The problem with disability studies and sexual assault
*TW: SEXUAL ASSAULT*
Does disability studies address sexual assault?
Disability studies scholar Stephanie R. Lawson (2018), as well as feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay (2017), comment on the lived embodied experiences of surviving sexual abuse. Gay, writing about the physical and psychological realities of surviving trauma in her memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, states that “I’m living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred” (21). Analyzing Gay’s memoir in relation to survivor narratives, Lawson writes, “…[R]ape and its aftermath provoke a range of embodied consequences, often met with prescribed standards that dictate how one should heal” (682).
These scholars flesh out what it means to live an embodied reality of surviving trauma. Yet, there are still many gaps in critically addressing sexual assault and its physical consequences on the body. I am still questioning: what about Mad folx who have survived assault and abuse? What about the cognitive, psychological, and physical implications of surviving trauma? Certainly, it is known that those who survive trauma can possibly develop psychological and emotional impairments such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders. Considering that every 73 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the US, I am left to wonder: where is the critical scholarship that brings these narratives into focus?
Newer branches of disability studies do indeed critically engage with psychological impairment — my own field of Mad studies being the prime force in literary and cultural studies. To give a brief introduction to the field: Mad studies was first introduced in 2008 as a separate branch from disability studies and has been evolving both within and outside of disability studies. As the beginnings of disability studies primarily were comprised of scholars with physical disabilities (such as Mike Oliver), many scholars who had psychological disabilities felt excluded from this discourse. Similar to Deaf studies, Mad studies scholars believe that the history of madness and those who are Mad is fundamentally different from those with physical disabilities and chronic illnesses. (Bradley Lewis’ chapter in The Disability Studies Reader, “A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism” [2017], also points this out.)
I want to discuss here Therí A. Pickens’ new work, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (2019), for two reasons: a.) because my dissertation is in the field of Mad studies, and b.) because I disagree with her theorization of sexual violence as metaphor for madness. This work is quite popular right now in the field of disability studies, and Duke University Press even made the introduction free to download when it was first published, assuming it would be highly anticipated as a contribution to the critical discourse of Mad studies. I would say that, indeed, it has brought attention to literary intersections between Blackness and madness — a much needed work for both scholars who engage with race, and scholars within my own field of Mad studies. This critical attention is so vitally needed, even particularly in our own historical moment.
I first will analyze Pickens’ definitions for “madness,” as well as my own understanding of this term as a woman who does indeed identify as both Mad and disabled. The difference between “Mad” and “mad,” and why I always capitalize “Mad” in my own research, is because these two words mean fundamentally different things: “Mad” is a political identity for those who view themselves as psychiatric patients/consumers/survivors/ex-patients (psychiatric P/C/S/X in Bradley Lewis’s terms in Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, & the New Psychiatry [2006]), while “mad” represents an emotional or psychological state (“insane, crazy; mentally unbalanced or deranged; subject to hallucinations or delusions,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary [“mad, n. 3.a.”]). Although Pickens makes use of both of these definitions and includes “mad” within her definition of “Mad,” I believe we must be extremely careful in how we use these terms, as both “Mad” and “mad” have been applied in problematic ways to both psychiatric P/C/S/X (Lauryn Hill as an example) and politicians (Trump being a good example). I would contend that not every individual who identifies as “Mad” also identifies with the colloquial use of the term, as many of my students have demonstrated to me in my own classroom. For those who identify as “Mad,” in the socio/cultural/political sense, these folx do not need to agree with or even have a clinical psychiatric diagnosis, and those who were clinically diagnosed do not have to identify as “Mad.” Indeed, many students in my own disability studies classroom are either liberated or disturbed by this identity category when I teach them this Mad studies unit. Some might feel accepted by the Mad community in this sense, while others feel that they should not celebrate their psychiatric diagnosis. Either view is logical.
Pickens combines “mad” into “Mad” in her introduction. She states on page 4: “Mad carries a lexical range that includes (in)sanity, cognitive disability, anger, and, for anyone who remembers the slang of the 1990s, excess (usually synonymous with too or really),” even though she states that she is “resisting an uncritical celebration of madness as experience or metaphor.” Is she?
Previous disability studies scholars have pointed out the problematic ways that literature and literary scholars have portrayed disability and madness as metaphor or have glamorized disabled and Mad people’s real suffering. For instance, Elizabeth J. Donaldson (2011) highlights the very real issue of the glamorization and romanticization of women’s madness in second- and third-wave feminist literary studies and pop culture. Donaldson states, “However it is romanticized, madness itself offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion” (93). Although Pickens states that she is shying away from the issues of portraying madness as metaphor for deviance, this proves impossible to maintain in her first conversation, “Making Black Madness.”
