Locating control: Psychology and the cultural production of 'healthy subject positions'

Abstract

This paper addresses some of the ways in which psychological constructs, which have been traditionally positioned as intra-psychic phenomena, may be more productively understood as local performances of intelligible 'healthy subject positions'. More specifically, it focuses on the cultural location of psychological epistemologies, and the assumptions of universality (based upon the normative subject position 'white middle-class heterosexual male') that shape them. Through an analysis of traditional locus of control research, it explores the ways in which individualistic notions of 'personality traits' enact a form of governmentality over subjects who are expected to inhabit specific, fixed subject positions. Thus, traditional research on locus of control can be seen as instantiating the very subject positions that it seeks to measure. To counter this, the paper draws upon experience as a methodological tool in order to examine some of the ways in which neo-liberal discourses of control work to homogenize the broad range of experiences that construct intelligible subject positions. In particular, the focus is on the potentialities and limitations of drawing on such discourses of control to understand non-heterosexual experiences, and it is suggested that we need to examine how such experiences may render individuals complicit with heterosexist 'practices of self'.