Literatures of Madness

Disability Studies and Mental Health

Elizabeth J. Donaldson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319926650
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319926667
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.

© The Author(s) 2018

Elizabeth J. Donaldson (ed.)Literatures of MadnessLiterary Disability Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92666-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Breathing in Airless Spaces

Elizabeth J. Donaldson¹

(1)

New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY, USA

Elizabeth J. Donaldson

End Abstract

In 1998, Shulamith Firestone published Airless Spaces, a slender collection of vignettes about her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The book begins with a nightmare: “I dreamed I was on a sinking ship” (5). Firestone’s narrator flees from a manic, drunken party on an upper deck and seeks shelter deep in the watery bowels of the ocean liner. Searching for a protected air pocket, she stows away in a refrigerator, “hoping to live on even after the boat was fully submerged until it should be found” (5). Unfortunately, the ship sinks in the Bermuda Triangle, where no one is willing to search. Unlike the buoyant, repurposed coffin that saves Ishmael in Moby Dick, Firestone’s basement refrigerator sinks like a rock, lost to obscurity in the Bermuda Triangle of mental illness. These are “deadpan, deadend stories,” the back cover warns.

Airless Spaces, with its psych ward sketches and tales of “losers” and suicides, nevertheless contains and beautifully preserves these last gasps of breath. These are tales that are devastating in their brevity, for the monumentally small acts of courage and resistance and for the neglected moments of grief and loss that they encapsulate and record. The fact that the book even exists is itself an unlikely wonder. Beginning her activist work in the late 1960s, Shulamith Firestone was a force to be reckoned with. A radical feminist leader and organizer, Firestone published a groundbreaking manifesto of second wave feminism, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, in 1970 when she was only 25. But as Susan Faludi describes in her memorial essay, “Death of a Revolutionary,” bitter divisions in the feminist movement led Firestone to “self-exile” (58). And Firestone’s emerging, concurrent mental health problems made her almost disappear. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals on involuntary committals (Faludi 60). But in the early 1990s, a makeshift support system of women organically emerged to help Firestone survive, meeting with her weekly to “help her with practical needs, from taking her anti-psychotic medications to buying groceries” (Faludi 61). Lourdes Cintron was at the core of this support group, which included friends who admired Firestone’s work and friends who were healthcare professionals. As a caseworker for The Visiting Nurse Services of New York, and an ardent admirer of The Dialectic of Sex, Cintron successfully advocated for Firestone to receive nursing support services, even though she had no insurance (Faludi 61). Bolstered by the care of this community of women, Firestone’s health and standard of living improved, and her hospital stays were less frequent. Airless Spaces, which is dedicated to Cintron, is a product of this special period in Firestone’s life. Yet in the late 1990s her support group began to fall apart just as organically as it had formed: Cintron became ill, and other women, including Firestone’s psychiatrist, moved away. Firestone relapsed more often, spent more time in hospital, and increasingly withdrew from family and friends. She died in August 2012: her body was discovered in her apartment, only after her landlord noticed that her rent bill sat untouched on her doorstep for several days (Faludi 61).

Airless Spaces exists because a feminist community of carers worked both within and beyond the traditional mental health care system to support Firestone when she wanted and needed it. The book is a product of feminist ethics of care in action, of a web-like interdependency among women. But its origin story is secondary to the remarkable content of the book. Airless Spaces is the muckraking, realist, disability studies antidote to the misogynist fantasy psych world of Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest . Firestone’s work is sparse and direct, mired in the mundane details of case workers and day programs, involuntary commitments and missed rent payments, homelessness, taking meds, not taking meds, and the hard and rarely glamorous work of surviving with a chronic psychiatric disability. Airless Spaces should be a classic in a canon of literature about mental illness; it should be a text that disability scholars routinely turn to when they discuss disability and mental illness. But chances are you haven’t read it. Yet.

