An Asylum’s Afterlife: From Site of Trauma and Anxiety to Place of Revelry and Memory

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - III: The Materiality of Deviance in Institutions, Movements, and Mediascapes

Abstract

On October 18, 1974, the Wayne County Training School for Feeble Minded Children (WCTS), located near Detroit, officially ended its life as a state institution. To the surrounding community, WCTS’ closing wasn’t the end of its story but the beginning of a new place in public memory. In its afterlife, this former youth asylum remained a space of community anxiety related to youth delinquency. However, it also transformed from a space where unruly bodyminds were contained by the state to a space that created delinquents via illegal trespassing.

This paper traces one afterlife of WCTS through Crip Theory and STS lenses. After closing WCTS, the state repurposed the cottages that once held delinquent youth into a for-profit haunted house exhibit. In the surrounding community’s collective consciousness, WCTS transformed from a place where delinquent youths were sent to be contained to a public spectacle where horrors were used to generate profit. While open as the WCTS, taxpayers complained loudly about the public cost of the institution; however, in its afterlife, that same community gladly paid high admission prices to keep it open for their entertainment.

Applying both a Crip and STS lens to the WCTS’ afterlife allows for intersectional analysis of the relationship between the institution and the community, with a particular emphasis on how WCTS, both the state institution and the haunted house, was a site where unruly bodyminds became separated from the general community: either by state coercion and medical authorities or by choice, for their own revelry.

Author

• Kate O'Connor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor