Extract — Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering by Catherine Liu
Read an excerpt from Catherine Liu's forthcoming book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, where she explores and challenges how trauma has become a weapon in the culture wars – amid the collapse of liberal politics, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Accompanied by a brief introductory note from Catherine, this extract – from the chapter 'Oprah or the Work of Trauma in the Age of Televisual Reproduction’ – analyses the career of media mogul Oprah Winfrey in light of the trauma script.
Author's note
The following text is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my new book, Traumatised: The New Politics of Public Suffering. In this chapter – titled 'Oprah or the Work of Trauma in the Age of Televisual Reproduction’ – I analyse the career of media mogul Oprah Winfrey in light of the trauma script. Her 'authorship' is framed within a brief history of pre-cable television content.
Winfrey was made by television, but she also transformed the medium through a combination of financial savvy and personal revelation; she expanded acceptable content in daytime television talk shows by enhancing her own brand as a 'survivor’. The multi-episode Apple TV+ show about mental health, The Me You Can't See, that she created and executive produced with Harry Windsor, is the crown jewel of her trauma script brand. Apple also offered a digital resource called Here to Help to accompany the programme, guiding viewers to different mental health treatment options: its aim was to produce more adhesion to Apple content and platforms.
Winfrey's career is groundbreaking because it synthesises so many aspects of the culture industry of the 1980s. In Traumatised, I frame the evolution of the survivor/victim in the post-social movements media landscape as a secular prophet — one whose political efficacy in the neoliberal regime of mediatic visibility could not actually be questioned.
On November 10, 1986, Oprah Winfrey made media history when, before a television audience of millions, she 'came out' of the closet as a victim and survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a violation that had occurred at the hands of a relative. She made the announcement on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which had just been syndicated and was being broadcast across the United States. Using the language of gay liberation at a time when US President Ronald Reagan refused to say the word AIDS or mention the gay community in public, Winfrey synthesised the transgressive cultural energy of the 1960s social movements with 1980s effervescence about self-starters, self-improvement, and the entrepreneurial destiny of all human beings under the regime of free markets. Her personal story was a rags-to-riches narrative tailor-made for the end of the twentieth century. Poised, defiant, and composed, Winfrey presented herself as the survivor of one of the most intense forms of sexual and psychological violation: childhood sexual assault. She set the tone for her media brand, mixing spectacular but intimate confessional testimony with progressive-sounding recovery mantras meant to appeal to her predominantly white middle-class female audience that she would cultivate and build on in the decades to come. Her televised confession expanded the communicative capacity embedded in the American public sphere, a space heretofore dominated by the stoicism of the WASPY, stiff-upper-lip ruling class. Very open about a painful past that included drug addiction and teenage promiscuity, Winfrey turned her own life into content for her show. Publicising her psychological turmoil regarding dating and dieting, Winfrey presented herself to her audience as someone who struggled with relationships with men and with her weight. In 1988, in one of the most watched broadcasts in the medium’s history, she showed off her new slim physique and wheeled sixty-seven pounds of animal fat onto the studio stage to show how much weight she had lost. She touted the benefits of her Optifast, allliquid diet. Addressing her audience as fellow dieters and sufferers, her message was: 'If I can do this, you can too.' She quickly regained the weight she’d lost once she resumed normal eating habits.
Winfrey has never let her celebrity direct her life. She has used her life to direct her celebrity. She choreographed her story and her image with the vigilance of an old-fashioned Hollywood studio head. Tabloid media of the roaring 1920s exploited the fame and misfortunes of movie stars. They supplied a growing readership with lurid details about the lives of silent film stars like Rudolph Valentino and Fatty Arbuckle. Celebrities of the Jazz Age were victims of both the movie studios that owned their labour and a sensationalist media hungry for details about their everyday lives. Broadcast media would take a further step in sensationalism by opening a channel for what looked like a direct and intimate first-person communication between a star and her fans, without any kind of mediation. Instead of letting a tabloid tell her story, Winfrey expanded her own media power by taking control of her own scandals.
Winfrey’s confession was a stunning televisual moment, when the vulnerable little girl and the composed celebrity merged into one remarkable, exemplary human being. Winfrey’s trauma is at the heart of her distinctive identity: her trauma and recovery were monetised when she herself converted her own story into simple parables that were eagerly consumed by an adoring audience. In talking about her painful past, Winfrey sent an allegedly liberal and liberating public service message about abuse to her audience. She said explicitly that she hoped to dispel the shame and iniquity that surrounded women who as girls had been sexually abused by family members. The catharsis of televisual confession turned private trauma into spectacle, content, and commodity all at once. Most importantly, Winfrey’s public testimony of survivorship allowed her to differentiate herself from her daytime television talk show rivals, including Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Jerry Springer. Winfrey was trauma and recovery in action. The Oprah Winfrey Show went on to become the most successful daytime talk show in television history. For sociologist Eva Illouz, 'The more Oprah Winfrey became famous and powerful, the more intimate and familiar she became with her audience.' The therapeutic intimacy and empathy produced by her show made her fans feel as if they were part of a project of enlightenment and compassion.
The 1980s under Reagan were a time of renewed optimism and nationalism in a country that had been torn apart by the Vietnam War and the civil rights and labour unrest of the previous two decades. In retrospect, Reagan’s ideology was based on a kind of simple optimism about individual success [as embodied by a figure like Oprah Winfrey herself] ...
Traumatised: The New Politics of Public Suffering by Catherine Liu is published on 29 September by Verso Books.
