Insult, Injury, and Age’s Redefinitional Violence

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-148
Author(s):  
Melanie V. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Female Beauty ◽  
Perceptions Of Aging

Tracing insults about aging, alongside perceptions of aging as injurious to the self, this chapter explores the spectacular nature of public insults, real and imagined in fictions by Wharton, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hergesheimer, Glasgow, and Ferber. These scenarios, which stress aging’s painful visibility, appear throughout assessments of female beauty. Aging patriarchs, who transform their lives in efforts to reinvent their identities, however, are treated somewhat more sympathetically, even when they fixate on early youth, impossibly precious success, and romances with much younger women. When such exercises fail, the texts stress aging’s inevitability. More positive accounts of aging, understood here as a rich maturity, by contrast, appear across agrarian fictions, which circumvent social contexts and instead depict cyclical patterns of natural renewal, thereby rejecting linear conceptions of age and embracing aging as part of a life of accomplished productivity.

Back from the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ivy League ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Successful Career ◽  
Family Balance ◽  
The Future ◽  
Work Family

Chapter 4 examines two well-trafficked mommy blogs written by Ivy League–educated professional women with children. Reading these blogs as part of the larger neoliberal feminist turn, the chapter demonstrates how neoliberal feminism is currently interpellating middle-aged women differently from their younger counterparts. If younger women are exhorted to sequence their lives in order to ensure a happy work-family balance in the future, for older feminist subjects—those who already have children and a successful career—notions of happiness have expanded to include the normative demand to live in the present as fully and as positively as possible. The turn from a future-oriented perspective to “the here and now” reveals how different temporalities operate as part of the technologies of the self within contemporary neoliberal feminism. This chapter thus demonstrates how positive affect is the mode through which technologies of the self-direct subjects toward certain temporal horizons.

The Identity Paradigm

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Psychoanalytic Discourse ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
The Universe

This epilogue reflects on the critical importance of the identity paradigm—and especially the identificatory paradigm—in culture. To see the identificatory paradigm at work, in a range of cultural and social contexts—in legal settings and debates, in fictions from low and high culture, in confessional and psychoanalytic discourse—is to bring to attention something characteristic and important about people's lives, singly and collectively. To grasp the predominance and the importance of the identity paradigm is to recognize something ineradicable and significant in culture. The chapter then presents something of a contradiction: the self sees itself from the inside as a place of depth, meaning, and as the center of the universe, whereas the self viewed from the outside is merely the point of intersection of impoverished data.

scholarly journals ‘Do you mean I’m not whole?’: Exploring the role of support in women’s experiences of mastectomy without reconstruction

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (12) ◽  
pp. 1598-1609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Archer ◽  
Fiona G Holland ◽  
Jane Montague
Keyword(s):  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Positive Support ◽  
Unilateral Mastectomy

This study explores the role of others in supporting younger women who opt not to reconstruct their breast post-mastectomy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six women diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s/40s. The women lived in England, had been diagnosed a minimum of 5 years previously and had undergone unilateral mastectomy. An interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed three themes: Assuring the self: ‘I’ll love you whatever’, Challenging the self: ‘Do you mean I’m not whole?’ and Accepting the self: ‘I’ve come out the other side’. The women’s experiences of positive support and challenges to their sense of self are discussed.

The Self in Social Contexts

1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
M R Banaji ◽  
D A Prentice
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self

5. Some themes

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-61
Author(s):  
Edward Craig
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Role Of The State

‘Some themes’ looks in more detail at some of the topics explored by Plato, Hume, and the author of ‘Milinda’s Questions’—ethical consequentialism (what happens as a result of someone’s choices), rationalism, integrity, family, the self or no-self, and the role of the state. Could Plato and Hobbes, 2,000 years apart, really be discussing the same thing? Are we right to identify parallels between philosophers from different times and backgrounds? What do we miss when we try to extricate philosophers from their social contexts and motivations? Our understanding of philosophy is cumulative. The challenge is not in becoming familiar with these themes, but in being sensitive to their variations.

