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Chapter
‘Pump up the positivity’
DOI link for ‘Pump up the positivity’
‘Pump up the positivity’ book
‘Pump up the positivity’
DOI link for ‘Pump up the positivity’
‘Pump up the positivity’ book
ABSTRACT
The authors analyse how narratives around victimhood, spanning from media culture to popular feminism, are penetrated by the logics of positive psychology (PP). The chapter explores the gendered nature of neoliberalism, understood as a dominant mode of governmentality that interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors; as active, rational, calculating subjects whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’ and the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. Following this ideology, women are urged to turn away from collective and structural accounts of inequality in favour of ‘upgraded’ or ‘madeover’ forms of selfhood by taking “mental shifts” toward a “PMA” (positive mental attitude). The corpus analysed includes a range of material including PP texts, women’s magazines and peer-to-peer advice in online forums. Through its interrogation of the new regime of ‘compulsory positivity’ alongside the ‘turn to agency’ in much feminist writing and beyond, the chapter raises critical questions about postfeminism, processes of individualisation and psychologisation, and the workings of (gender) power under neoliberalism more generally.