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"Travis, Trysh"
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The Language of the Heart
InThe Language of the HeartTrysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger \"recovery movement\" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development.Travis draws on hitherto unexamined materials from AA's archives as well as a variety of popular recovery literatures. Her analysis traces AA's embrace of the concept of alcoholism as disease, the rise of feminist sobriety discourse and the codependence theories of the 1970s and 80s, and Oprah Winfrey's turn-of-the-millennium popularization of metaphysical healing. What unites these varied cultures of recovery, Travis argues, is their desire to offer spiritual solutions to problems of gender and power.Treating self-help seekers as individuals whose intellectual and aesthetic traditions are worth excavating,The Language of the Heartis the first book to attend to the evolution and variation found within the recovery movement and to treat recovery with the attention to detail that its complexity requires.
eBook
Toward a Feminist History of the Drug-Using Woman—and Her Recovery
In 1995, public health scholars Laura Schmidt and Constance Weisner published \"The Emergence of Problem-Drinking Women as a Special Population in Need of Treatment.\" The article, aimed at specialists in the growing field of behavioral sciences, explored the history of medpsych attitudes toward women drinkers. That history had been characterized, until the 1970s, by ignorance and neglect, but it began to shift in the wake of Second Wave feminism and what Schmidt and Weisner called \"the women's alcoholism movement.\" To be fair, attitudes toward male drinkers had also long been inchoate. But beginning in the 1940s, advocacy by a handful of scientific and legal professionals, as well as the mutual aid group Alcoholics Anonymous (founded in 1935) and the National Council on Alcoholism (founded in 1944), created a new vision, which went on to be underwritten by federal funding and private insurance. \"Alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic a sick person,\" argued National Council on Alcoholism founder Marty Mann in a host of magazine articles beginning in the late 1940s. From that assertion followed the beliefs that \"the alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping\" and that \"alcoholism is a public health problem and therefore a public responsibility\" (29). Behind Mann's carefully gender-neutral language lay an image of the alcoholic as a white man from the respectable middle classes. The mid-century legitimation of that man's problems, Schmidt and Weisner argue, paved the way for \"problem-drinking women\" to finally come into focus half a century later.
Journal Article
The Cool Chick in Recovery: Understanding Brené Brown
In the summer of 2016, I began toying with the idea of a little article about the vulnerability guru Brene Brown. I also had a brief and somewhat torrid fling. Like me, the man was middle-aged. The relationship ended amicably as the summer wound down, but it was still a rather wistful parting. It's too bad things couldn't work out, my friend told me on our last night together. You're a cool chick. As the days grew shorter I found myself haunted by this quaint turn of phrase, so evocative of North Beach and Greenwich Village. I was a homeowner in a red state, a tenured faculty member with expertise in, of all square things, popular self-help cultures.
Journal Article
The Intersectional Origins of Women’s “Substance Abuse” Treatment
The WOMAN Center was a women’s drug treatment program focused on heroin that existed in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood between 1971 and 1985. During this period, successful advocacy by the Modern Alcoholism Movement was establishing the “disease model” as the norm in the expanding alcoholism treatment realm; therapeutic communities and methadone maintenance vied for similar prominence in the world of drug treatment. The WOMAN Center approached drug dependence quite differently. Its founders’ allegiance to ideas about grassroots organizing led them to see drug use and related problems as predictable responses to community chaos and blight. Their treatment program hinged on linking individual and community empowerment, achieved through drug cessation but also through consciousness-raising and leadership training. This theory was difficult to operationalize and the WOMAN Center’s tenure was short-lived. This article argues that it is nevertheless an important moment in the theorization of women’s alcohol and other drug problems: WOMAN’s intersectional analysis of gender, which drew special attention to the ways that capitalism and racism affect women’s decisions to use drugs, is a road not taken for women’s treatment. Attention to such a politicized vision of recovery is important as the U.S. grapples with the present wave of narcotics use in rural and rust-belt communities.
Journal Article
Middlebrow Culture in the Cold War: Books USA Advertisements, 1967
IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, AMERICANS WHO BELIEVED IN THE BOOK'S TRANSFORMATIVE POWER ENJOYED SHARING THEIR literary wealth with readers in the developing world. Through the Darien Book Aid Project (founded in 1949), The Freedom House Bookshelf (founded in 1958), Books USA (BUSA; founded in 1962), and other programs, they sent bundles of American paperbacks to would-be readers in countries where books were scarce and expensive. Such experiments in what international-relations scholars call people-to-people diplomacy aimed to harness the energies of America's growing middlebrow reading public to the nation's Cold War aims. Book-donation programs shared the realist aesthetic and humanist sensibility that hallmarked the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Disdaining avant-garde “difficulty,” their selections foregrounded transparent language, traditional mimesis, and strong themes. Fiction, biography, and popular history were the backbone of such programs, and even selections from sociology and political thought centered on unambiguous, three-dimensional characters—individuals who embodied the Enlightenment virtues of rational thought, hard work, and tolerance.
Journal Article
\It Will Change the World If Everybody Reads This Book\: New Thought Religion in Oprah's Book Club
Scholars seeking to praise Oprah Winfrey's Book Club have lauded it as a triumph of cultural democracy, while those looking to denigrate it have dismissed it as merely a \"therapeutic canon.\" Both visions rely on a repression of the Club's religious dimension. This article argues that Winfrey has for some time used her multimedia empire to purvey a version of American New Thought religion—an idealist, mystical faith in \"thought as power.\" It reads her Club as a particularly focused arena in which Winfrey's New Thought beliefs and practices are performed, and explores the politics of the Club's non-rational ideals of authorship and reading.
Journal Article