Mad/Queer Pedagogies of Dissent

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Building on the growing attention in American Studies to the nexus of crip/mad/queer studies, this panel traces some of the intellectual, activist, and artistic imbrications of the “queer” and the “mad” since the post-Civil Rights period. The panel advances current research into how theory and activism around the politics of madness have emerged from an expansive and variegated history of social and political struggle over the force of normativity, especially as it is exerted through intertwined processes of pathologization, medicalization, and cultural representation. Papers trace affinities and tensions between queerness and madness not just through the early work of Foucault, but also other thinkers associated with antipsychiatry (Deleuze, Guattari, Laing), as well as through psychoanalysis, feminism, and antiracist projects and forms cultural production. La Marr Bruce examines “mad sex,” black womanhood, and the limits of the “phallic” in the work of Ntzoke Shange and Gayl Jones. Leon Hilton revisits Kate Miller’s antipsychiatric feminisms by way of her under-studied artistic practice of the 1960s-70s. Heather Lukes traces vexed relations between the crip, mad, and queer vis à vis the politics of abnormality and analogy in the 2000 film Chuck and Buck. And Abram J. Lewis examines cross-pollinations between French antipsychiatry and grassroots organizing around insane liberation in the U.S. during the 1970s. Each of the panelists will address how crip/queer/mad conjunctions have contributed to the creation of “pedagogies of dissent” that teach us to envision and bring into being other modes of relation between the psyche and the social.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Lynne Huffer, Emory University

Individual Presentations

• Queer Literalism: The Task of Analogy in Crip/Mad/Queer Studies - Heather N. Lukes, Occidental College

• Mad Sex; or, Mad Black Women and the End of the Phallus - LaMarr J Bruce

• "Come Aboard Our Ship of Folly”: Kate Millett and the Mad/Queer Aesthetics of Anti-Psychiatry - Leon J Hilton, Brown University

• Breaking Down and Breaking Through in the Insane Liberation Movement - Abram J Lewis, Northwestern University

Comment

• Lynne Huffer, Emory University