The (Not So) Good Old Days
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“irrational,” a “cult,” or “possessed.”) While gay affirmative accounts of
homophobia are decidedly preferable to the old pathological accounts, they fail
to account for the significant role society plays in encouraging homophobia
through its construction of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The apparent
solution to homophobia and heterosexism, according to therapeutic discourse,
would be therapy for individual homophobes.
This strong connection between liberalism and therapeutic discourse helps
explain why the two are so strongly present on talk shows. According to White,
the main discourse/narrative strategy of U.S. television is the therapeutic. She
argues that therapeutic discourse easily resonates in American culture; its
trajectory of problem-confession-cure is both familiar and comforting (177).
While other television genres share this narrative strategy, the talk show is
archetypical. While one function of talk shows is to provide us with information
that will take away our problems, another significant cultural function is its
definition of problems. While therapeutic discourse individualizes problems,
through its focus on individual change and its denial of socialization, it also
locates the ability to define the nature of the problem in medical authority—in
the therapist.
As Foucault has noted, the use of therapeutic discourse to define and
regulate social conflict has had a long history in the United States and Europe,
with the rise of the social sciences in the Victorian era, which established the
principle of a scientia sexualis {History o f Sexuality 58). In this historical
moment, “sex was constituted as a problem of truth” (56), one that could be
answered by the newly developing scientific disciplines of anthropology and
psychoanalysis. The project of these “human sciences” is to articulate and
represent the inner workings of the individual. The anthropologist and the
psychologist examine others in hopes of understanding, ultimately, themselves:
“An unveiling of the same .. . Identity separated from itself by a distance”
(Foucault, The Order o f Things 340). The abject and the deviant are dissected in
the name of truth—a truth that is often driven by a will to power. Similarly,
Patricia Morton has documented the deluge of racist and sexist research
produced at the turn of the 19th century that served to quell anxiety about social
upheaval and to defend the social order. Sociologists, historians, geneticists,
phrenologists, and other authorities used biological and environmental
arguments to pathologize African-Americans as a way of justifying racial
inequality (18). From their foundation, these professions have participated in a
racist tradition, whose legacy may be the tendency to explain inequality by
examining essentialized characteristics of the marginalized, rather than the
conditions of oppression that create them—as the continued circulation of the
“culture of poverty” thesis suggests.
Talk shows play directly into this therapeutic dynamic, investigating
individuals as a means of investigating marginalized groups. The investigation is
not neutral, however. Because the dominance of some classes over others is
naturalized, the examination is highly unilateral, based on the perspectives of the