Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
The Arts of Self 7
Concepts of the Self 12
The Structure of the Book 24
1 Self, Society and Everyday Life 28
Self, Symbols and Others: Symbolic Interactionism 30
Presentations of Self: Goffman 37
Reflexivity and the Self: Giddens 44
2 The Repression of Self 53
Psychoanalysis and the Self 56
Culture and Repression 72
3 Technologies of the Self 85
Technologies of the Self: Foucault 88
Governmentality: New Technologies, New Selves 103
4 Self, Sexuality and Gender 112
Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Two Recent Views 112
The Politics of Gender Performance: Butler 124
Queer Theory: Contesting Self, Defying Gender 130
5 The Postmodern Self 138
All that is Modern Melts into Postmodern? 143
Strategies of the Self: Modern and Postmodern 153
6 The Individualized Self: From Reinvention to Mobile Lives 161
Individualization of the Self 163
Self-Reinvention: The New Individualism 170
The Mobile Self 176
Conclusion 182
Inner Depth, or Inside Out 182
Identity Politics, or Critique of Self 186
Afterword: Global Identities, the Rise of Anti-Self Theories and New Horizons 189
Index 195