Inventing [DIS]topia: Recovering Rhetorics of Un[DIS]ciplined Agency

Marian Lupo

Ohio State University, Columbús (United States)

Janet Foner, before the U.S. National Council of Disabilities, testifies for people labeled with psychiatric disabilities:

We are locked up without due process and without knowing how long our sentence will be . . . . We become physically disabled by the so-called treatments we are given, such as brain-damaging electroshock and psychiatric drugs. . . . If people can say it is our fault and we are the defective ones, then they do not have to face the issues that are happening in society that are oppressing people.[1]

My focus is on recovering rhetorics of agency for “psychiatric disabilities.”  People labeled with psychiatric disabilities are figured as delusional, untrustworthy, violent – in a word – undisciplined—and requiring punishment, exclusion, and shame.  Within Disability Studies itself, the psychiatric disabilities are placed at the lowest rung, used as that margin against which others establish credibility.  “At least I am not crazy” is a common refrain in Disability Studies memoir. 

My purpose is to claim center space for those labeled with psychiatric disabilities – those disabilities both undisciplined and un[DIS]ciplined – and recover arguments critical to the avowedly utopian enterprise of Disability Studies: empowerment and inclusion of bodies/minds across all divides.  To invent [DIS]topia requires not simply including the psychiatric disabilities within Disability Studies, but recovering arguments that recuperate those so labeled from their historic silence and shame. 

Twenty percent of the U.S. population is labeled with psychiatric disabilities, and globally, “psychiatric disabilities” are the leading disability among women and children.  Inventing [DIS]topia is urgent work. I first survey the U.S. culture of violence that represents psychiatric disabilities as the source of unspeakably deviant acts.  This culture justifies the violence against people labeled with psychiatric disabilities, the exploitation that produces distress, and the lack of funding for social services.  

I place this culture within the history of psychiatry, which justified itself with three arguments: Insanity was curable; the insane could become productive citizens; and supporting institutions kept the public safe from violent people.  I conclude the curability of “psychiatric disabilities,” a lucrative industry for pharmaceutical corporations, finds its logical expression in U.S. “Mental Health Courts” that forcibly medicate non-violent offenders labeled as psychiatrically disabled. I then turn to recovering three arguments often assigned to people labeled with psychiatric disabilities: disidentification, disassociation, and disintegration of the ego.  

I claim these arguments are rhetorics of  agency that directly threaten the hegemonic disciplinary apparatus. These are powerful dissuasive arguments made within and against an oppressive system.  They disrupt the ability of this system to assign a subject position to the individual.  I show how people labeled as psychiatrically disabled are shamed, in part, because of their competency in rhetorical intervention – the use of language to accomplish empowering sociopolitical ends.  

Hegemonic discipline perpetuates shame by figuring these rhetorical interventions as pathology, as incredible and uncredible.  Yet these rhetorics create self-professed urgencies insisting on the credibility of the “undisciplined” agent and disrupting systemic subjugation of the individual. By recovering these rhetorics from pathology, [DIS]topia becomes a thinkable space. 

Abstracts/Resumenes de las Ponencias