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Subverting madness: on translating the mental illness memoir into a curatorial practice
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Content
SUBVERTING MADNESS:
ON TRANSLATING THE MENTAL ILLNESS MEMOIR INTO A CURATORIAL PRACTICE
by
Hattie Louise Schultz
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)
May 2024
Copyright 2024 Hattie Louise Schultz
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………… iii
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Chapter 1: Historical Background on the Western Construction of Mental Illness …………… 3
Chapter 2: Introducing Memoir as An Expressive Form ……………………………………… 10
Chapter 3: Memoirs and Mental Illness ………………………………...………………………16
The Non-Subversive Mental Illness Memoir ………………………………………….. 23
The Subversive Mental Illness Memoir ………………………………………………...28
Chapter 4: Comparing Memoir and Exhibition ………………………………………………. 34
Chapter 5: Moving Towards a Subversive Curatorial Practice …………………………………41
Notes …………………………………………………………………………………………….46
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………… 54
ii
ABSTRACT
In "Subverting Madness: On Translating the Mental Illness Memoir into a Curatorial
Practice," Hattie Schultz makes connections between visual art exhibition and the non-fiction
literary genre of memoir. Individuals with mental illness have long been excluded from society,
and visual culture continues to perpetuate harmful dominant narratives around mental illness.
However, memoir's growing publication and popularity has given people with mental illness the
power to tell their own stories, which resist the romanticization and spectacularization of their
lived experiences. Distinguishing between narrative/rhetorical structures that reinforce negative
perceptions and those that work against them, Schultz identifies the subversive mental illness
memoir as a potential model from which to base curatorial practices. In identifying the
subversive rhetorical techniques taken up by this sub-genre of memoir, Schultz argues that these
methods can be roughly adopted into curatorial practices, which can perhaps be utilized in
exhibiting the work of mentally ill artists in a way that honors the messiness and vulnerability of
their experiences.
iii
INTRODUCTION
I’ve struggled with mental illness periodically throughout my life. For a long time I
insisted that my depression and anxiety didn’t define who I was as a person– that internally I
contained multitudes, and my psychiatric diagnosis was only one microscopic piece of my
wholeness– but as the years progressed and my experiences multiplied, I started to feel like my
anxiety and depression played major roles in my day to day life, and significantly informed my
personality. I was not defined by my mental illness, but this part of myself informed my
subjectivity in ways simply too great to ignore. Beyond meeting the diagnostic criteria required
to be deemed “abnormally” depressed (though “generically” anxious!), I believe that my
emotional state dictates a wide range of aspects of my life, perhaps the most significant being the
kinds of connections I make with people, places, things, and ideas.
I have always had a great love and appreciation for art and art history. Even when I didn’t
have the words to describe what I was seeing, I knew what I was feeling, and in my emotional
and somatic responses to art I could identify a relationship forming between myself and the
artist, the artwork, and something bigger. I was content with not always knowing the exact
history or meaning behind a work of art, as I felt like I could fill in the blanks for myself when
necessary, when needed. But I would find myself unintentionally turning away from art when
going through especially difficult moments of mental illness. Instead of finding life in visual art,
I found solace in memoir. Through reading the stories of people with experiences, thoughts, and
feelings incredibly similar to my own, I felt a profound connection stronger than any I had ever
had with visual art. In reading memoirs of experiences with mental illness, especially narratives
written by women, I was reassured– even comforted– by the fact that there were others feeling
1
the same way I did, which for too long had felt alien, like I knew what I was feeling was wrong,
and yet I didn’t know how to feel any other way.
Having recognized the powerful identifications I have with memoirs of mental illness, I
now want to identify why I turned to memoir in moments of emotional instability, rather than to
visual art. What is it about visual art, its presentation and its written history, that denies an
empathic relationship with the viewer? Why do I find it so difficult to find representations of
mental illness in visual art, art history, or curation that speak to my own emotions and
experiences? In what ways do I find visual art exhibitions to be discouraging, and what draws me
instead to memoir? These questions fuel my thesis, which investigates the differences in how
mental illness is represented in visual art and memoir.
I begin this project by identifying harmful contemporary misconceptions of mental illness
in the West, their history, and how they are perpetuated in art historical discourse and exhibition.
These master narratives, which continue to marginalize, stigmatize, and oppress people with
mental illness today, permeate visual culture, and are the source of the disidentifications I’ve had
with art during times of heightened emotional and mental distress. Once I discuss what visual art
“gets wrong” about mental illness, I examine memoir as a narrative artform that resists
romanticizing, spectacularizing, and “othering” lived experiences with mental illness. There are
multiple identifiable rhetorical techniques utilized in memoir that distinguish it as a subversive
creative practice working against dominant ideologies surrounding mental illness. To call
attention to these rhetorical techniques serves to construct a potential model for translating
subversive representations of mental illness into a visual art practice, namely a curatorial
methodology. In utilizing the subversive memoir as a curatorial model, perhaps those individuals
2
struggling with mental illness can experience greater empathic responses to visual art and find
empowerment through creative community.
I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ON THE WESTERN CONSTRUCTION OF MENTAL
ILLNESS
Condemnation of idleness, physical isolation, and infantilization permeate contemporary
social and cultural perceptions of mental illness, and can be traced back to the late Renaissance
and classical age of Europe. The perception of the mentally ill person as a “failed worker” was
born from their segregation from other social “undesirables” in their inability to carry out
assigned “chores” aimed at slowly rehabilitating those seen as standing a chance of one day reentering society.1 This perception of madness as a social and economic problem continues to be
reflected in contemporary perceptions of mental illness in late capitalist societies, which often
consider those struggling with psychiatric conditions to be incapable of economic productivity.
The misrepresentation of madness as a sickness further forced the mentally ill into isolation, as,
by the middle of the eighteenth century, asylums were blamed for somehow spreading
mysterious diseases through the atmosphere. The great reform movement of the nineteenth
century would move these institutions to the rural countryside, away from the nearest towns and
cities.2 Finally, within the structures of the eighteenth-century asylum, individuals with mental
illness were treated and regarded as having the same level of consciousness as children. Asylums
were organized in a way so that the mad became minors: doctor-patient relationships, as well as
the broader social structure of the asylum, were based on a familial structure, as this was seen to
be “the oldest, the purest, the most natural” form of coexistence.3 By looking back on the history
3
of the asylum and its methods of care, we can identify the formation of social practices that
hinder the autonomy of the mentally ill in a way that has significant cultural ramifications.
Coexisting with the infantilization, condemnation of idleness, and physical isolation
forced upon the mentally ill in the late Renaissance and classical period was the trope of the mad
genius, which ran as an undercurrent in the social imagination throughout Western Europe. A
common belief established centuries before the inception of the asylum was that madness was
closely connected to creative thinking and artistic practice. Ancient Greek philosophers wrote
that those who occupied space between rationality and irrationality were most likely to be
creative practitioners, and although their mental processes may be “primitive,” their abilities
would bring them closer to divine powers.4 This ancient understanding of the mad yet divine
creative genius was reignited in the early Renaissance, wherein philosophers fashioned the
concept of melancholy, previously one of the seven deadly sins, as a creative force.5
More recent “scientific” connections between mental illness and creativity are only
motivated by the ancient conceptualization of melancholy as positive, and “in the overlap of
psychologies of creativity and art history the myth of the mad genius was reconstituted,” in
Griselda Pollock’s argument; the condition that madness is a prerequisite for a truly great artist
“is remade as the condition of the artist’s creativity.”6 While the mad genius trope allows the
average person to grasp the notion of grand creative genius through a grossly generalized
connection between creativity and mental/emotional otherness, it more significantly feeds into
harmful narratives around mental illness. The idea that one must be “a little crazy” in order to be
artistically successful discourages artistic people from seeking mental health treatment and
4
resituates mental illness as a trait with productive potential, prioritizing the output of creative
capital over one’s quality of life.
As Joan Busfield elaborates, experts in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United
States continued to use institutionalization as a medium for social othering, and condemnations
of insanity fueled a new era of classification and the solidification of a medical model. As the
nineteenth-century asylum provided, in Busfield’s words, a “standard model of mental health
care which spread widely under the impact of colonial ideas,” those occupying the margins of
society, especially those belonging to lower social classes or ethnic minorities, were overrepresented in asylum populations, their confinement often enforced on a compulsory basis.7
Further, Busfield argues that the final decades of the nineteenth century can be considered as the
era of classification, since categorization was the primary way in which both laypersons and
medical professionals commonly thought about mental illness.8 The belief that mental illness is a
hereditary condition became common, and would function as a foundation for the biology-based
medical models of the following centuries.
The new medical model for treating mental illness, Busfield asserts, would dichotomize
lived experiences into binary classifications of being, exacerbated by clinical pathologization of
the individual in psychoanalytic practices. Sigmund Freud had paramount influence on twentieth
century psychology and psychiatry, considered to be the most controversial medical practice in
the twentieth century.9 Busfield argues that in his attempts to understand the causes of mental
illness, “Freud’s etiological shift from traumatic events to unconscious processes and phantasy
led him largely to ignore the reality of external events… and to pathologize the individual.”10
Major transformations were brought to the field with the introductions of shock therapies in the
5
1930s and chemically synthesized psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, but this focus on “controlling
the mind via the body as psychiatry often does is to simplify and distort the complexity of human
experience.”11 Significantly, developments in mental health treatment and discourse in the
twentieth century inform a contemporary dichotomization of complexity: mental illness
simultaneously relieves the individual of responsibility of their actions (as their feelings are
attributed to genetic or chemical dispositions) and provides agency (the mentally ill person can
be “cured” by simply taking a pill).12 Not only do the methods of classification implemented in
the twentieth century continue to be in practice today, but these contemporary maltreatments
work beyond the medical sphere, permeating law and popular culture in the Western world.
