Technologies of Mental Illness Community: Media Representations, Digital Receptions, Psychedelic and Artificially Intelligent Entanglements in the Netflix Show Maniac

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - IV

Abstract

Media are technologies in the Heideggerian sense: they are not instrumental means to an end but poetic revelations of new intellectual spaces. The Netflix show Maniac and its transmedia network reveal the potential for interrupting normative psychiatric technologies and practices represented. Disability studies of mental illness has long resided at the intersection of STS and media. However, STS often takes an ableist approach treating disability as a problem to be overcome while media studies frequently focuses on representation/management of stigma. Our study focuses instead on the ways Maniac and its network of transmedia technologies model the emergence of liberatory “mad” communities both narratively and through the practices of disability advocacy bloggers who write about the show. In this study, we contextualize our critical media approach with histories of psychiatry that place Maniac alongside other technologies of resistance to psychiatric control.Post-Foucauldian histories of psychology and psychiatry as well as the digital humanities work of scholars like N Katherine Hayles allow us to understand the media representations of madness in Maniac as simultaneously self-reflexive about technoculture itself as well as generative of interdependent threads of community based on shared experiences of symptoms, attempted treatments and social interactions within pathologized worlds. Fan studies work such as Henry Jenkins and virtual ethnographic methodology allow us to locate such threads of community within a disability blogosphere where multiple meanings of sex, gender and sexuality as well as disability politics are improvised and rehearsed with a social movement-based prerogative.

Authors

• Zahari Richter, PhD student at GWU

• Martin Peter Law, Indiana University