This great little book contains everything you wished but did not dare to ask about the meaning of the ‘self’-one of the thorniest, most contentious, exciting and enraging issues of our times and our lives in these times. To the questions you might have asked or are likely to ask yet, Elliott offers answers that are carefully weighted, balanced and realistic-drawing from the vast treasury of sociological insights and moving freely between the variety of complementary even if ostensibly adversary perspectives. Elliott’s book is good to read, to learn and to think with. It helps to understand what it means to ‘have a self’ and ‘to be oneself’-an understanding that itself is a foremost condition of both.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Arts of Self

Concepts of the Self

1 The Structure of the Book

Self, Society and Everyday Life

Self, Symbols and Others: Symbolic Interactionism

Presentations of Self: Goffman

Reflexivity and the Self: Giddens

2 The Repression of Self

Psychoanalysis and the Self

Culture and Repression

3 Technologies of the Self

Technologies of the Self: Foucault

Governmentality: New Technologies, New Selves

4 Self, Sexuality and Gender

Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Two Recent Views

The Politics of Gender Performance: Butler

Queer Theory: Contesting Self, Defying Gender

5 The Postmodern Self

All that is Modern Melts into Postmodern?

Strategies of the Self: Modern and Postmodern

Conclusion

Inner Depth, or Inside Out

Identity Politics, or Critique of Self

Afterword: Globalization, Postmodernization and New Individualism

Index