People with psychiatric disorders have long suffered systemic exclusion from public life,
and in the United States today, as Katie Rose Guest Pryal argues, “the psychiatrically disabled
continue to be denied civic participation: they are dismissed as criminals, committed patients, or
simply unreliable observers of their world.”13 State and federal courts continue to judge whether
mentally ill people are “competent– reasonable enough– to stand trial, to testify, to be held
responsible for past actions, or to be committed to an institution” against a high set of standards
established to determine the individual’s ability to participate in juridical proceedings.14 A 1999
survey of existing state laws pertaining to mental illness found that about one third of the fifty
states restrict mentally ill individuals from holding elective office, participating on juries, and
voting, and about half of the nation restricts the child custody rights of people with mental
illness.15
In relation to this question of agency, a historical case oft-cited by contemporary
disability activists is Buck v. Bell of 1927, in which courts upheld Virginia’s Eugenical
6
Sterilization Act, authorizing the state to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman whom
the state deemed unfit to have children due to her unstable mental and emotional state. Even
though Buck v. Bell is almost one hundred years old, its assertion that “heredity plays an
important part in the transmission of insanity”16 is a precedent for contemporary maltreatment
for mentally ill people in state and federal law.
The oppressive medical and legal practices established against people with mental illness
have permeated popular culture and media in all major forms. For centuries, Western literature
has addressed madness in various contexts and from different perspectives, with notable “mad”
characters from classic literature including Euripides’ Medea, Ophelia from Shakespeare, and
Don Quixote from Miguel de Cervantes. Discussions around the nature of insanity carry into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the works of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia
Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. However, as Sharon Packer points out, because literature doesn’t share
“the persuasive power of the moving image,” cinema has received the majority of criticism about
mass media’s depictions of mental illness.17 Since its inception, film has shown mentally ill
characters in detrimental lights. Philipe de Broca’s 1966 King of Hearts infantilizes asylum
patients, a trope that the cinematic adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) would
continue through its depiction of mentally ill men as having a childlike innocence.18 Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho introduced the slasher genre in 1960, ushering in a generation of horror films
that would villainize mentally ill people as violent criminals, perpetuated by television series like
Criminal Minds (2005) and Dexter (2006). The ancient trope of the mad genius is maintained by
television shows such as House (2004) and Mr. Robot (2015), both of which feature protagonists
7
who exceed the expectations of their respective fields, though through unconventional means,
because of their mental illnesses.
It is startling to think that contemporary dominant narratives surrounding mental illness
in the West were born from ancient myths and prejudices, and that these harmful perceptions
were maintained through centuries of oppressive medical, social, and cultural mechanisms.
However, in tracing the history of maltreatment, we can better identify problematic tropes of
mental illness today, and how these tropes are formulated and continuously perpetuated. Through
reviewing historical perceptions of “madness,” especially as it was conceptualized in alignment
with creativity and artistic brilliance, we can better understand how visual art exhibition fails the
mentally ill artist and viewer. The mad genius trope is undeniably evident in discourses
surrounding great artists who had mental illness, with Vincent van Gogh being the most notable.
Griselda Pollock uses the term “psychobiographical” to describe the “psychologistic emphases
which occur in both art historical and related literature” on van Gogh.19 She argues that that
psychologistic interpretations of van Gogh’s work “far outnumber the relatively scarce studies of
aspects of an artistic practice,” and that “all aspects of VG’s life story and the stylistic features of
the work culminating in VG’s self-mutiliation and suicide has provided material to be reworked
into a complex but familiar image of the madness of the artist– ‘sensitive, tormented, yet
incredibly brilliant.’”20
Curatorial and monographic arguments for van Gogh’s schizophrenia as the cause of his
artistic brilliance inspire more recent discussions around contemporary artists with mental
illness, such as Francesca Woodman, whose depression and ultimate suicide are central in many
of her artistic biographies and museum exhibitions. After visiting the Francesca Woodman
8
retrospective exhibition at SFMoMA in 2012, Esmé Weijun Wang noted that “Woodman’s body
of work, experienced in a museum setting, feels abbreviated. You walk through the final room
and find the exit, expecting more.”21 This perception of the exhibition as foreshortened eerily
reflects the reality of Woodman’s life; again it is the artist’s biography, not having much to do
with her artistic practice, that is the conceptual focus of the exhibition’s curation. Overt
romanticization and spectacularization in curation and art historical discourse trivialize the work
produced by mentally ill artists, and alienate audiences with similar experiences from identifying
with visual art.
When it comes to representing the lived experiences of people with mental illness, those
holding authorial positions, such as curators, must avoid spectacularization and romanticization.
To depict mentally ill people as infantilized, criminalized, or as defined by their medical
diagnoses is to perpetuate ancient oppressive narratives that encourage and reinforce systemic
maltreatment. It is crucial that mental illness be depicted and discussed as nuanced, not limited
by categorizations, and in response to this necessity, I propose looking to memoir as a creative
model for approaching mental illness. While my initial interest in memoir came, as noted in the
introduction, from my personal investment in establishing a sense of self through a form of
indirect community building that occurs through the connection of other individuals’ stories with
my own, I now turn to memoir as an expressive form with a far-reaching ability to provoke
empathy in readers, characterized especially by its narrative techniques, availability and
accessibility, and unique relationships to memory and authorship.
9
II. INTRODUCING MEMOIR AS AN EXPRESSIVE FORM
Understanding what memoir is and what it does is essential to formulating how to
translate its influence into another medium, such as art work or a visual art exhibition. Memoir is
a form of literary nonfiction and exists in the narrative spaces between autobiography and
biography. Writers can tell their own personal stories, as well as those of people with close
relationships to them. Memoir can also be considered a genre in itself, one that includes a highly
diverse chorus of voices from across disciplines and geographical boundaries. Although
traditionally approached, in the words of Jane Danielewicz, as “ready-made discursive structures
that enable writers to accomplish particular rhetorical goals,” recent scholarship within genre
theory has reconceptualized the concept of genre as “dynamic forms that arise out of rhetorical
situations.”22 Due to its strong foundation in lived experiences, memoir is loyal to the
recollection of true events, places, and individuals. With this nonfictive element considered,
memoir naturally resists spectacularization and idealization, the first point of departure into a
consideration of translating memoir’s strengths into visual form.
While memoir is one of the most popular nonfiction genres of our contemporary moment,
it has been taken up as a narrative practice since the eighteenth century, when it became a
distinctive literary genre, particularly within Anglophone writing.23 Since that time, there have
been multiple “booms” in cultural significance and interest in memoir. In North America,
autobiographies by immigrants seeking to assimilate were common in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Narratives focused on the daily lives of middle-class, nuclear families
gained popularity in the 1930s and lasted through the fifties, while autobiographical accounts in
the 1960s and 1970s celebrated the writings of prominent African American figures such as
10
Malcolm X and Angela Davis.24 These later narratives addressed the oppressions experienced by
the authors in relation to race, gender, and class from intersectional viewpoints, and significantly,
“announced the citizenship of new groups of people in the democratic province of
autobiography,” according to G. Thomas Couser.25 Due to the accessible nature of memoir,
writing about (or recalling, more generally) one’s own life and relationships has never been
exclusive to the privileged; contrary to popular belief, the practice of writing memoir has been
taken up time and again by people of low status or ill reputation. As Couser notes, “in both
England and America, memoirs by rascals and scamps were published as soon as the genre
developed,” and eighteenth-century British narratives by criminals were common.26 However it
is our contemporary moment in which we are seeing the greatest numbers of people with
traditionally marginalized or minoritarian identities taking up the practice of life writing, further
proving memoir’s widespread appeal, as well as its accessible nature.
In a 2002 issue of The Washington Monthly, Lorraine Adams distinguishes between what
she calls the somebody memoir and the nobody memoir. In the case of the former, the author is
well known, perhaps even a celebrity, before their memoir is published, and it’s often their
established social or cultural reputation that fuels the sales of their written narrative. The nobody
memoir, on the other hand, is written by the average layperson, the noncelebrity, and it is through
their memoir’s publication and literary merit that they gain notoriety.27 The nobody memoirs of
this most recent boom in the genre are distinctive from memoirs of previous eras, primarily in
that the nobody memoirs of today are written by people of oppressed identities, individuals
whose stories have been disregarded, or people who were never deemed able to speak for
themselves in the first place. Additionally, as Couser points out, the contemporary nobody
11
memoir is more likely to center around a tale of suffering than a happy and carefree life,28
perhaps reflecting a continuing history of colonization, oppression, and violence, now reinforced
by the forces of contemporary neoliberalism and capitalist greed.
