grounded in the analysis of everyday discursive practices in the home—the practices through which couples define their contributions to household labour and negotiate ideological dilemmas about gender, entitlement and fair shares. We argue that investigations of gender inequalities in domestic labour can benefit from the new directions provided by social constructionism, as well as the more complex views of subjectivity, power and social interaction that are now emerging in psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the ways in which women defined as single work with the typical constructions of their identity available in the public arena. View of 'singleness' as a discursively constructed social category; Interpretations of singleness as a personal deficit, as social exclusion, as independence and choice, and as self-actualization and achievement; Prevalence of patterns of sense-making out of singleness.

This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors' and nurses' accounts of men's health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense of their male patients. The 'interpretative repertoires' through which doctors and nurses constructed their representations of male patients and the 'subject positions' these afforded men are outlined in detail. We describe how hegemonic masculinity is both critiqued for its detrimental consequences for health and paradoxically also indulged and protected. These constructions reflect a series of ideological dilemmas for men and health professionals between the maintenance of hegemonic masculine identities and negotiating adequate health care. Men who step outside 'typical' gender constructions tended to be marked as deviant or rendered invisible as a consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and commentary on men's responses to feminism have demonstrated the range of ways in which men have mobilized both for and against feminist principles. This article argues that further analyses of men's responses require a sophisticated theory of discourse acknowledging the fragmented and contradictory nature of representation. A corpus of men's talk on feminism and feminists was studied to identify the pervasive patterns in men's accounting and regularities in rhetorical organization. Material from two samples of men was included: a sample of white, middle-class 17-18-year-old school students and a sample of 60 interviews with a more diverse sample of older men aged 20 to 64. Two interpretative repertoires of feminism and feminists were identifed. These set up a 'Jekyll and Hyde' binary and positioned feminism along with feminists very differently as reasonable versus extreme and monstrous. Both repertoires tended to be deployed together and the article explores the ideological and interactional consequences of typical deployments along with the identity work accomplished by the men as they positioned themselves in tandem with these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that Marxism is most useful for radical psychology in negative terms—as a form of critique. It has much less to offer as a positive theoretical programme. The binaries which make up Marxist epistemology (individual-social, culture-economy, base-superstructure, truth-falsity, real-illusory) constrain creative thought and lead to some by now predictable cul-de-sac. The Foucauldian emphasis on studying ontoformative practices is more useful. This claim is illustrated through a critical examination of Foster's construction of the discursive and extradiscursive, Osterkamp's premises regarding human nature, and the view of false consciousness developed by Augoustinos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we provide a critical analysis of the concept of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that although this concept embodies important theoretical insights, it is insufficiently developed as it stands to enable us to understand how men position themselves as gendered beings. In particular it offers a vague and imprecise account of the social psychological reproduction of male identities. We outline an alternative critical discursive psychology of masculinity. Drawing on data from interviews with a sample of men from a range of ages and from diverse occupational backgrounds, we delineate three distinctive, yet related, procedures or psycho-discursive practices, through which men construct themselves as masculine. The political implications of these discursive practices, as well as the broader implications of treating the psychological process of identification as a form of discursive accomplishment, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the approaches of discourse analysis and social contructionism, talk about New Zealand/Aotearoa is analysed to show how constructions of time become a discursive resource in speakers' identity work and also in larger contests around nation and belonging. Time and place constructions become interlinked within a personal narrative as consecutive life-stages corresponding to different places of residence. An absent time-place is reified as a valued possession, to be protected from others. In contests around the status of the Maori minority, the constructions of time within alternative narratives establish or challenge the status of indigeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the critical points raised by Morgan (1998) about Discourse and Social Psychology. She suggests that the book is organized around basic binaries (inner/outer, representation/reality, nature/culture) which reflect and reproduce logocentricism and thereby phallogocentricism, and she proposes that the phenomenon of silence is one which is simultaneously of particular concern to women and beyond the limits of a discourse approach. The response takes issue with the philosophical idealism and gender essentialism of these arguments, stressing that binaries are made sexist or progressive in the context of specific ideological practices. We disagree with both her identification of binaries in Discourse and Social Psychology and their claimed consequences. The paper ends by outlining some ways in which silence can be approached from conversation analytic and discourse analytic perspectives, and raising some reflexive questions about Morgan's own construction of gender and silence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses reasons why social psychologists should study a constructed version of natural language. Importance of studying materials generated within the influence of researchers; Conceptualization of a model for natural language; Impedances to social psychologists' study of natural language in a constructed version.