"Come Aboard Our Ship of Folly”: Kate Millett and the Mad/Queer Aesthetics of Anti-Psychiatry

• In Event: Mad/Queer Pedagogies of Dissent

Abstract

This paper discusses the work of the feminist artist, writer, and anti-psychiatry activist Kate Millett in order to trace a series of significant but overlooked connections between feminism and political critiques of psychiatric authority in postwar American art and aesthetic practice. Propelled to the forefront of the women’s liberation movement with the 1970 publication of her book Sexual Politics, Millett’s earlier accomplishments as a painter, sculptor, and installation artist, and her subsequent artistic activities, have been largely obscured by the scholarly emphasis on the historical importance of her bracing polemics against patriarchal violence and, in later years, the social stigmatization of mental illness. I argue that the feminist, queer, and anti-psychiatric dimensions of Millett’s work—as well as the crucial correlations between them—can only be fully understood when considered alongside her career-spanning engagement with a series of specific formal and aesthetic questions in her art practice. In order to do so, the essay considers the continuities between Millett’s early artistic endeavors, such as her 1967 work Trap (an immersive installation piece created in response to news reports about the rescue of a young woman who had for years been confined to a cellar in sexual captivity) and her later work, focusing especially on Kate Millett Farm, the utopian experiment in communal living and art-marking structured around feminist principles of autonomy and self-organization that she founded in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1980 and continued to run until the mid-2000s.

Kate Millett Farm was created in response to Millett’s dehumanizing encounters with psychiatric power. Though Millett’s ideas were in line with many of the ideas of the “anti-psychiatry” movement that arose in the 1960s and 70s following the work of figures like R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault, and Felix Guattari, she brought a necessary emphasis on gender and sexuality to the critiques of dominant psychiatric paradigms that emerged during this period, insisting that the psychiatric regulation of mental illness has been a crucial and especially damaging component of patriarchal authority. The paper situates Millett's work in the context of recent critical efforts to revisit the historical and theoretical legacy of the antipsychiatry movements of the 1960s and 70s, and specifically a renewed scholarly attention to the multiple valences of the term "asylum" that these movements made thinkable. I discuss how, during the heyday of so-called "deinstitutionalization," as state-run psychiatric asylums were being dismantled, artists like Millett (and thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari) rescripted what was meant by "asylum" by forging collective experiments in dwelling with and alongside madness and psychosis. Finally, I suggest that the insights of "schizoanalysis" and its critique of late capitalism's modes of subjectivization around madness, sexuality, and gender can inform our understanding of aesthetic and cultural practices that took the asylum as the model for a new model of collective living during this period.

Author

• Leon J Hilton, Brown University