“The Game is the Double Game”: Medical Discourse in Tennessee Williams’s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (1957) functions as a searing retort against the American medical model which, for decades, demonized drug and alcohol users by labeling them as “disabled”; medicalized social “deviants”; pathologized sexual preference; and attempted to eradicate physical, psychological, and sexual non-normativity through eugenics. By depicting characters grappling with issues such as substance addiction, homosexuality, and euthanasia, Tennessee Williams not only exposes and challenges the flawed logic of eugenic theory and the fallacies of such medical discourse, but also, in the process, reveals that the provincialism, rigid social norms, and narrow-mindedness of the South—a society of “double games”—in effect paralleled such ideologies and facilitated the construction of non-conformity and non-normativity as medical “pathologies.”