CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Critical Psychology and Cultural Studies

Session Organiser: Valerie Walkerdine

Blackman, Lisa (Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom) INVENTING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: LIFESTYLE MAGAZINES AND THE FICTION OF AUTONOMOUS SELFHOODS
This paper explores how success and satisfaction in relationships are problematised, articulated and made intelligible across a range of lifestyle magazines. The focus of the research is on to what extent the 'fiction of autonomous selfhood' central to how the psychological disciplines frame and construct what is taken to be normal psychological health, is translated differently across the designations of gender, race and sexuality. It reviews debates within cultural studies on the psychological and social significance of media forms, such as magazines, and argues that this work, although for the most part rejecting psychological explanations, makes its own often implicit psychological assumptions in its theorizing. It shows how critical psychology and particularly a novel combining of rhetorical analysis (c.f. Billig 1997) and Foucault's later work on techniques of selfhood (c.f. Blackman 2001), can provide fruitful tools for addressing the production of subjectivities within broader regimes of media and scientific discourse.

Gill, Ros (London School of Economics, United Kingdom) FROM SEX OBJECT TO DESIRING SEXUAL SUBJECT: A STEP FORWARD FOR MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF YOUNG WOMEN?
Drawing on a detailed analysis of media representations of women over the last ten years, this paper documents a significant shift in the portrayal of young women and girls in the UK, US and Australia. This shift is represented by the move from depicting young women as passive sex objects to showing them as active sexual agents, who know what they want and are going to get it. It explores the nature of new media representations of women, particularly in adverts and magazines, and locates the emergence of this new representational practice in the wider context of discussions about girl power and a backlash against feminism. The paper asks: How might these new representations be understood politically? How should feminists theorise the emergence of this new representational practice, and how can critical psychology help? What kind of feminist cultural politics is needed to challenge contemporary media representations of young women?

Edginton, Elizabeth (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom) PSYCHOANALYTIC ETHNOGRAPHY: USING PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND EXPERIENCE
The term 'psychoanalytic ethnography' usually implies the application of psychoanalytic theory to the behaviour and utterances of informants or, more controversially, to the reflective practices of ethnographers. The legacy of the Writing Cultures debates, meanwhile, suggests that close attention be paid to the structure and rhetoric of ethnographic texts. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Poland, this paper argues that ethnography should not only draw on psychoanalytic theory, but also on the experience of being in psychoanalysis. It should not, then, just treat ethnographies as texts, but should also involve more radical psychoanalytic questioning of the ethnographer as text. This is one way in which Cultural Studies might begin to address the issue of the researcher's subjectivity.

Campbell, Jan (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom) PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHENOMENOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
This paper addresses the historical relationship of psychoanalysis to cultural studies, and the way psychoanalysis has often been problematic because of its emphasis on psychic, mental representation at the expense of more embodied social experience. This paper examines a more embodied phenomenological (psychoanalytic) imaginary that connects social and psychic, language and experience, history (practice) and theory and then
uses this imaginary to explore how embodiment, hysteria and memory operate in constructing cultural identities.

Bainbridge, Caroline (University of East London, United Kingdom) MAKING WAVES: CONSTRUCTIONS OF SUBJECTIVITY AND SPECTATORSHIP IN THE CINEMA OF LARS VON TRIER
This paper examines the construction of subjectivity and spectatorship in Lars von Trier's 'gold heart' film trilogy:Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000). Each film positions the spectator in relation to the experience of trauma and its representation, thus undoing traditional cinematic patterns of pleasure in the text. Von Trier is a director known for his technological and generic experimentation. This paper draws on feminist, psychoanalytic and film theories to argue that the subjectivity of the spectator is reworked through the experience of viewing, evincing a rawness of response in an arena traditionally associated with sensory pleasure. The unconscious processes of cinema spectatorship shift to produce new positions of viewing and pleasure that reconstitute the subject through the experience of textual trauma. The spectator's experience of subjectivity is rendered in terms of difference and alterity, enabling the spectator-subject to perceive him/herself anew.

Squire, Corinne (University of East London, United Kingdom) PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AS CULTURAL GENRE: THE CASE OF HIV
Clinical psychological work on people's stories of living with HIV have pointed to a common narrative progress from diagnosis through resistance and despair to acceptance. This narrative sequence resembles many other personal narratives of coming to terms with death, illness and stigmatised conditions, and narratives of self-realisation in general. However, stories are told within cultural matrices of narrative possibility. Drawing on studies done in the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this paper examines the cultural situating of stories about the 'self' and HIV, and the genres which these stories both draw on and reinvent, from the coming-out genre, through romance, to religious 'conversion' narratives and the 'Socratic' dialogue genre. The paper also examines aspects of subjectivity that are at risk of falling out of narrative, remaining unstoried, and the place which different genres may allow them.