Couser argues that our current day’s preoccupation with memoir can be thought of not
just as the most recent boom in the genre’s widespread popularity, but as marking the age of
memoir, characterized by a multitude of significant new developments in the practice,
publication, and popularity within the past thirty to forty years.29 First, it is only recently that
memoir has come to be considered a literary genre on par with the novel, and now memoir is
often taught in North American secondary and post-secondary schools, in classes such as general
literature and creative writing.30 Second, “creative nonfiction” is now recognized as the fourth
literary genre after fiction, drama, and poetry, with memoir being the most unique and popular
form of contemporary creative nonfiction.31 Third, never before has memoir been “more
frequently and prominently published by prestigious presses and more widely reviewed than ever
before.”32 Memoirs can be found on non-fiction bestseller lists, and several of the most popular
among them have been made into films, introducing the narrative style into a larger visual
culture. This current boom in memoir’s popularity, distinguished in part by major developments,
such as its place in North American education, its elevated relation to the other major literary
genres, and its recognition by publishers and readers alike not only marks our contemporary
moment as the age of memoir, but fosters a sharing of ideas between narrative and visual cultures
that further marks memoir as a point of departure for potential curatorial projects of other artistic
forms. Memoir’s wide availability and accessibility, as well as its distinctive narrative style and
12
approaches to authorship and memory can also be informative on how to use memoir as a
prototype for discussing mental illness in informative and empowering ways.
Danielewicz connects memoir’s current popularity to broader social and political
movements outside of the realms of narrative and visual art. Parallel developments to memoir’s
prevalence “include changes in how individuals think of themselves, how identities are
expressed through interactions with others, and how the borders between the private and public
spheres (once the domain of political or impersonal discourse) are dissolving.”33 This
disintegration of private and public life, unique to what Danielewicz terms our postmodern age
of inescapable mass media, is directly reflected in art (visual and narrative), its vast proliferation,
and the varying ways in which different media overlap with each other.34 It is worth noting that
memoir’s ability to be thematically translated into different visual forms (films, television shows,
plays, and comics) is a manifestation of the genre’s accessible nature; after all, Couser argues,
“memoir is a particular, highly developed form of a very broad-based human activity: the
narration of our real lives.”35 Life narrative doesn’t even necessarily have to take a written form:
Couser notes that memoir can also pertain to oral accounts, rather than written recollections, and
therefore doesn’t automatically require the use of writing tools or modern technology.36 As long
as an individual wants to tell their story they will be able to do so, regardless of their education
level, language, social class, racial or ethnic identity, or gender, in accordance with a long
tradition of oral narration often present within oppressed groups. And in recent decades, as Ann
Cvetkovich writes, “memoir has been an undeniable force in queer subcultures, where it has been
an entry point into the literary public sphere for working-class writers.”37 As a vehicle for
personal expression, memoir is perhaps the most accessible artform in terms of who can take it
13
up and in what ways (written, oral, and/or visual). Its open narrative style, embrace of memory
and embodied history, and its approach to authorship further informs my interest in memoir as a
solvent for broader sociocultural discussions.
With its strong foothold in lived-experiences, memoir inherently resists romanticization,
sensationalization, and idealization through the author’s recollection of their personal history.
Further, the genre’s uniquely amorphous nature encourages its application into other (visual)
forms, allowing for life stories to be expressed as directly as the author wishes. Couser explains
that “memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content… it also limits its narrative
techniques.”38 While Couser frames memoir’s basis in reality as a limitation, I see this narrative
aspect as an opportunity and strength. Unlike idealized fantasies of the perfect life in a perfect
world, realistic reflections on contemporary life hold the greatest power in speaking to the
average person, enabling identification and empathy within the reader, positioning the practice of
life story sharing as a relational practice, informed by the author’s social positions and
interpersonal relationships.
Couser also brings up a significant disadvantage of rooting an expressive practice in
memory, being that it is “a notoriously unreliable and highly selective faculty.”39 Indeed,
memories are never fully reliable, as each moment we perceive and embody is filtered through a
multitude of internalized biases. However this does not pertain exclusively to memoir; even the
most objective, “universal” knowledge we encounter everyday was once taught to us as an
experience, and reinforced through collective memory. I will address this more below,
specifically commenting on how memory relates to art and curating, in later sections. But
essential to my argument for memoir’s resistance to idealization and romanticization is that the
14
role of memory in memoir informs the complex relationship between the author and the wider
narrative, effecting memoir’s empowerment of the author as they exist in relation to their social
and political environments.
In memoir, the subject (author) and object (themselves, and/or their written memories of
others) are in dialogue with each other. There is no privilege of one over the other, again
illustrating the relationality inherent in the genre. As Couser argues, memoir can be
conceptualized as a continuum. On one end of the spectrum are narratives that focus on their
author, or are autobiographical. On the other end are those that focus on someone else, or are
biographical. For Couser, “the point of thinking of them as arranged on a continuum is that,
although there is an important conceptual distinction between writing about yourself and writing
about another person, memoirs do not often do just one or the other. Indeed, in practice, it is
difficult to do one without doing the other.”40 As social creatures, our individual identities are
unavoidably informed by our relationships to others. While older practices such as art history
(and thus museology, and the making of exhibitions) insist upon a sole subject and a strong
distinction between the subject and the object, memoir puts both at the forefront, not in
opposition but in conversation with each other. It may at first seem like positioning the subject
and the object on equal footing wouldn’t be empowering for the author (the making subject). If
anything, it could devalue their identity, moving away from a status as a “genius” or fully
autonomous individual. But with memoir, it is through the author’s identification with,
ownership of, and confrontation with their own lived experiences, as difficult and painful as
many of them may be, that empowers them as individuals. Not only did they live through a
15
distinctive period of time, but the writer proudly takes accountability for their roles within the
narrative, for better or worse.
For people living with mental illness, reading honest accounts of emotional struggle and
despair in the form of published literature is not only validating and empowering, but it also
creates a greater sense of community between individuals who for too long were made to feel
isolated, ignored, and unlovable. Additionally, individuals who aren’t familiar with mental
illness, its manifestations and implications can gain an understanding directly from those who’ve
bore its weight. Memoir’s history, availability, accessibility, and the empowerment of memory
and lived experiences inherent in its narrative style infuse it with radical potential in relation to
sharing experiences of mental illness.
III. MEMOIRS AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Just as memoir as a broader literary nonfiction genre has existed and thrived for a long
time, so has the mental illness memoir, or biographical/autobiographical accounts of one’s lived
experiences with mental illness. However only in recent decades has there been a huge
proliferation of memoirs about mental illness, with depression memoirs being the most common.
41 This proliferation and popularity can be examined as a series of responses to growing political
depression, developments in the field of psychiatry and mental health, and actions within social
movements, all of which interact with the continuation of ancient cultural paradigms that cast
mental illness in a harmful light.
In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich urges readers to think about depression
and similar mental illnesses as responses to social and cultural phenomena, rather than
16
exclusively medical diseases, introducing political depression as “the sense that customary forms
of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to
change the world or to make us feel better.”42 Cvetkovich’s book, which recounts the author’s
own experiences with mental illness and innovatively adopts memoir as a research method, is a
deep investigation of the relationships between medical models of depression, the reality of
living with mental illness, the power of memoir, and the lasting legacy of harmful tropes about
mental illness. Speaking of the concept of political depression, Cvetkovich explains how the
trials and tribulations of contemporary everyday life, often brushed off as just “the way things
are” have more frequently come to be labeled as depression. While therapeutic culture often
attributes these negative feelings to childhood traumas or biochemical disorders, Cvetkovich sees
“such master narratives as problematic displacements that cast a social problem as a personal
problem in one case and as a medical problem in the other, but moving to an even larger master
narrative of depression as socially produced often provides little specific illumination and even
less comfort because it’s an analysis that frequently admits no solution.”43
The medical model of mental illness maintains a substantial presence within the popular
imagination most likely because its rhetoric illustrates mental illness as a disease that’s
manageable through its easy detection, diagnosis, and treatment. The insistence on a biologybased science, as Cvetkovich argues, “relieves people of individual blame or responsibility and
makes for a tangible set of solutions that contrast with the overwhelming, diffuse, and messy
tendencies of social or cultural analysis.”44 Cvetkovich’s promotion of conceptualizing mental
illness as a condition informed and impacted by one’s socio-political environment leads us to a
greater conundrum, which is a question of cultural authority. Who are depression’s public
17
intellectuals?45 Should doctors and scientists have more authority over the matter of mental
illness than the people who actually live with these conditions? How would perceptions of
mental illness have to change for the average person suffering from such a condition to have
equal authority on the matter as their psychiatrist? Writers of contemporary mental illness
memoirs can shed much needed light on the complex dynamics between medical and scientific
authority and the embodied experiences of everyday people living states of mental and emotional
duress.
For both cultural and medical historians alike, it is the history of pharmacology postWorld War II, as well as the creation of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental
Disorders (DSM) that have most profoundly impacted the current favoring of biochemical
explanations and treatments over explorations of affective history.46 First published in 1952, the
DSM “gave clinical psychology a more respectable foundation in scientific methodology.”47
Scholars studying scientific rhetoric have examined the social constructions of mental illness
through documents generated by the medical community, especially the DSM. Conversely, the
rhetoric of the DSM is a central feature of many mental illness memoirs, with many authors
drawing from specific points in the DSM to situate the ways in which their conditions were
received and interpreted by those from whom they sought help.48 As Cvetkovich notes, the
ongoing debates around the benefits and negative effects of psychiatric medication are also often
addressed by writers of the mental illness memoir, so much so, in fact, that the exploration of the
relationship between medication and quality of life has become a common narrative trope in
many accounts,49 which will be addressed in more detail below. The centralizing of responses to
developments in psychiatry and mental health treatment within personal accounts of experiences
18
with mental illness feeds the proliferation and popularity of the mental illness memoir as its own
subgenre.
