Oprah Winfrey and women's autobiography: A televisual performance of the therapeutic self

It has become somewhat commonplace to suggest that the genre of talk shows has blurred the private and public spheres by exposing to public view secrets hitherto confined to the bedroom (or whispered into the ear of a professional). However, the process by which the private is made public is still largely unclear. To become a public form of speech, a private utterance must undergo a transformation, that is, be recoded as a public performance. In this essay, we suggest that Oprah Winfrey's construction of her biography on television is exemplary of the kind of cultural transformation that the private must undergo in order to become public. Winfrey's performance of her private self is paradigmatic of the mechanism by which the private is recoded for public consumption as a spectacle.