Are you Gay? Are you stupid? Are you a Nerd! Making use of everyday humor to explain sophisticated sociopolitical vocabulary and disempowering labels of discourses (stories).
I remember chuckling when during one of my first classes during my Masters studies a lecturer said the following in explaining Foucault, “On everyday ground level it works like this – That person is a real nerd”. At the time, it was funny for me until I understood that ‘words are not always empty. Persons expressing likewise experiences are common in therapy.
In wielding their power, others (peers / parents/ teachers) could constrain the life of another by their discourse. This is in rather simplistic terms but many variants of this are found in the mental health field. Some with a sociopolitical vocabulary may call it ‘the mental unhealthy' field.
Michel Foucault wrote about the ubiquity of power pervading all human interaction. Knowledge is power. It is benevolent and singularly adept in the collaboration of the subjected in their own subjection. Power is allowed to know and see all in its methods of surveillance and of accumulating knowledge.
Michael White introduced the work of Foucault in family therapy. People do what they do because they are ‘constrained' from doing otherwise. “Whites singular genius as a clinician is that he has been able to take this bleak version and apply it to people's everyday lives in the service of their liberation even from such ubiquitous oppression… …A powerful way of keeping a person in line is to identify him/her with the problem-even when keeping the person in line is not the intention as such. Having people blaming themselves is a most powerful way of controlling not only a family, but a populace.” (Story-revisions by Alan Parry Robert E. Doan)
Externalizing such discourses is the work of White and others from this field. I also adopted this technique and epistemological background. This is an ethical narrative view in the field of therapy and counseling and has sociopolitical implications.
The tragedy of modernity in a mental health settings are expressed in movies like 'Girl Interrupted' and 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest'.
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