Lastly, greetings and acknowledgements of broader socio-cultural political movements on
the part of authors of mental illness memoirs further promotes the narrative’s contemporary
proliferation. The boom in mental illness memoirs has at least coincided with, if not been
pressurized by the rise of the disability memoir as a broader subgenre. The emergence of the
disability memoir is surely related to the disability rights movement, especially the passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States in 1990. Couser notes: “As
disabled people have become more visible in the public sphere, the increasing publication of
their lives should come as no surprise”; Couser identifies the publication of Lucy Grealy’s 1994
Autobiography of a Face as establishing “the commercial and literary potential of the disability
memoir.”50
Rarely is it during a pivotal moment in the social/political/cultural sphere that memoirs
addressing said moment are published and proliferated. Couser points out that movements and
crises take time to be reflected on, articulated, and shared through publication, and memoirs
reflecting specific turbulent periods can come decades after the fact.51 But it is through the
proliferation of such narratives that future social progressions are able to take place. For instance,
the early years of the women’s liberation movement significantly informed the breast cancer
narratives that would come decades later, and HIV/AIDS narratives would be published mostly a
decade or two after the AIDS crisis began to abate in order to advance the gay rights movement.
In the same way, narrative responses to past movements in social and political advocacy,
as well as the developments in psychiatry and the burgeoning concept of political depression
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have all contributed to the recent surge in the mental illness memoir’s proliferation. Now I will
turn to key elements of the mental illness memoir that distinguish it as a notable subgenre of
memoir.
The mere existence of the mental illness memoir as a popular genre is radical in its
inherent resistance to harmful master narratives of mental illness. For the majority of Western
history, mentally ill people were considered completely incapable of speaking, let alone writing,
due to their lack of rationality. As explained by Foucault:
From the depths of the Middle Ages, a man was mad if his speech could not be
said to form part of the common discourse of men. His words were considered
null and void, without truth or significance, worthless as evidence, inadmissible in
the authentication of acts or contracts.52
But now with this most recent boom in memoir, mentally ill individuals are not only
writing their stories, but sharing them with wider international audiences, creating political
counter-narratives to the dominant psychiatric discourse.53 This political potential encourages
emotional rehabilitation for authors and readers of the mental illness memoir alike, and
interactions between recollections of lived-experiences and dominant medical discourse
illuminate the multitude of ways in which memoir can promote new ways of reconceptualizing
mental illness.
Memoirs allow for their authors to perform the work of self-rehabilitation.54 The act of
putting on paper the words once considered too scary to even think about is profoundly powerful
and allows the author to take ownership of their condition. As Elizabeth Young argues, writing
about one’s life with mental illness not only allows the writer “to establish parallels between
20
their experiences and the reader’s experiences” but descriptions of coping with the varying
symptoms of mental illness also “serve to articulate the resistance of writers' experience when
they confront our culture’s ideas about what mental illness is and means.”55 This empathetic
relationship between the author and the reader not only works to disprove harmful stereotypes
about mental illness, but it also fosters a community-building based in collective effort,
demonstrating solidarity amongst individuals separated by time and/or distance. Further, the
malleable nature of memoir writing allows for the author to utilize the narrative style for
whatever purposes best fit their intention. Cvetkovich notes: “I came to think of my practice of
memoir as a research method, as a way of addressing debates about memoir in both academia
and the public sphere.”56 Cvetkovich advocates for memoir as a research method “because it
reveals the places where feeling and lived experience collide with academic training and
critique.”57 I can certainly make a similar connection to my own practice, as my initial impulse
for this thesis was to situate my personal experiences with depression and anxiety within a
broader discourse which has taken the form of memoir.
Just as those who take up memoir as an expressive form find empowerment in the
narrative’s versatility, so do the readers of these stories, who can see themselves reflected in the
vivid recollections of the author, putting into words indescribable feelings once thought to be
isolated individual experiences. Readers of memoir respond to memoir’s inherent relationality,
and can identify with the author’s impressions being shaped by social interactions and stimuli as
a ubiquitous human experience. Mental illness memoirs are especially invaluable resources for
people with mental illness, who more often than not see their afflictions inaccurately depicted in
the Hollywood movie or True Crime series. Through reading the stories of others with similar or
21
differing experiences and struggles, individuals with mental illness can suddenly have access to a
larger community and not feel invisible or othered. Further, mental illness memoirs can be used
“to educate, to provide hope to those experiencing similar symptoms, to describe outcomes of
various choices, and to model coping strategies for others engaged in similar struggles.”58 I
would also add that reading the narratives of others with related experiences can inspire and
empower the reader to share their own stories, increasing access to a community rooted in
relationality more so than a diagnosis would do. As mental health services are not as accessible
for some as they are for others, memoirs can provide perhaps the most accurate descriptions of
life with mental illness for those unable or unsure of how to navigate health care systems, or
without access to them. Reading mental illness memoirs and incorporating them into our own
personal narratives is, as Elizabeth Young argues, “an act of inclusion and empowerment that
challenges the dominant story of mental illness as something shameful and isolated.”59
The mental illness memoir is (typically) in competition with more dominant narratives,
such as those produced by doctors, lawmakers, and by popular media’s portrayal of people with
mental illness.60 It is through first-hand experiential accounts that harmful dominant ideals about
mental illness are resisted and dismantled, informing a practice of refusal that is centered in
lived, bodily experience, rather than trivializing and romantic notions of madness and disability.
However, as memoir is arguably the most versatile narrative genre, adaptable for any author or
narrative, it is equally as likely that master narratives will be reinforced as it is that a mental
illness memoir will be subversive and do activist work. Despite pedagogical and political power,
Maureen Donohue-Smith argues, “caution should be used in relying upon personal narratives as
fully realized representations of the mental illness experience.”61 As Katie Rose Guest Pryal
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notes, although unique to individual authors, locales, and geographies, personal accounts are
deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they surface, “such that
dominant narratives can easily take hold, often to the exclusion of other, alternative narratives.”62
Not all mental illness memoirs are subversive, as it’s very easy to get pulled into reinforcing
master narratives. If we are able to identify the expressive techniques that feed into stigmatizing
narratives, then we will be better able to avoid such mistakes in the future. In the next section I
will distinguish between the subversive mental illness memoir (occasionally referred to as the
“depression memoir”) and the non-subversive mental illness memoir, or the “anti-depressant
memoir.”
THE NON-SUBVERSIVE MENTAL ILLNESS MEMOIR
As with any expressive or artistic form, memoir can fall into reinforcing harmful
dominant narratives that romanticize, trivialize, and/or spectacularize mental illness. This is
determined by narrative structure, choice of language, and relationship to medical models, all of
which primarily rely on the author and their positionality. The non-subversive or “compliant”
mental illness memoir feeds into dated constructions which further “other” people with mental
illness.
Non-subversive mental illness memoirs can be identified firstly by narrative structure.
The order in which the story is told not only communicates the procession of events and actions,
but signals the intelligibility with which the writer understands these events to have taken place
in relation to each other. A clearly delineated timeline of events shows that the writer has a
leveled understanding of order and time: the compliant mental illness memoir will promote
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linearity in its narrative structure, and “tidy up” messy or unresolved endings. As examined by
Abigail Gosselin and Katie Rose Guest Pryal, both fictional and nonfictional stories about mental
illness tend to follow a common, general structure: “The narrative begins with an account of how
the subject became sick, chronicles her worsening condition, and culminates in her lowest point
or darkest moment when she hit ‘rock bottom.’”63 While memoirs that adhere to this structure are
certainly entertaining and can often even be educational, they simplify and clean up complex
narratives that aren’t able to retain their authenticity when sensationalized, and are thus
problematic.64
Further, narratives that follow this dominant structure “typically depict the subject as an
autonomous individual who is either an agent or a victim,”65 which not only denies the existence
of social, cultural, and political influences on the individual, but also reinforces a popular
misconception that mentally ill people are actually in full control of themselves, but just don’t
want to participate in normative life, and are merely lazy, disrespectful, etc. Though “by
narrowly circumscribing how a story about psychological disorder can be told, the dominant
paradigm limits the ways that people can understand such experiences, both their own and those
of others,” restricting the empathic potential of memoir.66 In arguing for the classification of the
general mental illness memoir, or the “mood memoir,” as its own sub-genre, Pryal explains how
there are distinctive shared rhetorical conventions to be found in such narratives, which adds
another dimension of digestible readability besides a clearly delineated timeline and the binary
classification of the subject as agent or victim. The non-subversive rhetorical conventions
outlined by Pryal include a moment of awakening and certain techniques of auxesis, such as
laying claim.67 In addition to linear narrative structures, each of these conventions further
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marginalize, trivialize, and spectacularize the mentally ill writer/subject in their own way,
reinforcing oppressive misconceptions around mental illness, defining the non-subversive mental
illness memoir.
