[Inter]sections #29 (2026)

The Triumph of the Therapeutic Revisited: The Politics of Self-Care and Self-Improvement in Contemporary American Culture
Guest editors: Alexandra Bacalu & Dragoș Manea

The rising popularity and speedy proliferation of social media in the 2010s and 2020s has resulted in the revival of a large-scale cultural interest in self-care and self-help—now reconceptualized as digital practices of self-improvement and virtual means of performing individual authenticity, in the context of increasingly blurred boundaries between the public and the private. This concern with caring for the self and preserving mental health has only peaked during moments of political crisis and social unrest, with the 2016 and 2024 elections of Donald Trump, the 2020 global pandemic, and the recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East being repeatedly referenced in popular discussions around the—highly debatable—therapeutic need for occasional political disengagement. The birth of the sociological study of therapeutic culture(s) in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the recognition of America as a particularly intriguing case-study on the Western “triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff 1966), especially considering its open-armed welcoming of Freudian ideas in the post-war period or the rise of spiritual self-actualization fads that followed the deeply politically-engaged Civil Rights era (see Berger 1965; Lasch 1979; Lears 1983). Indeed, American culture offers an impressive collection of key contexts in the history of the larger Western concern with therapy and self-development. A rough survey of these might include: Puritan self-examination and self-discipline in seventeenth-century New England; Transcendentalist articulations of self-reliance and nonconformity; the clinical reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century; Audre Lorde’s articulation of self-care as an act of radical political warfare; US social media influencers and the popularity of Stoic self-help in the Manosphere; among others. We invite papers that reflect on the political, social, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of self-care—and its many cognates—in any aspect of contemporary American literature and culture. This special issue explores questions such as: In what ways are contemporary notions of self-care politically engaged or politically neutral? How can we (re)conceptualize self-care as a politically-loaded set of cultural practices that necessarily include the care of the other? How can the pursuit of individual happiness and self-actualization be made compatible with active political engagement in the popular imagination? How is the human body visually constructed via representations of self-care on digital and social media platforms? How are self-care practices involved in the cultural representation of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation? To what extent can contemporary representations of individual self-improvement make room for a more nuanced account of human vulnerability in the context of widespread neoliberal narratives of undefeatable individual resilience?
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Please send all inquiries and proposals (a title, 300-word abstract, and 100-word bio) to Dragoș
Manea at dragos.manea@lls.unibuc.ro and Alexandra Bacalu at alexandra.bacalu@lls.unibuc.ro.
The deadline for proposals is June 15, 2026. The deadline for articles between 4,000 and 8,000 words is September 15, 2026. All texts should be written in accordance with the 9th edition of
the MLA citation style.