Lifestyle media and the formation of the self

'Be the best you can be' is the call of self-help books and makeover TV show. It's ridiculous to argue against self-improvement but it is interesting and important to ask just who is imagined as needing a makeover and what kind of 'you' is imagined as the happy result. Drawing on recent sociology and social psychology, this book explores how our cultural imagination is reflected and shaped by self-help books, advertisements and lifestyle TV shows. Each of these imagine an ideal self. By focusing on slummy mummies, headless zombies, living autopsies, and empowered women, Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self argues that ideas about respectable class, appropriate weight and ideal gender are shaping the ways we judge ourselves and others.