In the mental illness memoirs that Pryal examines in her essay, she finds that each author
“lays claim to other sufferers of mental illness as a means to create rhetorical authority,”68 a
practice I have also taken note of when reading mental illness memoirs. As a way to locate
themselves within a larger history of mental illness, contemporary memoir writers will often
invoke famous names of those who have also struggled with mental illness in some form or
another, identifying not only with their symptoms and/or outlook on life, but also their successful
creative endeavors, and compare themselves to these historical figures who achieved notoriety
because of and/or despite of their mental ill health. Through citing the lives and practices of
famous persons with mental illness (name-dropping) or by mentioning large populations who
have also been diagnosed with mental illness (statistics dropping), memoirists can break the
taboo that tells the mentally ill to be invisible and hide their diagnoses.69 However, laying claim
reinforces and expands the “mad genius” trope on multiple levels.
The mad genius trope is perpetuated from the perceived “benefits” of laying claim, which
entail informally diagnosing a historical figure based on documented behaviors, the nature of
their cultural work, and general public perception, both past and present. As Pryal notes,
“diagnosing” long-dead historical figures who showed signs of mental distress “can either
normalize the author… or, through retroactive diagnosis of creative geniuses, push the author’s
ethos into the realm of genius, which seems like an even stronger rhetorical position.”70 Though
detrimental for both individuals as well as the broader constructions of mental illness, the mad
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genius stereotype is a powerful source of cultural authority, and is often employed by
memoirists.71 In Prozac Nation, for example, Elizabeth Wurtzel reflects:
I’m starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton and
Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead, who may live in that bare, minimal sort
of way for a certain number of years, may even marry, have kids, create an artistic
legacy of sorts, may even be beautiful and enchanting at moments.72
I argue, however, that the “benefits” of laying claim are just two different ways of
reinforcing master narratives. By diagnosing a historical figure who isn’t known for certain to be
mentally ill or not, one enacts the work of medical doctors, creating categories and making
conclusions based on surveillance and documentation, further “othering” people who have no
say in how they are perceived. Second, by likening oneself to a historical “creative genius,”
memoirists extend the lifeforce of a dated fallacy and permit audiences to perpetuate oppressive
misconceptions about mental illness. Laying claim might at first seem to have the potential to
generate a sense of community, but to do so, especially with a venerated historical figure, only
reinforces the centuries-old mad genius trope, and acts as but one cliched rhetorical convention
in an unrealistically linear narrative.
The author’s positive relationship with medication is perhaps the clearest indicator of a
non-subversive memoir. Speaking of the contemporary popular discourse surrounding depression
and similar mental illnesses, Cvetkovich connects the work done by medical experts to the rise of
the general mental illness memoir; while memoir may seem to offer a more holistic alternative to
medical or psychiatric expertise, it actually more often than not reinforces medical discourse,
“since [memoir’s] equally vast proliferation has also been catalyzed by the anti-depressant
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revolution and, like many subgenres of memoir, can be quite homogenous in its vision.”73 Many
of the most well-known mental illness memoirs center the author’s experience with medication,
marking their first responses to pharmaceutical psychotropic drugs, or echoing wider responses
to a specific drug by a larger generation of people seeking treatment for mental illness.
Using Styron’s Darkness Visible (1989), Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), and Slater’s
Prozac Diaries (1998) as examples, Cvetkovich argues that medical discourse and memoir
should not be considered in opposition to each other, as the proliferation in the publishing of
memoir seems to piggyback off of social revolutions in anti-depressants. Narratives whose
primary themes revolve around the author’s relationship with medication “are largely structured
around some version of a drugs-saved-my-life narrative and hence consolidate a medical
model.”74 Besides a promotion of psychotropic medication, the anti-depressant memoir further
meshes with the medical model in that it is produced by and for a very privileged demographic.75
Authors of the most popular compliant memoirs in the context of the United States, such as those
mentioned by Cvetkovich, are usually college-educated, white, middle-class, and have health
care that grants access to free psychiatric medications, a coveted point of access within the
privatized and expensive United States healthcare system. While memoir as a broader genre is
accessible and encouraged for the layperson, the non-subversive mental illness memoir only
speaks to those with greater social advantage, and thus the Western medical model, which has a
long history of having bias against race, class, and gender, as well as ability.
The non-subversive mental illness memoir demonstrates that just like other expressive
forms, even memoir can fall into reinforcing harmful master ideologies surrounding mental
illness. By adhering to linear narrative structures, writers “clean up” the messiness inherent in
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narratives of mentally ill life and give endings to ongoing, often unsolvable problems. Laying
claim to past writers or creatives with mental illness reinforces the mad genius trope, and
inappropriately signals to readers that this impersonal identification is warranted. Lastly,
identification with the medical model through endorsement of pharmaceuticals validates the
misconception that mental illness is a thoroughly hereditary or genetic condition of an otherwise
autonomous individual, rather than a mixture of predisposition and response to social and
environmental conditions, again tidying up lived realities into a digestible plotline that
diminishes the lived reality of mental illness. Knowledge of the common rhetorical conventions
that constitute the non-subversive mental illness memoir informs a better understanding of where
and how the subversive mental illness memoir can resist dominant narratives that continue to
“other” people with mental illness. Identifying the main narrative characteristics of the
subversive memoir will then inspire an inquiry into a conceptual curatorial translation into visual
exhibition.
THE SUBVERSIVE MENTAL ILLNESS MEMOIR
The subversive mental illness memoir rejects the dominant narrative style and rhetorical
conventions of many “mainstream” mental illness memoirs, actively working against harmful
master narratives around life with mental illness. As explained previously, the malleable nature
of memoir allows for its writers to use it as a medium for progressive purposes,76 though Pryal
and Gosselin go further by examining specific narrative and rhetorical conventions found among
notable mental illness memoirs that subvert dominant ideologies. Pryal identifies the use of
apologia and criticism of doctors as narrative mechanisms that empower the author’s centering of
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lived experiences and use of alternative forms of knowledge. Considering creative expression,
Gosselin advocates for the adoption of other more abstract rhetorical interventions, many of
which can be found in Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 Girl, Interrupted, which I will utilize as a brief
case study for the subversive mental illness memoir.
As memoir has grown as a popular literary genre, its existence has had to be defended
time and again from critics who see the narrative style as too self-centered and not intellectually
rigorous enough to be considered literature, suggesting that “writing an entire book about oneself
is bold, crass, arrogant, or selfish.”77 With this criticism considered, memoirists taking up
conversations around mental illness have often used an apologia to justify and defend their
projects. In an apologia, which is typically in the introduction or afterword, Pryal notes that “the
author strikes a tone of humility, apologizing for sharing a story of suffering and stating a desire
to help others.”78 In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, novelist William Styron uses an
apologia to justify his adoption of memoir, and states his desire to break down taboos
surrounding mental illness.79 Similarly, Elizabeth Wurtzel also utilizes an apologia in Prozac
Nation to explain how a significant factor in her decision to write the memoir was the responses
she received to an article she published on depression in Mademoiselle magazine a few years
before.80 Although neither of these memoirs are necessarily subversive as overall narratives, their
uses of apologia demonstrate an engagement between the mental illness memoir and the reader,
situated within a specific sociocultural context that discourages the mentally ill from speaking
from their lived experiences. The apologia in the mental illness memoir creates a space outside
of the main text where the author can speak directly to readers and critics alike, carving out a
space for conversation in a traditionally one-sided discourse.
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In addition to apologia, Pryal cites the criticism of doctors as a common narrative
convention, explaining that, “nearly all mood memoirists write about interactions with doctors
who ignore patient stories in favor of other forms of knowledge, such as observations and
diagnostic criteria.”81 Anecdotes recalling ignorance, distrust, bias, and cruelty from therapists,
psychiatrists, and other medical professionals are rife among subversive mental illness memoirs,
as authors use their own lived-realities to recast supposedly objective knowledge as detrimental
misconceptions. As contemporary culture and medical practices continue to restrict the voices of
mentally ill people through “scientific” categorizations, rhetorical power is given to the
memoirists who criticize the logic and practice of medical professionals as a way of “talking
back.” Writers of the subversive mental illness memoir, Pryal asserts, “deliberately oppose their
experiential, narrative-based knowledge as patients to the empirical, scientific knowledge of the
medical profession.”82 Criticism of the DSM is especially common, and significant enough to
warrant chapters or essays dedicated to the issue, as demonstrated in Girl, Interrupted, as well as
Weijun Wang’s 2019 The Collected Schizophrenias. This fight for authority (what Pryal
describes as the oppositions of lived experience vs. science, pathos vs. logos)83 again brings to
question the issue of cultural authority, and repositions mentally ill people themselves as public
intellectuals responsible for discussions around life with mental illness.
While Pryal shows how the use of apologia and criticism of doctors function as
exemplary narrative mechanisms in the subversive mental illness memoir, Gosselin highlights a
few rhetorical interventions that can function more abstractly to resist romanticizing,
spectacularizing, and trivializing lived experiences with mental illness. The first strategy of
subversion is to depict time as a disordered experience, rather than presenting a predictable plot
30
or a digestible linear timeline. Confusion, nonlinearity, and absence of chronology accurately
reflect the reality of living with mental illness, and encourage the reader to experience this
perspective for themselves. The second rhetorical intervention is the avoidance of dichotomies
and binaries. To conceive of mentally ill people as existing as either one thing or the other–
“healthy vs. unhealthy”; “sane vs. insane”; “agent vs. victim” – reinforces dated and
surveillance-based scientific methods of categorization that continue to “other” mentally ill
individuals in both social and medical spheres. Third, subversive memoirists can ignore the
common narrative tendency to tidy up endings or provide finalized conclusions. Some issues, no
matter the nature, never end, and mental illnesses often present challenges that can only be
managed rather than cured. Rather than mark the narrative arc as (a) singular, random
experience(s), “a counterstory can avoid false representations of finality by depicting these
experiences within the present time in an active, dynamic way, as living experiences that must be
confronted continuously.”84 Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted demonstrates the effectiveness
of the rhetorical interventions proposed by Gosselin, and acts as a striking example of a
subversive mental illness memoir.
After displaying signs of severe depression, Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder at the age of eighteen. After a psychiatric consultation, she was sent to
McLean Hospital, where she was a resident from April 27th, 1967, through October 4th of 1968.
While Girl, Interrupted primarily reflects on her time at McLean, Kaysen’s text uses
performative narrative techniques to shift the focus away from her as an individual and towards
larger social issues, leaving the memoir intentionally open-ended and somewhat anthropological.
85 Explained by Couser, Kaysen’s memoir is “concerned with a concatenation of personal,
31
cultural, social, and political trends that landed her and a cohort of young female patients in
mental hospital even though few were certifiably insane,”86 illuminating not only the fight for
authority among medical professionals and people with mental illness, but also the social and
environmental factors that influenced the institutionalization of Kaysen and her fellow patients,
in opposition to the authority of psychiatric diagnosis.
In addition to situating her time at McLean within a greater socio-political context
(including the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement), Kaysen creatively adopts the
rhetorical and narrative conventions outlined by Pryal and Gosselin to subvert widely-held
beliefs surrounding mental illness. Kaysen’s criticism of doctors is a recurring theme, beginning
with the initial appointment with a psychiatrist, a family friend, who promptly sends her to
McLean after a brief first-time meeting. Kaysen repeatedly questions the logic of mental health
doctors, and whether they are treating the brain or the mind. Further, she situates her accounts of
interactions with doctors in conjunction with experiences of disordered time perception; for
instance, during a visit to the dentist, Kaysen has an anxiety attack when no one will tell her how
long she was unconscious from general anesthesia, giving her a sense of “lost time.” While this
method of depicting time as a disordered experience is rooted in literal narrative, Kaysen also
uses an achronological arrangement of chapters to intentionally avoid linearity. Similarly, an
avoidance of dichotomies or binary classifications are demonstrated in the author’s recollection
of events, including her diagnosis and interaction with other patients, as well as her opinions on
what it means to be healthy or “sane.” Kaysen believes that a primary reason the doctor who sent
her to McLean may have felt inclined to do so was likely due to her “state of contrariety,” or her
regular insistence on negating experiences socially conditioned as positive. She writes, “when I
32
was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a
pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.”87 Kaysen’s suggestion that sanity is a falsehood,
socially constructed to separate the sick from the healthy and reinforce definitions of normalcy,
rejects the categorical practice of dominant medical discourse, subverting medical authority
through narrative practice.
Lastly, no tidy endings or set conclusions can be found in Girl, Interrupted. Kaysen’s
memoir ends on a note of uncertainty and ambivalence with a recollection of a memory that is
essential to her amorphous sense of self. While visiting the Frick Collection in New York City,
Kaysen became taken with Johannes Vermeer’s 1660 painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music.
Viewing the central figure’s fretful gaze as a plea for freedom and a reflection of her own youth
experiences, Kaysen sees the glowing light of this particular work not as a typical example of
famous Vermeer light, but rather as “the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves
and others only imperfectly, and seldom.”88 The uncertainty about being “cured” that Kaysen
feels after being officially released from McLean again speaks on the subjective nature of mental
illness, and argues for viewing mental illness as a response to social and cultural factors rather
than a clearly-defined problem that can be “fixed” with treatment and medication. In locating her
narrative within a wider social context, criticizing medical authority, illustrating time as a
disorganized and disorienting experience, and rejecting binary classifications and tidy endings,
Susanna Kaysen uses memoir to actively work against oppressive ideals and master narratives
that stigmatize and “other” people with mental illness, opening up space for broader cultural
dialogues.
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The level of engagement required of the reader of Girl, Interrupted and other subversive
mental illness memoirs points towards a “significant kind of social or cultural work” that goes
beyond merely telling a story,89 and encourages an accessible level of activist work that creates a
space of empowerment for people with mental illness. Thus far I have discussed memoir as an
expressive form, focusing particularly on its presence amid discourse surrounding mental illness,
the rise of the mental illness memoir, and its complaint and subversive types. I’ve examined the
characteristics of memoir that allow for its widespread adoption and proliferation, but will now
consider memoir in relation to the exhibition of visual art. Given the differences and similarities
of these two expressive forms, is it possible to take the rhetorical conventions of memoir and
translate them into a curatorial practice? Can the subversive mental illness memoir be used as a
model for exhibiting artwork in a way that doesn’t romanticize, trivialize, spectacularize, or
“other” people with mental illness, and/or cast mentally ill artists into the trope of the mad
genius? To begin a pursuit of identifying a curatorial practice that performs some of the same
functions as the subversive memoir, I will now examine the shared qualities of memoir and
visual art exhibition, as well as the distinctive characteristics of each form, identifying points of
potential translation and unavoidable restrictions.
IV. COMPARING MEMOIR AND EXHIBITION
Despite at first seeming to be completely different expressive forms, one written and the
other visual, the memoir and the art exhibition share a handful of similarities, some of which
may be perceived as trivial, but actually function as gateways for the translation of one form to
the other. Once an understanding of the most basic mutual characteristics is established, as well
34
as an identification of inherent differences (and thus limitations), then a deeper analysis and
conceptualization of the relationship between memoir and exhibition can be made, moving
towards a curatorial model that, at least, doesn’t reinforce harmful misconceptions around mental
illness and mentally ill artists. At best it might empower and foster a sense of community among
viewers with mental illness, and educate and evoke empathy from those who haven’t had direct
experiences with mental illness.
Beginning with a broad generalization, both memoir and exhibition are public
presentations addressing things that are happening and/or have happened in the past.
“Exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known,”90 and the
current boom in memoir is bringing visibility to traditionally marginalized and silenced
populations more than ever before. Just as “narratives, and memoirs in particular, can intercede
rhetorically on behalf of people such as the mentally ill who are traditionally excluded from
rhetorical participation,”91 so can visual art. However, while art and memoir as broader media
have the capacities to speak to and be adopted by vast populations, there is a limit of how much
of one thing can be addressed in each form.
Both exhibition and memoir cannot possibly speak on the entirety of an artist’s, curator’s,
or writer’s life experiences, or arguably, even a single experience. Within the exhibition of art,
there will always be biases present in the documented history from which the curator works, as
well as within the curator themself and the institution in which the exhibition is housed. Larger
exhibitions and anthologies often claim to be exhaustive in scope and depth, but they will always
be incomplete and subject to change.92 Memoir acts in a parallel fashion, as it is often perceived
as reflecting and providing a comprehensive overview of a person’s life or a specific period of
35
life. However, “life is multidimensional and complex, sometimes chaotic; life writing must have
focus and form. Life inevitably far exceeds the capacity of writing to contain it.”93 Considering
the limited scope of both memoir and exhibition already sets a standard for what themes and
ideas can and cannot be addressed in either form and how, but opportunities to build a more
specific curatorial practice are presented with equal visibility.
Just like memoir, exhibition holds potential to disrupt cultural master narratives that have
long oppressed minoritarian populations, and curatorial practice can greatly empower
expressions of mental illness. In “A Place for Uncertainty: Towards a New Kind of Museum,”
Vera Frenkel considers the moral freight of addressing dark histories and trauma in museum
exhibitions, arguing that despite the widely held belief that it is impossible to represent certain
experiences or feelings, many of these representations do successfully exist, and appropriately
represent things long thought unrepresentable.94 In acting for difficult ideas or traumatic stories,
curators will require “art practices and museum structures that allow space and time for difficult
knowledge to remain dilemmatic, unresolvable, evoked rather than stated and made present to
the imagination through a mix of absence, indirection, incompleteness,”95 evoking a
metaphorical negation that could actually be a positive factor in accurately representing lived
experiences with mental illness. In addressing concepts that are intrinsically indeterminate,
messy, and nonlinear, accepting information as relative and incomplete can encourage a better
understanding of difficult subjects.96 However, just as memoir and exhibition have the potential
to radically subvert dominant tropes, so too can they easily fall into reinforcing them. Colonial
legacies of museology and exhibition, as well as institutional restrictions, complicate the
situation of certain histories within a white cube space, but more will be said on this later.
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The public nature of their presentation, limited narrative scope, and potential to disrupt
cultural master narratives are the basic qualities shared between memoir and visual art
exhibition, and these qualities thus set a standard for what can be accomplished in either form, as
well as establish potential limitations were a narrative to be translated from one medium to the
other. However, examining closely the nature of each of these expressive forms, I identify two
more significant shared qualities that connect them more deeply. First, both memoirs and
exhibitions are conceptualized and practiced by individual authors with unique and subjective
experiences. While acknowledgement of authorship and the lived experiences of the author is
one of the defining characteristics of memoir, exhibitions are similarly constructed by individual
authors with subjectivities: curators. Second, the material featured in memoir and exhibition is
based, though in varying degrees, in memory. In memoir, the author directly recalls their
memories through narrative, while exhibitions feature the memories of others that inform the
ideas and opinions of the curator, as well as the memories of the curator themself (which are
conceptually manifested as biases). Authorship and memory are certainly more nuanced and
complex qualities of exhibition and memoir, and reveal themselves to different degrees, as I will
explore later. But their significance and power within each medium informs the ways in which
memoir can potentially be translated into curatorial practice. As I just examined the mutual
qualities of exhibition and memoir, now I will analyze the distinctive qualities of visual art
exhibition that separate it from the literary genre.
