"Soothing the Self"
Affective Infrastructures of Calm in Feminine Wellness Media from Gloria Swanson to ASMR
How do media teach us to soothe ourselves?
Soothing the Self is a four-year research project exploring how practices, images, objects, bodies and media environments have shaped the cultural promise of soothing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
From Gloria Swanson's early advocacy of health, beauty and bodily self-management, through Jane Fonda's fitness and self-care culture, to Goop's contemporary wellness imaginary and the intimate audiovisual environments of ASMR, the project traces changing ways in which women have been invited to actively produce states of comfort, safety, relaxation and emotional regulation.
Rather than treating soothing simply as an individual feeling or psychological response, the project approaches it as a culturally and historically situated process. It asks how soothing is promised, performed and experienced; who or what is positioned as the source of comfort; what bodies, objects, spaces and technologies participate in creating it; and what cultural values and power relations become embedded in practices of self-soothing.
Principal Investigator: Dr Joanna Łapińska
Host Institution: Jagiellonian University, Kraków
Institute: Institute of Audiovisual Arts
Funding: National Science Centre, Poland — OPUS 29
Project no.: 2025/57/B/HS2/00399
Duration: 2026–2030
THE PROJECT
Why soothing?
Soothing is everywhere in contemporary culture. We encounter promises of calm in wellness routines, skincare rituals, meditation and sleep technologies, fitness practices, online videos, sounds, interiors and everyday acts of self-care. Yet soothing is rarely examined as a cultural phenomenon in its own right.
What does it mean for something to be presented as soothing? How are people taught to recognise, seek and reproduce particular states of calm? And what happens when responsibility for feeling better is increasingly placed in the hands — and bodies — of individuals themselves?
Soothing the Self investigates these questions historically and comparatively. It examines soothing not as a universal or timeless experience but as something organised through particular cultural practices, aesthetic forms, material arrangements and relationships.
Five dimensions of soothing
The project develops its analysis around five interconnected dimensions:
The Promise of Soothing
How is soothing imagined and promised? What forms of discomfort, stress or vulnerability are invoked, and what state is offered in their place?
The Process of Soothing
What is a person actually invited to do in order to become soothed? How do repetition, movement, touch, listening, watching and bodily routines organise the process?
Soothing Relations
Who soothes whom? The project examines relationships between the soother and the soothee — including situations in which these positions overlap and the individual is taught to become the agent of her own soothing.
Soothing Arrangements
Soothing rarely happens through a single stimulus. Bodies, voices, images, sounds, objects, technologies and environments work together. The project investigates these affective and material arrangements and the experiences they make possible.
The Politics of Soothing
Who is expected to soothe herself, and under what conditions? What ideas about gender, labour, health, beauty, consumption and individual responsibility accompany cultural promises of calm?
FOUR CASE STUDIES
Gloria Swanson
Actress, celebrity and early advocate of health-oriented lifestyles, Gloria Swanson provides the project's historical point of departure.
Drawing on archival research in the Gloria Swanson Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, this part of the project examines how health, beauty, bodily discipline and self-management became intertwined with celebrity culture and ideas of personal wellbeing.
Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda's fitness culture transformed domestic exercise into a highly mediated practice of working on the self.
The project examines Fonda's audiovisual fitness and relaxation materials as environments in which instruction, bodily movement, voice, music and domestic space converge. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between bodily effort and relaxation and to the ways in which the exercising subject is taught to manage her own physical and emotional state.
Goop
Founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, Goop provides a contemporary example of wellness culture in which skincare, touch, sleep, food, exercise, objects and domestic routines become techniques for managing the self.
The project investigates how Goop constructs the promise of wellbeing through instructional media and how the body functions simultaneously as the instrument and object of soothing.
ASMR
Whispers. Soft voices. Tapping. Scratching. Slow gestures. Personal attention.
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) has developed into a vast online audiovisual culture explicitly oriented toward relaxation, sleep and comfort.
The project examines how ASMR creators construct mediated situations of intimacy and care and how viewers participate in producing their own experiences of calm through screens, headphones, bodies and imagined interpersonal encounters.
RESEARCH IN PROGRESS
This page follows the project as it develops. Research progress, archival discoveries, conference presentations and emerging conceptual questions will be added throughout the project.
Current research
2026 — Goop & ASMR
Developing the conceptual framework of soothing and examining contemporary practices of self-soothing across wellness and digital media.
2027 — Gloria Swanson
Archival research at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
2027–2028 — Jane Fonda
Research on fitness, relaxation and audiovisual techniques of bodily self-management.
2028–2030 — Connecting the histories
Comparative work tracing continuities and transformations in feminine cultures of wellness and self-soothing.
EVENTS
This section documents public events organised as part of the project. More to come.
How Media Create Soothing Experiences?
A Conversation on the Aesthetics of Calm in Culture, Film and Design
10 December 2026 | Online: Microsoft Teams
How do media create experiences of soothing? What kinds of aesthetic choices, material settings and cultural practices make certain forms of media feel calming, reassuring or emotionally supportive?
Joanna Łapińska
Soothe Yourself! The Cases of ASMR and Goop [lecture]
Anna Wiśnicka
Designing Comfort in Scandinavian Film [lecture]
TALKS & CONFERENCES
This section documents conference papers and invited talks arising from the project. More to come.
2026
"'Let Me Show You': Guided Calm in ASMR" [talk]
Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, England, September 2026
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International Scientific Conference "Media and Emotion", organized by the Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice, in the Faculty of Media, Science and Technology at Bournemouth University.
"Sleep and Self-Care in ASMR Culture" [talk]
University of Education, Upper Austria and the University of the Diocese of Linz, Linz, Austria, November 2026
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AAAS 2026 Conference "Critical Media Analysis, Participatory Cultures, and New Textualities: American Studies through a Digital Lens", organized by the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS).
PUBLICATIONS
Publications resulting from Soothing the Self will be collected here as they appear.
Articles
Chapters
Book
The project will culminate in a research monograph bringing together its four historical and contemporary case studies.
FIELDWORK & ARCHIVES
Research for Soothing the Self combines audiovisual and cultural analysis with archival research and international research stays.
University of Stavanger, Norway — 2027
Research stay and academic exchange.
Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, USA — 2027
Archival research in the Gloria Swanson Papers.
ABOUT THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Joanna Łapińska, PhD is a researcher in film and media studies whose work focuses on affect, multisensory media, ASMR, wellness cultures and mediated intimacy.
Her previous research project, ASMR as a New Intimacy Practice in Western Culture, was conducted at the University of Vienna and resulted in the monograph Hear the Tap, Feel the Scratch: The Transgressive Intimacy of ASMR.
[About Joanna] · [Publications] · [Contact]
FUNDING
Soothing the Self: Affective Infrastructures of Calm in Feminine Wellness Media from Gloria Swanson to ASMR is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (Narodowe Centrum Nauki; NCN) under the OPUS 29 programme, project no. 2025/57/B/HS2/00399, and hosted by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
[Project page at the National Science Centre]
The header image on this page was created using generative AI.