ABSTRACT
In the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in the concept of the ‘self’, inspired in part by Foucault’s analyses of ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988) and in part by theories of late modernity. I am concerned here with the latter, with theorists such as Giddens (1991, 1992) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2002) who argue that contemporary social conditions have given rise to highly individualized forms of self-hood and also to transformations in gender and sexual relations. These writers are currently setting agendas for social theory in much of Europe and beyond-and doing so in relation to issues of central concern to feminists. Many feminists have, in turn, been critical of their preoccupation with individualization, particularly in relation to sexual, familial and personal relationships (e.g. Jamieson 1999; Irwin 2005; Jackson 2008). Fewer, however, have engaged theoretically with the assumptions about the selfunderpinning modernity theories or with their ethnocentrism-the issues I address in this chapter. First I draw on the pragmatist thought of George Herbert Mead (1934) to argue for a reconceptualization of the self, one that is suffi ciently fl exible to attend to culturally, historically and contextually variable forms of refl exive self-hood. I then use this as a springboard for challenging the exclusively western focus of the modernity theorists through considering the gendered and sexual consequences of modernity in East Asia.
