@article { , title = {Tactical authenticity in the production of mad narratives}, abstract = {First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress. The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept: a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology, where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension - between the value of narrative methods as a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the ‘authentic’ self on the other - can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity based on Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, especially when modified by Michel De Certeau’s (1984) distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’.}, doi = {10.1057/s41285-019-00092-2}, eissn = {1477-822X}, issn = {1477-8211}, issue = {2}, journal = {Social Theory \& Health}, pages = {15}, publicationstatus = {Published}, publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan}, url = {https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1649778}, volume = {17}, keyword = {Health, Centre for Critical Theory, Global Research Theme - Health and Wellbeing, Authenticity. Madness. Autoethnography. Narratives. Positive Psychology}, year = {2019}, author = {WRIGHT, COLIN and CLARKE, SIMON} }