Dragon-slayers and Jealous Rats: The Gendered Self in Contemporary Self-help Manuals

This article traces two broad discourses concerning gender in a selection of relationship manuals from 1974 to 2004. On the one hand are manuals promoting traditional gender roles, and on the other are those that promote financial and emotional independence for women. In contrast to other analyses, I argue that these approaches cannot be categorised into a simplistic dichotomy of ‘feminist’ and ‘patriarchal,’ but that they are better understood as being bound up with conservative and liberal discourses of the self. I further demonstrate that these approaches both assume and require types of self that are somewhat removed from their historical antecedents and should be understood as neo variants

You have to learn these lessons sometime: persuasion and therapeutic power relations in bestselling relationship manuals

Whilst self-help books have recently come under increased academic scrutiny, the power relations in the techniques they use in order to persuade, convince and convert their readers remain largely unexamined. This paper seeks to redress this omission, and examines a selection of bestselling relationship manuals published between 1973 and 2005 for claims to authority and techniques of persuasion. Further, it examines and critiques Rose's dimensions of therapeutic power relations, through the claims authors make to the right to speak as experts in human relationships and the techniques they use to persuade, co-opt and interpolate the reader into the therapeutic process