Discussing Octavia Butler’s novel, Fledgling, Pickens analyzes the pedophilic relationship between Shori (a Black woman, but physically appearing as eleven years old) and Wright (a white man). On page 43, Pickens states that Shori and Wright’s relationship is “a relationship between Blackness and madness, between himself and Shori as a Black mad subject […] Pedophilia then becomes the primary way that Wright works through her Blackness and her madness.” After Pickens describes a scene of sexual assault between the two, Pickens states, “By virtue of their incomprehensibility and socially unacceptable nature, morally reprehensible behaviors (lynching, hate crimes, sexualized violence, ableist violence, etc.) associated with oppressive ideology must be accompanied by madness” (44), which is a common cultural narrative for sexual abusers, school shooters, murderers, etc., in pop culture and media. Although Pickens states that readers could find this scene between Shori and Wright as “merely rough sex,” she concludes by stating, “[Shori] matches him with her bite, not knowing or understanding his need for violence, thereby thwarting the possibility of her degradation and allowing for her own pleasure” (44–45).
I cannot help but be concerned by her theorization of sexual abuse as a form of madness, and Pickens’ theorization of Shori’s supposed attempts to enjoy this abuse, to be extremely problematic in two ways: a.) Donaldson’s claim that madness should not be romanticized as a form of power, and b.) the portrayal of a survivor of assault as possibly enjoying their abuse. Does this not set up even more cultural narratives for victim blaming and slut shaming of survivors? A common narrative of sexual assault, according to feminist scholar Mithu Sanyal in Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (2019), is that when men overpower women sexually, women end up enjoying it: “Since women were supposed to have no sexual desires of their own, it fell to gallant men to overpower and ravish them” (9). By portraying this act of violence as an act of pleasure, Pickens is moving into dangerous territory that follows narratives of rape that have existed to harm survivors since the eighteenth century.
Although I am nitpicking here, I cannot unequivocally endorse new scholarship in Mad studies that excludes more thorough research in portrayals of the sexual assault of Mad folx. As fourth-wave feminism and #MeToo grows in its cultural relevance, I contend that the only appropriate way to theorize sexual assault is as a power imbalance between two parties — there is no reason that rape should be theorized, symbolized, or turned into any other kind of metaphor in our scholarship. Lawson writes that rape inflicts real, embodied pain: “Rape and sexual assault are painful experiences, both emotionally and physically” (683). I believe that Mad studies, and the wider field of disability studies, needs to look closer at pain, both physical and psychological, and not romanticize or glamorize the suffering of folx who have experienced trauma.
Where is pain in the discourse of Mad studies? Although disability studies scholar Sander L. Gilman (2015) writes that madness is “psychic pain” (114), much more work needs to be done concerning pain — either emotional, psychological, or cognitive — as well as its intersections with real, lived, physical pain. Margaret Price (2015) also points out the lack of critical engagement with pain in disability scholarship, stating: “DS [Disability Studies] needs to pay more attention to the place of pain in the world of disability” (274). As both Gay and Lawson point out, sexual violence does leave a mark on the body — and indeed, there are intersections between psychological and physical pain. My own lived experience with endometriosis has caused me quite a bit of pain, both psychological and physical, and I disagree highly with glamorizing or romanticizing my pain.
The problems surrounding disability and sexual violence are vastly understudied, and I cannot help but think that Pickens’ work, although quite well-researched and likely to be essential reading in the Mad studies canon, marginalizes the real issue of sexual assault to “merely rough sex.”
Works Cited
Donaldson, Elizabeth J. “Revisiting the Corpus of the Madwoman: Further Notes Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Mental Illness.” Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall, Indiana University Press, 2011, pp. 91–113.
Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. HarperCollins, 2017.
Gilman, Sander L. “Madness.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 114–119.
Lawson, Stephanie R. “Survivors, Liars, and Unfit Minds: Rhetorical Impossibility and Rape Trauma Disclosure.” Hypatia, vol. 33, no. 4, 2018, pp. 681–699.
Lewis, Bradley. “A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 5th ed., Routledge, 2017, pp. 102–118.
— -. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, & the New Psychiatry. University of Michigan Press, 2006.
“mad, n. 3.a.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2000, https://www-oed-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/Entry/112000?result=5&rskey=ous15Z&. Accessed 1 March 2021.
Pickens, Therí A. Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. Duke University Press, 2019.
Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 268–684.
