“Gender technology” and “self-technologies”: An analysis of discourses and practices of contemporary self-help

This paper is the result of a wider research, developed in my master degree course, sponsored by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa Do Estado de São Paulo – FAPESP. In this paper, I intend to understand the dynamic of subjectivity existing in the contemporaneous phenomenon called Self-Help, directly towards to women, keeping in mind that this is an effective “gender technology” since it is an instrument of cultural imposition with the objective of maintaining the unequal gender relationship. I will have a brief analysis considering my lines of research: the discourse present in the top five books sold in Brazil about this subject; the debate forums of one of the researched websites – Bolsa Mulher; and the follow-up interviews with the users of the previously mentioned website. Among the main objectives, I would highlight the critical mapping offered by contemporaneous Self-Help to people that use it and by ethnography, explore in what ways these people make use of these “Self-Technologies”. Testimonials of important historical aspects of the interviewed people were collected with the objective of understanding how and when these discourses have become part of their lives and what role these discourses have to their process of subjectivity (re)elaboration. This is also about bringing to debate the specific characteristics the therapeutic discourse assumes nationwide with the advent of technologies such as the internet and also within the network dynamics, since they create unprecedented possibilities of sociability in what concerns to the Self and the affections. I have in mind that these “subjectivity management discourses” can move together with de development of capitalism and a possible individuality mercantilization.