Much discourse within contemporary art curation calls into question the erasure of the
individual, authorial voice within the context of museum exhibition.97 The insistence that the
exhibition, especially in museums, should be value-neutral and the objectively present facts
37
denies authorial or historical subjectivity, or memory. While one of the key “selling points” of
memoir is the unique positionality, and thus voice of its author, a “successful” exhibition, in the
traditional, museological sense, will do the exact opposite, presenting its collection in a manner
that is supposedly unbiased, anthropological, and historically linear.
Any creative freedom or risk-taking on the part of the curator is discouraged in the
traditional museum, though the notion of the exhibition auteur grows as an interest in the world
of contemporary art where, similarly to memoir, investment in the individual often draws
audiences more so than the art itself, creating “art star” curators of celebrity status.98 For the sake
of my arguments, I will focus on the more traditional, art historical, and commonplace curatorial
practice rooted in a legacy of colonial classification and objectification. In centering this specific
curatorial practice, a stronger connection can be made to the dominant conceptions of mental
illness held today, which are also embedded in outmoded ideologies fueled by surveillance,
classification, and othering. As both museological curation and master narratives of mental
illness are based in ancient and colonial histories, memoir can be used as a catalyst for breaking
apart oppressive ideologies and repositioning questions of cultural authority.
Another significant quality of art exhibition that separates it from memoir is the
acknowledgement and understanding of memory, or lack thereof. Curation and the construction
of exhibitions are research-based practices, prioritizing the utilization of academic and archival
material. However, all of these materials have been “assigned” meanings by subjective
individuals and groups throughout their existence, and when these layers of meaning accumulate
over time, they become recognized as memories. This use of institutional memory on the part of
the curator really functions in a very similar way that memoir utilizes personal memories: both
38
are recognized as real things that have happened and still have effect, and are then managed,
organized, and constructed into a narrative. The point of difference lies in how memoir and art
history/museology are broadly perceived as cultural practices. Art history’s basis as an objective,
value-neutral discipline promotes the removal of the subjective curatorial author, which results in
a presentation of material as “fact,” rather than memory. Further, one of the most impactful
aspects of memoir is not its view of the world as an external reality, but rather its knowledge of
the world in there, that, Couser argues, “self awareness, insight into the author’s identity, that of
some other actual person, or the relation between them.”99 To this point I would add that the
exhibition of artwork can also have this effect, though not in the same level of directness as
memoir; because the museological curatorial practice is so firmly embedded in supposed
objectivity, value-neutrality, and indisputable “fact,” it is very difficult to present material as
based in memory, which limits the individual and subjective authority you’d find in memoir.
Not entirely unrelated to museological curating as based in archival material and
academic data are the institutional restrictions that are always inevitable in the construction of an
exhibition, which also limit the scope of an exhibition, as well as the curator’s creative authority.
Availability of artwork (whether it be pricing or the nature of its physical presence),
architectural/spatial restrictions, financial constraints, institutional timelines, and public interest
all factor in to determine if an exhibition can be manifested as a curator wants it to. Institutional
restrictions further delineate exhibition from memoir, circumscribing the authorial curator as
well as contributing to the inaccessibility felt by larger publics.
Inaccessibility, both physical/spatial and social, is the final factor that separates
exhibition from memoir. As a broad genre with limited conceptual restrictions, memoir’s primary
39
limitation to public accessibility is publication, which can be out of the hands of the author.
However, this most recent boom in memoir has shown that readers are hungrier than ever for the
nobody memoir, for narratives that are written by (and for) the layperson. Publishing houses
recognize this massive trend, and therefore do not hesitate to offer publication deals to
memoirists of all backgrounds and social positionalities. Exhibitions, on the other hand, as well
as visual art more generally, possess an air of exclusivity, which can be traced back to a number
of sources. Museums today are seen as sites of significant cultural capital, and exhibitions are
commodities, inaccessible more literally in their targeted audiences, locations, brief run times,
and occasional paid ticketing. So does this difference in accessibility between exhibition and
memoir mean that a translation from one to the other is impossible? Or can an acknowledgement
of the key differences between the two expressive forms encourage a more abstract conveyance
that still allows for a high degree of authorial subjectivity, rooted in embodied memories?
So far I have examined memoir as an expressive form of literary nonfiction, reviewing its
history and identifying why it is of interest as a potential model for a curatorial practice that
doesn’t romanticize or trivialize mental illness or cast mentally ill artists as mad geniuses.
Looking closely at its narrative conventions, I have explored the subversive mental illness
memoir as a smaller sub-genre within the broader genre of the mental illness memoir, arguing for
its inherent progressiveness and ability to empower writers with mental illness to work directly
against dominant cultural narratives and medical models. In its utilization of apologia, criticism
of doctors, depiction of time as a disorderly experience, rejection of binaries, and avoidance of
creating tidy and digestible conclusions, the subversive mental illness memoir works against
traditional spectacularization, trivialization, and “othering” or people with mental illness, giving
40
voice to a community formerly considered incapable of expression and empowering them in a
way that doesn’t feed into the mad genius trope.
I have also examined visual art exhibition in a similar manner, first looking at the ways in
which it is similar to memoir as an expressive form, and then highlighting its key differences.
While both memoir and exhibition are public presentations with an inherently limited scope, also
possessing potential to disrupt cultural master narratives, they differ in regards to allowance of
authorial voice and presence, acknowledgement and understanding of memory, institutional
restrictions, and accessibility, which sheds light on what components of memoir cannot be
translated into a curatorial practice. However, when it comes to representing the lived
experiences of mental illness in ways that aren’t harmful, both memoir and exhibition adopt
shared methodologies, which I argue can be adopted in a multitude of creative and abstract ways.
In the next section, I will focus on the major rhetorical conventions of the subversive mental
illness memoir that I am most interested in– forfeiting closure, use of apologia, absence and
incompleteness, achronology of time, and rejecting dichotomy– and begin a formulation of how
each of these conventions can be reflected/translated curatorially, moving towards a curatorial
model for exhibitions that work against dominant master narratives surrounding mental illness.
V. MOVING TOWARDS A SUBVERSIVE CURATORIAL PRACTICE
I now want to propose some potential methods of translating the rhetorical techniques of
the subversive mental illness memoir into a curatorial practice that could be applied when
41
exhibiting the work of artists with mental illness, and/or artwork that addresses lived experiences
with mental illness. One of the positive ways in which memoirists have addressed mental illness
is through an apologia, where the author addresses or “talks back” to specific audiences or larger
systems of oppression. If translated into a curatorial practice, the curator would first need to
identify who/what the artist is speaking to, or working against. Perhaps their work opposes the
trope of the mad genius, or discriminatory art historical discourses in general; maybe their
intervention is simply having their work shown in a non-anthropological way, their art
independent of their mental illness. As a way of addressing oppressive systems or practices,
acknowledgement of said systems (medical, political, and/or social) could be included in the
exhibition in the form of reproduced historical documents– not to reinforce their harmful
narratives, but to stand in as material references to larger ideologies. Perhaps the featured
artist(s) could annotate a copy of the DSM, and this could be shown either in the gallery space
alongside the artwork, or in subsequent publications in conjunction with the show. An apologia
could possibly take the form of a curatorial statement, as well; taking from its use in memoir, the
apologia should be made as public as possible, though its language should avoid apologetic
tones. A curatorial apologia can indirectly justify the project through acknowledging structural
oppressions against the artist(s) and artwork.
The curation of an exhibition addressing mental illness should move against the pressure
to provide a complete narrative of the whole show and the featured works, and there are a
multitude of creative ways in which absence and incompleteness can be conveyed curatorially.
First, a lack of presence can be indicated by leaving empty spaces typically occupied in an
exhibition setting. Empty vitrines could punctuate the gallery space, and large portions of wall
42
space could be left untouched, if the space permits. Empty picture frames could also act as
spatial markers that draw attention to what is not there. Second, spatial design and seating can
encourage viewers to pay special attention to what is absent: positioning benches in front of
empty frames or vitrines would emphasize the equal importance between what is present and
what is missing. Additionally, smaller viewing spaces can be created within the exhibition area,
intimate enough to allow for only one viewer at a time. Included in this area could be seating
options for multiple people, which would pronounce the isolation of the singular viewer. Finally,
the exhibition materials that are present, be it the works themselves or the accompanying texts,
can center incompleteness: the curator can opt to include sketches rather than (or in addition to)
final/completed artworks, highlighting the process over the finished product (if there is one).
Labels and wall texts can convey incompleteness by leaving phrases trailing off, or showing
specific words or phrases as scratched through, suggesting that these ideas are no longer
prevalent, and the message has since changed.
Curatorial expressions of absence and incompleteness help to resist pressures to provide
conclusions. In forfeiting closure, exhibitions can still be informative without telling audiences
how to feel. The subversive memoir suggests that no “solutions” or happy endings should be
provided or proposed, so keeping the exhibition conceptually open-ended is important. Spatial
design can again encourage nonlinearity, and utilizing a space without a clearly defined entrance
or exit could work against the expectation of an eventual ending, promoting the exhibition’s
themes as continuous and fluid. When the time comes for the exhibition to come down, how can
its conversations be continued? Endings aren’t necessarily conclusions; additional programming
43
and publications can extend the life of the exhibition’s themes and ideas, but without acting as
concluding events in themselves.
Subversive mental illness memoirs also encourage an achronological depiction of time.
Instead of prescribing to a linear narrative, life with mental illness is depicted as disorienting,
even confusing, and exhibited representations of mental illness can follow this model in several
ways. Similarly to how a forfeiture of closure could reject utilizing an identifiable gallery
entrance and exit, choosing not to provide a recommended viewing path through the exhibition
encourages viewers to navigate the space on their own terms, letting their own curiosities propel
them through the space and towards specific artworks. Further, the creation dates of the work
included in the exhibition can vary, and should not be presented in chronological order, or
grouped by the time period in which they were made. Perhaps most importantly, artworks should
not act as calendars or “markers” of the emotional states of the artists. Labels and wall texts must
avoid using language that locates the production of the artwork within an emotional/mental
timeline, or in relation to episodes of mental illness. In asking how to negate a linear timeline,
curators could accurately represent, or at least speak to, the ways in which people with mental
illness feel and perceive time as often distorted and asynchronous.
The final and perhaps most challenging translational tool suggested by the subversive
mental illness memoir is a rejection of dichotomous or binary classifications, such as healthy vs.
sick, or agent vs. victim. How can curators identify the artist and their practice without pinning
them down in an oppressive category? How can curators acknowledge the work as occupying
multiple and potentially conflicting spaces? One potential solution is to avoid using binary
language in wall texts and curatorial statements. Language can also be manipulated to relieve
44
artists of the weight of titles; for example, instead of referring to an individual as a mentally ill
artist, an alternative could be an artist with mental illness. Further, curators should not provide
diagnoses (official or speculative) of the artists in the exhibition, as medical categorizations have
weighty connotations that can affect how audiences perceive the artist and their work. In
choosing not to label or re-diagnose artists with mental illness, curators widen the door for
audiences to conceptually approach the artwork.
So, with these considerations in mind, I would ask the following question: is a
“successful” translation from subversive memoir to curatorial practice possible? Given the
unavoidable differences between the two forms, one narrative and the other visual,
representations of mental illness in exhibition may never completely evade the mad genius trope,
or other romanticizing, spectacularizing, or trivializing influences. Yet still, I remember the
empowerment I found in memoirs, and I’m reminded that to lack concrete answers is a
subversive strategy.
45
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (Vintage Books, 1988), 58.
2 Ibid., 206
3 Ibid., 252, 254
4 Ivonne Chand O’Neal, “The Mad Genius Controversy,” Reference Module in
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology (2017): 62.
5 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke University Press, 2012), 107.
6 Griselda Pollack, “Artists, Mythologies and Media -- Genius, Madness and Art History,”
Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 70.
7 Joan Busfield, “Mental Illness,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Medicine in the
Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (United States: Routledge, 2002),
634-635.
8 Ibid., 640
9 Ibid., 633
10 Ibid., 643
11 Ibid., 645-46, 650
12 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 24.
46
13 Katie Rose Guest Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric
Disability,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 5 (2010): 479.
14 Ibid.
15 Patrick W. Corrigan, Fred E. Markowitz, and Amy C. Watson, "Structural levels of
mental illness stigma and discrimination" Schizophrenia bulletin 30, no. 3 (2004): 485.
16 Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, Supreme Court of the U.S. (1927).
17 Sharon Packer, “Introduction,” in Mental Illness in Popular Culture, ed. Sharon Packer
(Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2017), xi.
18 Ibid., x
19 Pollack, “Artists, Mythologies and Media -- Genius, Madness and Art History,” 59.
20 Ibid., 66, 64
21 Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, 2019): 167.
22 Jane Danielewicz, Contemporary American Memoirs in Action: How to Do Things with
Memoir (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 13.
23 G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012), 140.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 153
47
26 Ibid., 140
27 Lorraine Adams, “Almost Famous: The Rise of the ‘Nobody’ Memoir,” The Washington
Monthly, 2002.
28 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 147.
29 Ibid., 141
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 146
32 Ibid., 142
33 Danielewicz, Contemporary American Memoirs in Action: How to Do Things with
Memoir, 8.
34 Ibid., 9
35 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 26.
36 Ibid., 25
37 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 74.
38 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 16.
39 Ibid., 19
48
40 Ibid., 20
41 Elizabeth Young, “Memoirs: Rewriting the Social Construction of Mental Illness,”
Narrative inquiry: NI 19, no. 1 (2009): 52.
42 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 1.
43 Ibid., 14-15
44 Ibid., 90-91
45 Ibid., 91
46 Ibid., 97
47 Ibid
48 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 481.
49 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 92.
50 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 149-150.
51 Ibid., 150
52 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972),
217.
53 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 483.
49
54 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 177.
55 Young, “Memoirs: Rewriting the Social Construction of Mental Illness,” 67, 58.
56 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 78.
57 Ibid., 80
58 Maureen Donohue-Smith, “Telling the Whole Story: A Conceptual Model for Analysing
the Mental Illness Memoir,” Mental health review journal 16, no. 3 (2011): 140.
59 Young, “Memoirs: Rewriting the Social Construction of Mental Illness,” 67.
60 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 481.
61 Donohue-Smith, “Telling the Whole Story: A Conceptual Model for Analysing the
Mental Illness Memoir,” 138.
62 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 484.
63 Abigail Gosselin, “Memoirs as Mirrors: Counterstories in Contemporary Memoir,”
Narrative 19, no. 1 (2011): 133.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
50
67 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 480.
68 Ibid., 495
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 496
71 Ibid., 496-497
72 Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1994), 8.
73 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 93.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 94
76 Danielewicz, Contemporary American Memoirs in Action: How to Do Things with
Memoir, 8.
77 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 486.
78 Ibid., 485
79 Ibid., 487
80 Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, 345.
51
81 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 492.
82 Ibid., 492-493
83 Ibid., 493
84 Gosselin, “Memoirs as Mirrors: Counterstories in Contemporary Memoir,” 142.
85 Bindu Bansinath, “Susanna Kaysen Reflects on Girl, Interrupted Turning 30,” The Cut,
May 23, 2023.
86 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 178.
87 Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (Vintage Books: New York, 1993), 42.
88 Ibid., 168
89 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 178.
90 Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, Thinking about Exhibitions
(London: Routledge, 1996), 2.
91 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric Disability,” 483.
92 Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne, Thinking about Exhibitions, 1.
93 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 22.
52
94 Vera Frenkel, “A Place for Uncertainty: Towards a New Kind of Museum,” in Museums
After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, ed. Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007), 120.
95 Ibid., 129
96 Ibid., 128
97 Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollack, “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur” in
Thinking About Exhibitions (1st ed.), ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy
Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 234.
98 Ibid.
99 Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 174.
53
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Vol. 34. Washington Monthly Company, 2002.
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2023, www.thecut.com/2023/05/susanna-kaysen-girl-interrupted-30-yearsanniversary.html.
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illness stigma and discrimination." Schizophrenia bulletin 30, no. 3 (2004): 481-491.
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Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, edited by Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans,
119-30. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Gosselin, Abigail. “Memoirs as Mirrors: Counterstories in Contemporary Memoir.” Narrative
19, no. 1 (2011): 133–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41289290.
Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. Thinking about Exhibitions. London:
Routledge, 1996.
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Heinich, Nathalie, and Michael Pollack. “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur.” In
Thinking About Exhibitions (1st ed.), edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and
Sandy Nairne, 166-79. London: Routledge, 1996.
Mastai, Judith. “There is No Such Thing as a Visitor.” In Museums After Modernism: Strategies
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Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the ‘Ethos’ of Psychiatric
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www.jstor.org/stable/40997108. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
O’Neal, Ivonne Chand. “The Mad Genius Controversy.” In Reference Module in Neuroscience
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Pollock, Griselda. “Artists, Mythologies and Media -- Genius, Madness and Art History.” Screen
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Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. Vintage Books, New York, 1993.
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55
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In "Subverting Madness: On Translating the Mental Illness Memoir into a Curatorial Practice," Hattie Schultz makes connections between visual art exhibition and the non-fiction literary genre of memoir. Individuals with mental illness have long been excluded from society, and visual culture continues to perpetuate harmful dominant narratives around mental illness. However, memoir's growing publication and popularity has given people with mental illness the power to tell their own stories, which resist the romanticization and spectacularization of their lived experiences. Distinguishing between narrative/rhetorical structures that reinforce negative perceptions and those that work against them, Schultz identifies the subversive mental illness memoir as a potential model from which to base curatorial practices. In identifying the subversive rhetorical techniques taken up by this sub-genre of memoir, Schultz argues that these methods can be roughly adopted into curatorial practices, which can perhaps be utilized in exhibiting the work of mentally ill artists in a way that honors the messiness and vulnerability of their experiences.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Subverting madness: on translating the mental illness memoir into a curatorial practice
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