No Direction Home

Zaretsky, Natasha

doi:10.5149/9780807867808_zaretsky

Cited by 60 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…73 Lasch was not amused to see the paperback edition of his book promoted as one of the 'greatest books on society's changing values', next to Sheehy's Passages, Friday's My Mother/My Self and Charles Reich's The Greening of America. 74 Lasch failed to change the minds of millions of readers about what they saw as an eye-opening, and indeed authoritative book. In Library of Congress surveys in the 1980s and 1990s, readers voted Passages among the ten books that influenced their lives most -next to The Feminine Mystique and the Bible.…”

Section: Bad Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Anti‐Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA

Schmidt¹

2018

Gender & History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Bad Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Anti‐Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA

Schmidt¹

2018

Gender & History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…During the 1970s to 1990s, this linkage was manifest in the political culture of “family values.” Gays and lesbians were seen by many, particularly political conservatives and those on the religious right, as a threat to national security via a challenge to the ideal of the White, middle-class nuclear family, which conservatives evoked as the bedrock for American politics (Coontz, 1992). As historian Natasha Zaretsky argues in No Direction Home , anxieties about national decline following the Vietnam War and the energy crisis of the early 1970s drew on fears that changes in the American family, including changes wrought by the women’s and gay liberation movements, were at the root of a decline in national military and economic strength (Zaretsky, 2007). Historian Robert Self similarly locates the rightward realignment of U.S. political economy and culture since the 1960s in politicized notions of family life, consolidated since 1973, he argues, under the banner of family values (Self, 2012).…”

Section: Psychotherapy and Sexuality Post-1973mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexuality, therapeutic culture, and family ties in the United States after 1973.

Weinstein¹

2018

History of Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2nd ed.; DSM-II; American Psychiatric Association, 1968). Clinicians subsequently began conducting psychotherapy with gays and lesbians not in order to change their sexuality but to address the psychological effects of homophobia and associated problems. Family-related issues such as the impact of coming out to relatives became an important dimension of psychotherapy that normalized same-sex desire, identity, and relationships, even amid contemporary invocations of family values as grounds for opposing gays and lesbians' political claims. This article examines family therapy's gradual recognition of gay and lesbian families as emblematic of the historically changing relationship among psychotherapy, sexuality, and family during the 1970s to 1990s. Although early family therapists of the 1950s and 1960s were largely unconcerned with treating homosexuality as a psychiatric problem, they also generally did not recognize same-sex relationships as a possible configuration of family life because their models presumed a heterosexual nuclear family. By the 1980s and 1990s, many family therapists came to see sexuality as a dimension of family life that might shape the issues for which couples and families sought treatment but that did not warrant treatment itself. Homosexuality's depathologization in 1973 thus signaled the opening, not the closing, of lesbian and gay issues in family therapy because the cultural trends and social movements that led to homosexuality's removal from the DSM-II would, by the 1990s, also contribute to expanding family therapists' notion of "family." (PsycINFO Database Record

show abstract

“…26 And, as Zaretsky's illuminating history of 1970's America argues, a distinctive configuration of the family/nation nexus -itself a reaction to the socio-economic changes of the previous generation -has come to dominate contemporary American politics. 27 Indeed, wide-spread anxieties over absent or emasculated paternal authority came to the fore in the late 1960's in such infamous tracts as Daniel Moynihan's report on the black family and then California Governor Ronald Reagan's militant responses to student unrest at the state's university campuses. Both Moynihan and Reagan identified the breakdown of conventional family ideals, as evidenced especially in the supposed loss of paternal authority in the household, as the engine of the manifold crises that suffused American society.…”

Section: All In the Family: The Intimate Politics Of American Conservatismmentioning

confidence: 99%

All the Rage: Clarence Thomas, Paternal Authority, and Conservative Desire

Dudas

2012

Law, Culture & the Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Clarence Thomas is, according to The Weekly Standard, the "leading conservative in America today." More than just an iconic conservative, The National Review esteems Thomas as "an extraordinary man." How are we to understand the ascent of a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice to the status of national hero in the American conservative imagination? And what does Clarence Thomas's hero-status reveal about that conservative imagination?I argue, first, that the canonization of Clarence Thomas by American conservative intellectuals speaks to, and revives, long-standing motifs in the American political tradition: rage at, and rejection of, maternal, feminine influence; an associated longing for stable, paternal authority and the self-disciplined, autonomous citizenship that it is believed to produce; and the promotion of law as the primary means by which to achieve social order and to repress the chaos conventionally associated with the maternal realm. Second, I argue that Thomas's political vision and, especially, his jurisprudential philosophy -which emphasizes a Judge's responsibility to abdicate individual judgment in the name of fidelity to the desires of the Founding Fathers -reveals an ironic ambiguity at the heart of the conservative political imagination. Indeed, fixation with the paternal authority of law leads modern conservatives, as it does Clarence Thomas, to impose a series of limitations on the individual autonomy that they claim is the fruit of overcoming feminine, maternal influence. The manifold obsessions voiced by Clarence Thomas and his conservative intellectual champions -obsessions with fathers, with mothers, and with law -thus point to a limited citizenship that is at odds with conservatism's own dreams of mature autonomy.

show abstract

No Direction Home

Cited by 60 publications

References 0 publications

The Anti‐Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA

The Anti‐Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA

Sexuality, therapeutic culture, and family ties in the United States after 1973.

All the Rage: Clarence Thomas, Paternal Authority, and Conservative Desire

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About