Literatures of Madness is an initial step in creating a tradition of literary disability studies of mental illness, mental disability, madness. The collection itself embodies a search for primary texts like Firestone’s and a search for the language and methodologies of analyzing these texts within a disability studies framework. The collection is meant to function as a provisional hub or way station: a point at which to meet together collectively, to commune, build on synergies, and honor differences, before continuing on the longer journeys forward.

The book is organized into three sections: Mad Community, Mad History, and Mad Survival. These themes directly correspond to aspects of Firestone’s life and work. The Mad Community section is about the importance of connection among people with disabilities, and the often invisible networks that link them together, which is reflected in both the content of Firestone’s vignettes and the creation of Airless Spaces. This section begins with Elizabeth Brewer’s “Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled.” Brewer examines the historically uneasy fit between mad studies and disability studies and explains some of the fundamental ideological differences between the two. Brewer notes, for example, that many psychiatric survivors do not identify as being disabled, and likewise many disabled people do not identify as psychiatric survivors. In an effort to bridge the divide between mad studies and disability studies, Brewer analyzes scholarship by three authors who strategically come out as both disabled and mad: Margaret Price, Katie Aubrecht, and A.J. Withers. The form of Brewer’s chapter also reflects and reinforces her larger argument about coming out and coalition building: she weaves her critical readings together with her own personal stories to reveal her positionality, perspectives, and motivations for analyzing the tricky contacts between madness and disability.

In a similar vein, PhebeAnn Wolframe’s “Going Barefoot: Mad Affiliation, Identity Politics, and Eros” bridges mad and queer communities. Wolframe examines the ways in which consumer, survivor, ex-patient, and mad (c/s/x/m) communities, like LGBTQIA communities, are bound together across messy identity categories and shared experiences of otherness. Beginning with a reading of Persimmon Blackbridge’s novel Prozac Highway (2000), Wolframe explores how c/s/x/m people forge a sense of kinship through online listservs. Wolframe further theorizes mad reading practices as a form of community building by analyzing excerpts from MadArtReview , a private blog she created. Reading MadArtReview alongside Prozac Highway , Wolframe considers the way mad people undermine the fixing of madness as identity, instead carefully negotiating their identifications and affiliations, and consciously blurring boundaries. This blurring, Wolframe argues, offers the possibility of messy affiliations across difference, and the re-emergence of a kinship between queerness and madness.

The next two essays in the Mad Communities section examine different types of structural, institutional barriers that complicate the creation of mad communities. In her essay, “‘Hundreds of People Like Me’: A Search for a Mad Community in The Bell Jar ,” Rose Miyatsu provides a new, alternate reading of madness in Sylvia Plath’s canonical asylum novel. As Miyatsu points out, previous readings ignore the fact that while Esther is searching for and rejecting female role models, she is also searching for identity and community as a person with an enduring mental illness. It is rare, Miyatsu argues, for any critic to even mention characters like Valarie, the lobotomized patient Esther meets, or Miss Norris, her mute neighbor in the asylum. When critics dismiss these friendships as symptoms of illness rather than a legitimate attempt at community building, they deny the personhood of those who cannot “recover,” people who end up getting left behind as Esther moves toward normalization. Although the hierarchical structure of the asylum, an institution based on progress and “cure,” ultimately dampens Esther’s attempts at forming bonds, her experiences there encourage her to imagine what a community that can incorporate pain might look like, even if it is currently unrealizable.

Erin Soros explores very different types of institutionalized barriers to mad community building in her chapter “Writing Madness in Indigenous Literature: A Hesitation.” Soros grapples with how her embeddedness in a history of colonial violence against Indigenous communities in Canada troubles her desire to write, as a non-Indigenous, mad-identified scholar, about madness in Indigenous texts. Soros attempts to reconcile or balance her wish to share with a general audience her deep appreciation for the insights into madness that she has gained from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Breathing in Airless Spaces
• Part I. Mad Community
• Part II. Mad History
• Part III. Mad Survival
• Back Matter