Image: Deal with It from the Inside Out.

Image is the 17th workbook in Lorimer Publishing’s Deal With It series, which targets tweens and adolescents coping with the stress of everyday life. Image is meant to alert readers to “the dangers of judging a book by its cover” by interrogating the ways in which image is used to include, exclude, tease, and limit.

Mototsune explains how image is produced, reproduced, and resisted through signifiers, actions, and involuntary markers as varied as “the celebrities you copy,” and “your ethnic or racial background.” Through a variety of creative and well-illustrated modules including quizzes, letters to a conflict counsellor, and lists of do’s and don’ts, Mototsune effectively shows how race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, religion, and ethnicity all play into image. The message is that, although some elements of image cannot be controlled, it is through individual choice that we should present our “true” self and appreciate, rather than judge, others.

I recommend the book for its heuristic value in explaining subject formation, although Mototsune’s promotion of choice underestimates how the dominant culture’s values are transmitted through consumer culture. Encouraging young people to forge an authentic identity assumes the possibility of self-knowledge outside of the culture industry despite the fact that consumer culture is reflective of a global political economy whose logic permeates all practices in order to ensure its maintenance and perpetuation. It is not simply advertisers that hinder one’s self concept, but what the dominant culture itself values: individualism, utility, domination, and supremacy over other ways of being.