Occupying the MindThe Discursive Implications of Naming Mental Disability

Margaret Price, Spelman Collegeprice.spelman@gmail.com

Outline of talk

Overview of the discursive implications of naming mental disability. “Discursive”= cultural, political, academic, personal.

Introduction of liminal rhetorics and what I have come to see as the “territories” of mental disability.

A statement about where I hope we are going in disability studies in the future.

“Academic psycho-killers”?

The dropout rate of students in college with diagnosed psychiatric disorders is 86%.

Reliable numbers are not available for faculty.

(Collins & Mowbray)

Themes emerging from discourse analysis in Mad at School

Rationality Criticality Presence Participation Productivity Collegiality Security Coherence Independence

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Mind / person / soul?

“The center of our discourses on madness has had many names: thymos, anima, soul, spirit, self, the unconscious, the subject, the person. Whatever be the accent given by the central concept, access to the entity afflicted with madness is obtained through a language game in which these concepts or names play a role, organizing our experience of the world even as the world vouchsafes criteria for correct use of these notions.”

(Allen Thiher, Revels in Madness)

What naming is for

The aim of analyzing language about disability should not be to mandate particular terms, but rather “to examine what our current articulations of disability are saying in the here and now.”

(Tanya Titchkosky, “Disability: A Rose by Any Other Name?”)

Mental disability

“This collective category [mental disability] focuses attention on the problem of gaining rhetoricity to the mentally disabled: that is, rhetoric’s received tradition of emphasis on the individual rhetor who produces speech/writing, which in turn confirms the existence of a fixed, core self, imagined to be located in the mind.”

(Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson,“Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental

Disabilities”)

Coalition and inclusivity

“We need a way of talking inclusively about people for whom access to human interaction is problematic.”

(Cal Montgomery, quoted in Mad at School)

Liminal rhetorical space

“A critical space of ambiguity between abled and disabled embodiment … This kind of passing is not a hiding of a stigmatized identity but an embodied ambiguity, a flexible embodiment that can call critical attention to the way dominant culture draws boundary lines and constructs exclusions.”

(Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson,“Rhetoric in Liminal Spaces”)

Capital-m Mad“I use the Mad Movement to question the idea that our differences (‘behavioural,’ ‘affective,’ cognitive’) are essentially disordered (in the dominant sense of being negative or unwanted disability). I claim what I call a Mad identity, capital M. This means it is a proper form of appellation, not simply a description about us for us, and therefore hopefully moves away from reifying the classical category of ‘mad’ which is ‘disorder,’ and contributes to what I call sanism: dividing people into mad and sound minds. “

(Erick Fabris, “Madness and Disability Discourses in Relation”)

Madness/brilliance