Managing between the Sheets: Lifestyle Magazines and the Management of Sexuality in Everyday Life

Abstract

Considering the intersection between managerial discourses, sexuality and contemporary cultural resources such as lifestyle magazines, this article reflects critically on the extent to which the discourses and techniques associated with the management of bureaucratic organizations have been incorporated into the (self-)management of sexuality and sexual relations. Locating its concern with sexuality within critical social theory, the article develops a critique of the work of those who emphasize the postmodernization of sexuality and the informalization of management. Drawing on recent research involving an analysis of management texts and lifestyle magazines, as well as a series of semi-structured interviews, it argues that contemporary cultural discourses on sexuality, permeated as they are by references to managerial imperatives such as efficiency and effectiveness, serve to arrest the inter-subjective aspects of eroticism (Bataille, 1962; Rose, 1995) and to reduce sexual relations in the contemporary era to yet another aspect of the ‘reflexive project of self’ (Giddens, 1992).

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