Public confessions

Oprah Winfrey's American religious history

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4517138
AutoresK Lofton (0000-0002-1069-4945, Indiana University Bloomington, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen18
Número1
Páginas51-69
Fecha de publicación2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07407700801902874
OpenAlexW1990552489
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas19

Nothing in The Oprah Winfrey show is a surprise. The show's arc is so commonplace, so predictable, that it is the premise of her viewer's rapt attention: they watch to experience the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation. That Winfrey herself is a particular type—a loudly “spiritual”, self-declared “black woman”—only compels viewers further into her corporeal and material utopia. Through her carefully racial self-descriptions, Winfrey transforms her talk show studio into the imagined black church, making a commodity of the very authenticity that propagates her own persistence in the public sphere. This essay deploys two moments in US religious history—the antebellum revivalism of Charles Finney and the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions—to posit particular analogies to Oprah's religious and racial scripts in the televised public sphere. From these moments, we will find that Oprah's codes of conduct are knit into the religious history of her national stage

Art · Epistemology · Literature · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Surprise · Law · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · Social Psychology