This panel explores how the work of a diverse cohort of contemporary authors destabilizes narratorial identity to probe the affordances and limitations of therapeutic culture. Panelists expand beyond the memoir into poetry and fiction, engaging intersectional theories of identity to demonstrate that therapeutic narratives face differential reception based on the gender, race, class, ability, nationality, and sexuality of their authors/narrators. Responding to calls from scholars including Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis (Rethinking Therapeutic Culture, Chicago, 2015), our panel constructs neither therapeutic culture nor its effects as monolithic. It instead highlights both the dangers and prosocial potentials of creating and consuming therapeutic narratives.

The study of therapeutic culture is generatively interdisciplinary, convening scholars from literary studies, particularly influenced by feminist, gender, and sexuality and queer studies (e.g. Ann Cvetkovich) and critical race studies (Jonathan Metzl); with others from sociology (Nikolas Rose, Eva Illouz), psychotherapy (Adam Phillips), and public health and social science (Philip Davis, Josie Billington). Therapeutic culture is also increasingly and vociferously debated beyond the academy, from prestige journalism to (social) media. The global pandemic has only exacerbated the preexisting mental health crisis, making our topic extremely timely.

To open the panel, Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan reveals how the collective diasporic settings of British-born Indian poet Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene (2011) and Ban en Banlieue (2015) challenge the individualism of Euro-American trauma theory. Destabilizing narratorial identity, Kapil refigures psychoanalytic concepts of testimony and witness to align with cultural memory production. Crucially, Kapil interrogates traumas both low-level, which render the consciousness of diasporic subjects already fractured, and event-based, which exacerbate collective experiences of racial trauma. She also engages with forms of somatic mind—or intentionally embodied discourse—to resist the fetishization of diasporic trauma. For Fuleihan, Kapil implicates herself alongside readers in the witness role, resisting both complacent consumption of her work and the idea that writing and reading constitute therapy. Through formal experimentation with movement evoking higher rates of schizophrenia in immigrant populations, Kapil’s poetry embodies both the violent motion of discard of the collective trauma of British South Asian women and the culturally-specific healing motion of pendulation.

Megan Paslawski asserts that Carmen Maria Machado’s 2019 memoir In the Dream House establishes a technology of resilience for suppressed stories of queer female intimate violence. Machado locates the dream house where she lived with her abuser at an intersection of nonrecognition and disbelief. Her experience is a supposed historic anomaly whose witness is vulnerable to the mechanism Leigh Gilmore calls “taint,” or contamination by doubt and stigmatization of testimony and testifier along gender and racial lines. For Paslawski, Machado’s imaginative (re)framing of the dream house as narrative becomes a therapeutic archival practice. By offering many iterations of story and narrator instead of one testimony and self that is more readily “tainted,” Machado’s narrative resists forces of disbelief and discredit. Explaining in the dedication that “[i]f you need this book, it is for you,” Machado suggests the therapeutic potential of reading.

Christina Fogarasi argues that the contemporary novel’s anti-confessional narrator resists the individualistic therapeutic mandate to tell one’s story, instead thinking communally and systemically about micro- and macro-traumas. Focusing on novels by two Black men, Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air (2010), Fogarasi centers Black male protagonists who, rather than divulge their past or work through a single traumatic event, instead share snippets of their emotional backstories from a distance, with entrepreneurial creativity. Whitehead’s protagonist, a renowned nomenclature consultant, indicates his feelings only by branding them, while Mengestu’s protagonist crafts asylum narratives for a living, harnessing his storytelling skills to fabricate his family history. These novels satirize the confessional form, exposing how racial trauma serves as a branding strategy through which BIPOC characters acquire ‘depth’ and cultural capital. Ultimately, anti-confessional narration frames racial trauma and white supremacy not as events one can confess or capture as commodities, but as cruel, depersonalized banalities that explode surface/depth distinctions.

We organized this panel because we believe that understanding how therapeutic modes of being and narrating experience both help and hurt us—“us” conceived capaciously—requires both employing methodologies from literary studies and ensuring humanists are central to the conversation. Addressing critiques that therapeutic culture issues from and abets unchecked individualism, these 15-minute papers mobilize literary texts that offer strategies for narrating individual and collective experiences of micro- and macro-level trauma in prosocial ways. We will reserve 15-20 minutes for an unstructured discussion on therapeutic culture as an ever-pervasive, yet unwieldy resource for forms of communal thinking and collective action we need now.