CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Buck, Taylor Glendora |
|---|---|
| Title | Agency, Subjectivity, and the Schizophrenic: Meaning in Madness Beyond the Bounded Subject |
| Summary | In this thesis I consider the ways projects of diversity and inclusion leave intact and unproblematized a centralized norm of the intelligible, coherent, self-reflective, individual subject. Such projects continue to exclude those who fail certain standards of intelligibility, relegating them to a space of abjection in relation to which norms of proper subjectivity and citizenship are simultaneously secured and troubled. I specifically discuss schizophrenia as a discursive construction that functions as an exemplar of this abject Other. I utilize threads of queer theory to question the very concept of normativity and formulate alternatives to the hegemony of the rational subject. At the crux of my discussion is a skepticism of what we might assume mental illness means, does, or looks like, in an effort to recognize modes of oppression inherent in such assumptions and imagine alternatives that do not silence those labeled ‘crazy.’ I turn to feminist disability studies, a field whose project has largely developed within a neoliberal biopolitical framework of rights-claiming, inclusion, diversity, and normalization, to consider in what ways this framework is limited by its reification of a certain requirement of agential subjectivity. How does the definitional incapacity of the ‘schizophrenic’ (non)subject indicate the ways in which these projects of diversity continue to exclude? What norms are (and ought not be) taken as originary and preferable, and at whose expense? Finally, how might we imagine forms of agency and intelligibility not through a centralized, ‘sane’ human subject, but instead through indexes of sensation and processes of becoming that capacitate a wide range of heretofore abjected bodies and minds? |
| Supervisor | Timar, Eszter; Fisher, Linda |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/buck_taylor.pdf |
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