Decompiling Oppression #76
Sam McVeety
This Thanksgiving weekend, we learned from my dad about a family member's increasingly precarious state of dementia, as she imagines herself being places that she's not, from her near and distant past, trying to attend to appointments and jobs long gone. We talked through some of the difficult questions about how to balance agency and safety: whether to keep her door closed to prevent her from wandering into a stairwell and how to manage care as she increasingly loses track of personal belongings, even within her own room.
All this has me thinking: about human minds and what constitutes "normal"; where we allow for autonomy and individuality, and where we restrict and control. For me, a foundational resource has been Liat Ben-Moshe's Decarcerating Disability (discussed before), which examines disability and confinement across many different intersections of identity and power. It's an immense topic, and today we'll ground ourselves in some of the immediate intersections with gender, race, and age.
Racially, conceptions of sanity and neurotypicality can be readily deployed in violent ways. As Ben-Moshe notes, from the trial of Michael Brown's murder: "Wilson testified, 'I’ve never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy. . . . I’ve never seen that. I mean, it was very aggravated, . . . aggressive, hostile. . . .'" This follows a centuries old history of pathologizing resistance:
[R]acial criminal pathologization has a long history, from eugenics, to resistance to slavery being diagnosed as drapetomania, to projecting the trope onto indigenous people, particularly women who resisted the state when it wanted to take their children to Indian residential schools.
In the realm of gender, we have "hysteria", and its selective deployment to restrict the mobility and agency of women. As a quick reminder, this was a condition ascribed to women who refused the gender norms of the day (submissive, even-tempered), with coerced marriage and childbearing prescribed as cures. The "father of modern neurology" prescribed Charlotte Perkins Gilman (herself a eugenicist) a "rest cure" for hysteria that provided the inspiration for The Yellow Wallpaper. (For a modern reclamation of these ideas and a rebuke of the gendered and racialized gaslighting that accompanies a hysteria diagnosis, see Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic.)
More personally, I consider my own precarity, only a few decades removed from its own delisting in the DSM (an official listing of mental illnesses). This apparent steady march of progress might seem obvious in retrospect, but again and again, it's not obvious when it's happening. And to be abundantly clear, it is still happening, particularly to trans people in the United States and elsewhere. All this has me thinking again about the complexities of predicating agency on perceptions of one's mental state, and how truly fraught that topic is. Who gets to determine what is normal and what is not? When does abnormal become dangerous? When is normal dangerous?
Lately, all this has made me particularly self-aware about uses of "crazy" and "insane". As someone who would probably have been labeled that, at one point in time... those are words that I've tried to be very intentional about in my use. (Perhaps "hysterical" belongs on that list, as well.) Thinking about friends who have engaged in self-harm further complicates my feelings. Some of them sought out help and support in obvious, socially legible ways (counseling, hospitalization) on their own, and others didn't. Were they crazy? That label feels wrong, absent the comfortable distance of anonymity.
As we think about words and their meaning, this invites perhaps a deeper question -- do we even need a word for "crazy"? Rather than ask what word I might use instead, I'm inclined to ask: what if I didn't? It makes me wonder, if I find myself using this label reflexively, to denote the other, the unknowable, the less-than -- what other (less acceptable?) words might I have used in a different time and place? What if, rather than the reduction to a single label, we forced ourselves to examine the emotions surrounding "I feel like that person is unknowable to me and it makes me deeply uncomfortable". Rather than project the narrative entirely on the other, we are part of the narrative as well.
Returning to my family, and the balance of agency and safety, finding this balance is hard. It is agonizing. And, perhaps this is how it should be. Perhaps we lose our way when we seek to find shortcuts and categorical rules for things that are still as mysterious as the mind.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Was there a time when you might have been called crazy? If not crazy, something else? What might you have called others?
Communal: What other linguistic or structural vestiges of disposability can we find in commonly held beliefs and practices?
Solidarity: Support Sins Invalid their work to celebrate artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.
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