Up from the archive: Online Self-Help and Relationship Advice. Justine Topham thinks with

Rebecca Hazleden's 2003 journal article ‘Love yourself: The relationship of the self with itself in popular self-help texts’ conducted a Foucauldian analysis of how therapeutic relationship manuals construct the self. Building on the insights of this piece, my PhD research updates this analysis to new mediums and considers how self-help and therapeutic discourse has evolved into the digital age. I affirm that the call to ‘love yourself’ continues to be a recurring theme in online relationship advice targeted at women, reproducing the neoliberal ideal of the responsible individual who diligently regulates their thoughts and emotions. The proliferation of self-help content on social media has significant implications for how this message is packaged and disseminated. My analysis uncovers how, behind the informal expertise of influencers, this therapeutic relationship advice is implicated in hegemonic worldviews and ideologies, working to perpetuate traditional gender roles disguised as postfeminist empowerment.