Purchase
One Nation Under Stress
Dana Becker
The Trouble with Stress as an Idea
Oxford University Press
March 2013
On Sale: March 11, 2013
256 pages
ISBN: 019974291X
EAN: 9780199742912
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction | Self-Help
Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it,
trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From
1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word
"stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010
that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more
stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown
exponentially over the past 40 years?
In One
Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our
national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has
created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the
tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the
social and political realities that underlie those tensions.
Becker shows that although stress is often associated with
conditions over which people have little control-workplace
policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic
inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept
focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to
stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical
warnings about the negative effects of stress on our
physical and emotional health all place the responsibility
for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better
diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept
has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political
shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief
that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves
rather than tackling the root causes of
stress.
Examining both research and popular
representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces
the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it
has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for
defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties
about upheavals in American society.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy