DISABILITY, DEPENDENCY, AND THE MIND: REPRESENTATIONS OF CARE-GIVING AND RECEIVING
type: CreativeWork
description: Since its beginnings in the 1970s disability activist movement, disability studiesscholarship has traditionally focused on physical disability and, in working to deconstruct the figure of the “cripple” as a symbol of pathos, has shied away from close examinations of pain, suffering, and dependency in favor of a focus on disability pride, agency, and community. As the field has grown, however, it has made room for investigations into these more difficult considerations, and in particular into how these affective states cluster around mind-related disability. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay’s 1999 book, Love’s Labor, reexamines social contract theory in terms of what she calls the “dependency relation” and its attendant ethics of care. Bringing together mental disability with an analysis of both gender and race, Kittay’s work undergirds my own project’s intervention into readings of American literature between the Civil War and World War II, along with recent debates (for example, in the work of Licia Carlson, Nirmala Erevelles, Rachel Adams, among others) about the gendered, raced, and classed structures of care and dependency that are particularly evident in the case of mind-related disability. With a few notable recent exceptions, scholarship into the history of psychiatry has largely ignored the early and sustained imbrication of race in the origins of the American asylum movement and its widespread — and long-lasting — cultural impact. My project seeks to intervene into this history by examining the works of American writers who deploy representations of dependency and mind-related disability, and, in so doing, also critique, and sometimes reinscribe, assumptions of racial and gendered Otherness. I argue that mind-related disability produces strong cultural anxiety reflected in these writings precisely because it threatens the illusion of raced-and-gendered autonomy, an American ideal that has never been possible but has loomed large since the earliest days of th…
abstract: Since its beginnings in the 1970s disability activist movement, disability studiesscholarship has traditionally focused on physical disability and, in working to deconstruct the figure of the “cripple” as a symbol of pathos, has shied away from close examinations of pain, suffering, and dependency in favor of a focus on disability pride, agency, and community. As the field has grown, however, it has made room for investigations into these more difficult considerations, and in particular into how these affective states cluster around mind-related disability. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay’s 1999 book, Love’s Labor, reexamines social contract theory in terms of what she calls the “dependency relation” and its attendant ethics of care. Bringing together mental disability with an analysis of both gender and race, Kittay’s work undergirds my own project’s intervention into readings of American literature between the Civil War and World War II, along with recent debates (for example, in the work of Licia Carlson, Nirmala Erevelles, Rachel Adams, among others) about the gendered, raced, and classed structures of care and dependency that are particularly evident in the case of mind-related disability. With a few notable recent exceptions, scholarship into the history of psychiatry has largely ignored the early and sustained imbrication of race in the origins of the American asylum movement and its widespread — and long-lasting — cultural impact. My project seeks to intervene into this history by examining the works of American writers who deploy representations of dependency and mind-related disability, and, in so doing, also critique, and sometimes reinscribe, assumptions of racial and gendered Otherness. I argue that mind-related disability produces strong cultural anxiety reflected in these writings precisely because it threatens the illusion of raced-and-gendered autonomy, an American ideal that has never been possible but has loomed large since the earliest days of th…
author: White Vidarte, Elizabeth Justine
language: eng
keywords: American literature, Disability studies, American studies, Care, Dependency, Disability, Gender, Madness, Race
license: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
date published: 2021
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:21:14Z
provider: Temple University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Temple University. Libraries

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/6846