Media, Gender and Identity,

David Gauntlett:

Media, Gender and Identity, second edition
EXTRA MATERIAL (2008)

Media, Gender and Identity, second edition, is a book by David Gauntlett, published in 2008. The book’s website at www.theoryhead.com offers a number of free ‘extras’. This is one of them.
The text is © David Gauntlett, 2008; not to be reproduced without permission. If you use this material for teaching or research purposes, please include the information in this box, including the website address, www.theoryhead.com.

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, second edition 2008). For information about the book, and additional material, see http://www.theoryhead.com/gender. Originally this was a whole chapter. That’s what you have here. It was subsequently compressed to just a few pages for the first published edition – because there wasn’t enough room in the book for all of the things that I wanted to discuss – and then for the second edition, I put some of this stuff back in, updated the statistics, and added some discussion of newer books (which you can find in the 2008 book but not here). If you want to reference this piece, I suggest you use the following: Gauntlett, David (2008), ‘Self-Help Books and the Pursuit of a Happy Identity’, extended version of material from Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (Routledge), http://www.theoryhead.com.

In the previous chapters on social theorists Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault, and the ‘queer theory’ approach to identity pioneered by Judith Butler, we saw the emergence of an approach to personal identities which suggests that in modern societies, individuals feel relatively unconstrained by traditional views of their place in life, and carve out new roles for themselves instead. As a person grows and develops, they typically continue to work upon

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