Some thoughts related to Friday's discussion

Thanks to everyone for contributing to Friday’s class. To keep the discussion continuing on the blog, here are a few questions to consider:

• Involuntary commitment: who decides that a person can be locked up?

• Nature versus nurture: the creation and social construction of disability becomes especially important to feminist theory when biological differences between the sexes enter the discussion. I’m sure everyone remembers the controversy that arose when former Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between men and women might account for the lower numbers of women successful in the fields of math and science. How does this relate to the topics that we have been discussing? What other factors might account for this discrepancy?

• Does having a mental disorder mean being unhappy, ignorant, or inhuman?

• How does money (or the lack of it) affect the treatment of mental disorders?

One topic that received a lot of treatment in Friday’s reading but that we didn’t discuss much in class was the use of photography to document insanity. Even though photography ostensibly should have been more objective than previous methods of recording the symptoms of mental disorders, it was subject to a lot of manipulation. The photographers often posed and dressed the subjects and placed them in environments to fit their own ideas of sane or insane, with the mad queen or Ophelia being the most common models of insanity. It reminded me of how descriptions of fertilization in textbooks were molded to fit the aggressive male/passive female stereotypes. Rather than recording events just as seen or as the data proves, the descriptions of both female insanity and fertilization became molded to fit preconceived notions.

The diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders seems especially suspect to manipulation by culture’s standards for “normal.” Given that intellect and morals are regarded as humanity’s distinguishing characteristics, those that are regarded as deviant in these areas are often stigmatized even more than those with physical disabilities as being less than human, as “life unworthy of life” (to use the chilling phrase from Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s presentation).

Such callous devaluation of those regarded as mentally disabled or deviant ties directly with the dehumanization of marginalized groups. As discussed on Wednesday, once abuse of the disabled begins, it opens up the door to dehumanization of other groups that are placed under the same label for political or even scientifically “justified” reasons. The perceived mental deficiency of women in the past, for example, was used to tie them closer to the animal aspect of humans; they were not granted equal status as full humans along with the males. The validity of the deficiency itself is a problem unique to that situation, but the dehumanization of those deviating from an established norm is a problem stemming from the treatment of the disabled as less than human.