Polyphonies of depression: The relationship between voices-of-the-self in young professional women aka ‘top girls’

Abstract

While the analysis of depression narratives has become increasingly common practice within critical mental health research, this work rarely investigates how these accounts intersect with particular social identities. The recent emergence of the ‘top girl’ identity, a new cultural slot on offer for young women, is underpinned by the rise of neoliberal and post-feminist discourses in the Western world. To explore whether this new feminine subjectivity is indeed taken up by young women and how it shapes their experience of depression, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Based on a dialogical approach to theorising and researching subjectivity, we identified repetitive inter-relations between different voices-of-the-self and the voices of depression. The most pervasive pattern in the sample consists of what we have termed demanding voices associated with the ‘top girl’ position, which construct depression as an individual deficit thereby discouraging young women from exploring the sociocultural origins of their distress. In contrast, resistant voices emphasise relationality and a (re)connection with meaningful values and, therefore, seem to be productive for individual recovery.

“Kick the XX out of your life”: An analysis of the manosphere’s discursive constructions of gender on Twitter

“…The imagery conjured by the manosphere to attack her was a fantasy of masculinity in which the idealised man violently denigrated the female body. While Sarkeesian was its primary target, the images’ endless repetition can reify identities and thereby create repercussions that reach far beyond Gamergate (Chowdhury et al., 2020).…”

Practicing the Ideal Depressed Self: Young Professional Women’s Accounts of Managing Depression

“…Data were collected as part of a two-part critical qualitative study on the identity work of young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. 1 The analysis presented in this article draws on data from individual interviews with young professional women about their experience of depression (see also Chowdhury et al, 2019). To minimize the likelihood of psychological harm resulting from the interview process, several safeguards were implemented, including the availability via phone of a registered clinical psychologist and providing participants with a list of mental health service resources.…”

“…Yet, contemporary discourses encourage women to think of themselves as “survivors” instead of victims (Orgad, 2009) and to overcome work-related problems by becoming more self-confident and resilient (Gill & Orgad, 2017). As my colleagues and I have demonstrated elsewhere (Chowdhury et al, 2019), by drawing heavily on such postfeminist rhetoric, the “top girl” narrative encourages depressed women to locate the causes for their depression primarily within themselves. This individualization of depression prevents women from exploring meaning-frameworks that connect depression to wider sociocultural and structural issues such as sexism or restrictive gender norms and thus promotes a very narrow conception of what it means to recover.…”

“…However, while self-management certainly presents a useful conceptual tool for thinking about and researching contemporary, Western (female) subjectivities, paying attention to particular identity practices produces a more nuanced, fine-grained analysis of the “top girl” identity encompassing a variety of self-practices such as perfectionism (McRobbie, 2015), confidence (Gill & Orgad, 2015), and resilience (Gill & Orgad, 2018). The analysis presented in this article builds on the use of dialogical self-theory (Hermans et al, 1992) to investigate different voices-of-the-self in participants’ accounts of depression (Chowdhury et al, 2019). One of the recurrent subject positions participants constructed in their talk is what I have termed the “ideal depressed self.” Following the analysis of this idealized middle-class femininity, which describes how young professional women “ought to” deal with depression (at work), I investigate the wider discursive field giving rise to these self-practices and discuss its implications for recovery.…”

“… 4. My colleagues and I have described two types of recurrent I-positions, demanding voices associated with neoliberal and postfeminist discourse and resistant voices such as the feminist perspective on depression, elsewhere (Chowdhury et al, 2019). …”