The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified (...) and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)

This dissertation takes up questions of access at the level of language itself, as well as in the context of cultural institutions in emerging global communities. Using the texts of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Shani Mootoo, I argue experimental narrative techniques develop new understandings of mental disability by pushing against the limits of language, particularly in relation to mentally disabled women. The novels and plays examined function as creative objects that refigure the reader’s relationship to mental disability through embodied (...) reading practices. In resisting previous tendencies to read literary representations of mental disability as metaphor, I offer an alternative framework for understanding mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies. Drawing on work from disability studies, critical gender studies, and trauma theory, I call for approaches to mental disability in literature that understand reading as an interactive process between reader and text, proposing a methodology for understanding how embodied reading practices inspire new understandings of mental disability and trauma in emerging global communities. In appreciating mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies, readers can better attend to the nuanced ways in which complex embodiment calls for innovative modes of storytelling that challenge histories of representation. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

This essay examines how disability interacts with gender in public discourse about sexual violence by investigating the ableist implications of two popular labels commonly applied to people who have experienced rape or sexual assault: survivors and liars. Using a rhetorical approach in conjunction with disability theory, I analyze how discourses of compulsory survivorship ask people who experience sexual assault to overcome disability and appear nondisabled, whereas rape‐hoax narratives frame others as mentally ill, mad, or irrational. Taken together, I argue, these (...) frameworks form a discursive paradox for people who experience sexual assault, specifically marking their mental fitness and placing them in a rhetorically impossible situation when attempting to disclose sexual assault. Demonstrating how these frameworks silence articulations of pain and the realities of mental illness that can result from sexual trauma brings debates about mental disability and pain more centrally into disability studies through a feminist lens. (shrink)

In 2013, in accordance with a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the U.S. government began fining hospitals with “excessive” patient readmission rates. Those working to respond to this issue have identified discharge communication with patients as a critical component. In response to this exigency and to contribute to the conversation in the medical humanities about the field’s purview and orientation, this article analyzes studies of and texts about communication in health and medicine, ultimately arguing that the (...) on-going circulation of compliance rhetoric and assumptions has limited efforts to improve patient communication. The article, furthermore, considers that humanist ideals of agentic action, the patient-centered care movement’s emphasis on the patient, and biomedicine’s tendency to treat evidence-based knowledge as fixed and given may have combined to support a rationale for using patient adherence to treatment guidelines as metrics in measurement studies designed to identify effective communication strategies. Finally, the article proposes that those working in the medical humanities consider the value of interdisciplinary posthumanist scholarship—specifically, its treatment of agency and knowledge as emergent, distributed, and contingent—and its potential to transform or extend in productive ways the conversation about what constitutes effective communication with patients. (shrink)