Disability St:The Mad Turn

“Disability studies” describes a diverse array of projects, located primarily in the humanities but speaking to and with the social sciences, that challenge the ways in which “normalcy” and “abnormalcy” have been deployed to conceptualize physical and mental difference. Speaking back to medical models of disability that would position people with disabilities as only objects of knowledge, disability studies considers not only how disability functions symbolically in culture but also how people with disabilities have themselves been shapers of culture. This course offers a survey of psychiatric disability with a focus on mania and depression with histories of madness and sanity serving as a larger backdrop that informs our current moment. We will examine a wide variety of texts in order to pose a series of overlapping questions: what languages does our culture provide us for thinking about disability and how have those languages shifted over time? How does psychiatric disability complicate the seeming divide between the medical and social modes of disability? How gender, sexuality, and race complicate both representations and the lived experience of those with psychiatric disability? How have discourses of sympathy, compensation, and accommodation been deployed to constrain or empower people with disabilities? How do people experiencing mania and depression talk back to systems of power and offer different understandings of the world? How does disability studies challenge our current sense of what it means to live in a multicultural society? This tuition includes housing, up to 19 meals per week, and all program fees.