The Oprah Phenomenon This page intentionally left blank The Oprah Phenomenon Edited by Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson T U P K he niversiTy ress of enTUcKy Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oprah phenomenon / edited by Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2426-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8131-2426-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Winfrey, Oprah--Criticism and interpretation. I. Harris, Jennifer, 1971– II. Watson, Elwood. PN1992.4.W56O67 2007 791.4502’8092—dc22 2006033479 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses Contents Foreword vii Introduction: Oprah Winfrey as Subject and Spectacle 1 Jennifer Harris and elwood watson Part I. Oprah Winfrey and Race The Specter of Oprah Winfrey: Critical Black Female Spectatorship 35 tarsHia l. stanley My Mom and Oprah Winfrey: Her Appeal to White Women 51 linda Kay The “Oprahization” of America: The Man Show and the Redefinition of Black Femininity 65 Valerie Palmer-meHta Part II. Oprah Winfrey on the Stage Oprah Winfrey and Women’s Autobiography: A Televisual Performance of the Therapeutic Self 87 eVa illouz and niK JoHn From Fasting toward Self-Acceptance: Oprah Winfrey and Weight Loss in American Culture 101 ella Howard Spiritual Talk: The Oprah Winfrey Show and the Popularization of the New Age 125 maria mcGratH Oprah Winfrey and Spirituality 147 denise martin Phenomenon on Trial: Reading Rhetoric at Texas Beef v. Oprah Winfrey 165 Jennifer ricHardson Part III. Oprah Winfrey on the Page Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream 191 malin Pereira Some Lessons before Dying: Gender, Morality, and the Missing Critical Discourse in Oprah’s Book Club 207 roberta f. Hammett and audrey dentitH Making Corrections to Oprah’s Book Club: Reclaiming Literary Power for Gendered Literacy Management 227 saraH robbins Knowing for Sure: Epistemologies of the Autonomous Self in O, the Oprah Magazine 259 marJorie Jolles Oprah Winfrey’s Branding of Personal Empowerment 277 damiana Gibbons List of Contributors 293 Index 297 Foreword To speak of Oprah Winfrey is to speak in superlatives. She’s the rich- est this, the most powerful that; the first this, the greatest influence on that. What Caesar was to geography, it would seem, Winfrey is to turn-of-the-twenty-first-century culture. Commentators refer to the “Oprahfication” of America much like historians refer to the helleniza- tion of Europe and Asia under Alexander. Winfrey positioned herself at the head of a vast cultural empire and then convinced everybody to confirm that she’d done so. A discussion of Oprah Winfrey nearly always begins with hyperbole. Oprah Winfrey starts out with one extraordinary gift: the ability to talk to millions of people as though she were directly addressing each of them. Others have had this talent, of course: Arthur Godfrey, Johnny Carson, Fred Rogers, even Walter Cronkite. As these media personali- ties did, Winfrey uses candor and a virtuoso fluency with the American vernacular to transcend the impersonal nature of electronic media. Tele- vision is the perfect medium for her: millions watch it, but they watch one or two at a time, usually in personal domestic spaces. Unlike her TV-savvy predecessors, Winfrey took her ability to be “someone we’d want to invite into our living rooms” and used it as a base camp from which to launch sorties into every nook and cranny of modern com- munications. With stunning speed, she applied the sophisticated tools of the modern entertainment-industrial complex to become not just a TV star but a lifestyle. It turned out, needless to say, that she was very good at very many things, from acting to publishing. Long before makeover shows hit prime time, Winfrey realized that a principal theme of the American story is reinvention. From the earli- est days of colonial settlement to the mass immigrations of the nine- vii viii Foreword teenth and early twentieth centuries, settlers annihilated their histories, escaped their pasts, and crossed the Atlantic to discover new selves in the new world. In a very real way, the history of the United States is one big makeover show. Oprah Winfrey understood this. Her biography is itself a breathtaking American story of self-creation, and that motif shows up in the earliest iterations of her talk-show persona. Whether through self-awareness, personal resolve, or conscious lifestyle changes, Winfrey’s unifying approach to life was one of improvement, actualiza- tion, and empowerment, brought about mostly by talking. It worked so well that she extended the franchise, deputizing Dr. Phil to talk away a whole new set of our problems. Embodied in Oprah Winfrey, and all she has wrought, are all the major themes of contemporary American life: race, gender, and con- sumerism; celebrity, power, and self-righteousness; optimism, jingoism, and altruism. To approach the subject of Oprah Winfrey is to encounter the possibilities and contradictions of life in the Republic. And it’s to encounter them on the exaggerated, super-sized scale of the nation itself. From the standpoint of the 1950s, the idea that an African Ameri- can woman would achieve the cultural centrality and power of Oprah Winfrey in just one generation would have seemed highly unlikely. It’s a great American story, and like most American stories it’s filled with ambiguity and wonder. Robert Thompson Syracuse University Introduction Oprah Winfrey as Subject and Spectacle Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson For a brief moment in 2002, President George W. Bush faced one of his most savvy media opponents to date: Oprah Winfrey. According to the White House, Winfrey declined to join an official U.S. delegation scheduled to tour the schools of Afghanistan and draw attention to the subordinate role of Afghani women, claiming “she didn’t have the time.”1 The news item was quickly disseminated, as befitting anything that tied together so many newsworthy elements: refusing a request of the U.S. president, rebuilding Afghanistan, and Oprah Winfrey herself. The attempt of the White House to draw on Winfrey’s cultural cur- rency to galvanize public sentiment is telling; although the mission was ostensibly a gender-based humanitarian one, officials candidly admitted that the “Winfrey strategy” was intended to “dampen images of global violence.” Photos of Winfrey extending her ubiquitous open-armed embrace to the citizens of Afghanistan would undoubtedly advance the notion that the Untied States had succeeded in a mission that was re- ally about embracing the people of Afghanistan, welcoming them into the loving fold of democracy and liberty. That an alliance with Winfrey and her audience was primary, and the actual humanitarian mission secondary, was evident from the cancellation of the tour—which was to include Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice—after Winfrey declined the invitation. In some ways, even more interesting than the choice of Winfrey as a revamped Statue of Liberty is the way the White House chose to “leak” this information, and the aftermath of its revelation. Announcing 1