These Wars Are Personal: Feminism's Double Entanglement With Therapy Culture&lt;strong&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;

Helen Barcham

doi:10.3390/isis-summit-vienna-2015-s3032

Abstract

These Wars Are Personal: Feminism's Double Entanglement With Therapy Culture<strong> </strong>

Highlights

In a digitally mediated world, the partition between the public/private is arguably dissolved as technologies such as the mobile phone invoke an “intersection of worlds” (Schegloff, 2002, p. 286) and as the public sphere becomes saturated with the exposure of private life (Burkart, 2010)
Through the widespread publicising of private matters via acts of confession, a therapeutic sensibility premised on emotionalisation has become one of the dominant ways in which actors express, shape and understand themselves and society (Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2007)
Therapy culture is marked by the spill of the therapeutic ethos from clinical spaces, in which it emanated, into wider cultural structures, institutions and vernaculars

Summary

Extended Abstract

The organisation of life into the public/private nexus has long been a site of contestation for feminism. ‘the problem with no name’, which was previously characterised as isolated and individual, was recognised as a social-systemic struggle—predicating a collective identity for women as women (Ang, 2001) and enabling a politicised interpretation of needs to enter public discourse and the agenda of the welfare-state (Fraser, 2013). While this paradigmatic change in the meaning of ‘political’ promised to invoke a gender-sensitive revision of democracy and justice (Markus, 1995), it is my thesis that this political imaginary has been grossly distorted some fifty years later through its appropriation by contemporary feminism

DISCUSSION

Feminism and therapy culture