The self in society: Effects of social contexts on the sense of self

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. McGuire ◽  
Claire V. McGuire ◽  
Jason Cheever
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self

scholarly journals Part I: Dynamics of Recovery: A Meta-Synthesis Exploring the Nature of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Recovery

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
pp. 7761
Author(s):  
Trude Klevan ◽  
Rose-Marie Bank ◽  
Marit Borg ◽  
Bengt Karlsson ◽  
Vibeke Krane ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Substance Abuse ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Self ◽  
Substance Abuse Services ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Personal Experiences

Recovery-oriented care has become a leading vision across countries. To develop services and communities in more recovery-oriented directions, enhanced understandings of recovery in terms of personal and social contexts are important prerequisites. The aim of this study is to explore the nature and characteristics of the experiences of recovery. The method used is a form of qualitative meta-synthesis that integrates the findings from multiple qualitative studies published by one research group. Twenty-eight empirical papers with a focus on recovery as personal and contextual experiences were included in this meta-synthesis. Five meta-themes were developed: (a) being normal, (b) respecting and accepting oneself, (c) being in control, (d) recovery as intentional, and (e) recovery as material and social. The themes describe how recovery encompasses dynamics between personal experiences and contextual dimensions. This meta-synthesis consolidated an understanding of recovery as dynamics of the self and others, and as dynamics of the self and material resources. This understanding of recovery suggests the need to work not only with the person, but also with families, networks, social systems, and local communities, thus developing mental health and substance abuse services in more collaborative, open-ended, and context-sensitive directions.

The Value of Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Relations among Children: A Commentary

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-80
Author(s):  
Dennis L. Krebs
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Predictive Power ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Social Judgement ◽  
Competitive Relations ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

The theory of evolution focuses on the ultimately (i.e. genetically) self-serving nature of co-operative and competitive relations among children. The self-serving goals of co-operative relations are mediated by biases in social judgement largely ignored by developmental psychologists. Individual differences in heritable behavioural styles are viewed as resources of varying value in different social contexts. Limitations in the a-priori predictive power of evolutionary theory are discussed.

The Gothic Girl Child

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Armitt
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Self ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
The Common ◽  
Textual Feature

This chapter focuses on anxiety about intimacy between girls or between girls and women as represented in works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ and Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’. A young girl’s desire for a female Other is the unspeakable subtext of these and similar stories. Examining Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘The Pool’, Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Stephen King’s Carrie and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Armitt explores both the rivalry between sisters and the self-abjection that can result from the onset of menstruation. The common narrative trope of the double or mirror is used to produce skewed images or strange doppelgängers that reflect the fear of a new identity following menstruation and the loss of childhood innocence. Finding that bonds between girls in Gothic texts are constantly fraught with danger, betrayal and loss and that the Gothic girl child must undergo trauma on her journey towards womanhood, Armitt concludes that it is hard to find positive messages for younger women in Gothic works, a textual feature that perhaps reflects the contradictory attitudes held towards girls by society at large.

Society and slaves

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Harrigan
Keyword(s):  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Self Interest

In the early colonies, alternative forms of society could be a source of anxiety. Religious and social cohesion was a concern in what was often an unmastered environment. Accounts of the early colonies reflect on the cohesion of a society made up of settlers and slaves. The self-interest of colonists could be acknowledged as problematic for public order, and the desires of slaves as disruptive to property. In practice, some property was ceded to slaves, and strategies were described to motivate slaves by granting comparative favour. Depictions of the uncultivated environment reflect anxieties about the proximity of unmastered spaces outside the colonies. There were also internal frontiers maintained by shared practices, such as hospitality and the consumption of alcohol. A number of testimonies about the maroon slaves illustrate concerns with culture and subversion, as well as the role of rumour in the early colonies. Further tensions in the colonies developed from desire, and related to questions surrounding marriage, manumission and métissage. Métissage, like manumission, was never considered outside distinct social contexts, and illustrates the instability within the slave society.

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