Vulnerable to be resilient? Investigating vulnerability as a therapeutic discourse
While for many years the therapeutic discourse has offered strategies for individuals to strategically manage their emotions, the emergent self-improvement discourse about “vulnerability” is distinct in that it encourages people to speak about their internal, emotional lives. The popular uptake of the vulnerability discourse offers a promise that it is creating space for more affective, feminized subjectivities, particularly in professional realms. Yet, I argue that the vulnerability discourse can be located in a long tradition of calls for resilience-building targeted at employees, and reflective of neoliberal ideals. Brene Brown, scholar and self-help figurehead of the vulnerability discourse, has gained prominence for her work on vulnerability after being featured on Oprah, TED, and Netflix. Through an examination of several media products that feature Brown, in the present study I examine the emergent discourse about how to strategically perform vulnerability. I argue that asking subjects to turn within to work on their psychic lives in order to offer colleagues a professionally vulnerable self comes at a steep societal cost, and has particularly concerning implications regarding gender. Although practicing vulnerability according to Brown’s discourse may allow for certain social and economic accomplishments for some employees, it also compels them to orient their psychic lives toward an individuating sense of self that is steeped in neoliberal ideology. Additionally, it reinforces the notion of an ideal neoliberal subject as a norm within the professional workplace (i.e. a subject who has the time and resources to take this discourse up, a feat that requires considerable effort). While similar critiques have previously been made of the therapeutic discourse, I argue that “vulnerability” pushes this problematic even further, offering revamped methods of emotional management and self-understanding that are further subsuming the self into the logic of the market. Relatedly, I situate the vulnerability discourse within neoliberalism’s psychological turn and ask how powerful media products such as Brown’s can serve to sediment this ideology within the contexts of everyday life.