Breaking Down and Breaking Through in the Insane Liberation Movement

• In Event: Mad/Queer Pedagogies of Dissent

Abstract

As many have noted, the growing conversations between crip and queer theory in recent years have often been skewed toward issues of physical disability. In contrast, within activist history, some of the earliest and most forceful articulations of an antinormative and deconstructive political agenda can be found in antipsychiatry organizing of the 1970s. Building on recent queer studies work that has traced theories of deviance through postwar critiques of psychiatry (Huffer 2010; Love 2015), this paper looks to 1970s insane liberation activism as a way of conceptualizing a genealogy of “queer” through mad activism. I focus specifically on the queer and feminist investments of 1970s militant groups like the Mental Patient’s Liberation Project, Insane Liberation Front, Project Release, and Women Against Psychiatric Assault; I also consider major antipsychiatry periodicals like Madness Network News and Rough Times/RT. Like many other 1970s radicals, insane liberation organizers in the U.S. were acutely attuned to political critiques in Left theory emerging during the same years—they frequently drew from these works in the development of their political praxes. For insane liberation activists, these included not just Anglophone antipsychiatry thinkers (Laing, Szasz, Goffman, Cooper), but also engagements with madness and institutionalization within French theory (e.g., Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Hocquenghem, Cixous). Accordingly, this paper highlights cross-pollinations during this time between U.S. activism and the profusion of intellectual production about madness on both sides of the Atlantic. I suggest that from these thinkers, activists theorized madness not just as a deviant subject position, they also positioned madness as a mode of being uniquely poised to dissolve structures both of the subject and of society altogether.

Author

• Abram J Lewis, Northwestern University