“Rendering Madness” explores aesthetic strategies for giving shape to representations of madness and mental and psychiatric disability in literature, art, and culture from antiquity to the present. Over time, madness has served as a designation of ‘otherness,’ standing in relation to sanity, normality, and disease. From its roots in Ancient Greek beliefs around reason and the supernatural to psychoanalytic expressions of psychological distress, feminist, queer, anti-racist notions of rebellion and resistance, and its current relationship to modern-day psychiatry, madness becomes a language for critiquing how disabled bodies and minds have been read through a pathologizing and medicalized lens. As Sander Gilman writes, “the diagnostic history of mental illness is entangled with the history of madness as a social convention” (2014). Bringing together disability, crip, and mad approaches, each of the 12-13 minute presentations considers how madness operates as a mode of social control, dictating the porous boundaries of madness and sanity, normality and disorder. With an archive that centers neurodivergence, crip time, and disabled identifications through trauma and survivorship, this panel explores how film, drama, visual art, and the graphic novel all posit aesthetic strategies that challenge ableism and discriminatory norms in our shared, social worlds.

With the Presidential Theme of “Emancipatory Narratives” in mind, the panel grants agency to mad bodies that have often been stigmatized, silenced, and marginalized as defective, broken bodies and minds in need of cure. In so doing, disability and mad studies offer a liberatory space for this essential work. This panel draws together an interdisciplinary group of scholars at varying ranks including a senior lecturer, two Ph.D. students (one advanced Ph.D. candidate and a 1^st year graduate student), and an incoming Assistant Professor from literature, theatre, art history, and cultural studies. Together, these 4 presentations foster a collaborative discussion around madness as the site of both potential harm and liberation with examples from a diverse range of media and disciplinary perspectives. We will have 15 minutes for a Q&A.

We begin with Shanna Killeen’s “Masks On, Masks Off: Paranoid Encounters with Madness in John Carpenter's Halloween and Contemporary Neurodivergent Writing” where they read this film about a mad, masked killer in the wake of deinstitutionalization where the film illuminates anxieties and paranoia around encounters with madness and neurological difference in public life. Killeen argues that the metaphor of masking takes on a new meaning concerning how one might try to perform neurotypicality and sanity as a mode of survival.

In “Delacroix’s Medea About to Kill her Children: Ambiguous Madness,” Kristin O’Rourke explores the French Romantic painter’s 1838 piece, “Medea About to Kill her Children” to consider how Delacroix portrays the dark psychological state of the oft-depicted monstrous, barbarian sorceress Medea as she battles with logic and emotional pain in a dark grotto reflective of her thoughts. In this paper, O’Rourke points to the “ambiguity” that attends to the painting’s treatment of Medea’s madness as it engages with the spectator’s sympathies of her suspended state of madness and asks: Will the children wriggle free? Will she truly follow through with it? Will she escape justice, or is she meting out justice?

Yifan Kong’s “Visualizing Crip Time: OCD and the Circular Form in Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor” examines how the graphic narrative form enables distinctive aesthetic strategies for rendering obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in Williams’s 2015 graphic novel. While scholarship on graphic medicine emphasizes the capacity of the comic medium to visualize illness, Kong argues that the interaction between verbal and visual tracks produces an innovative representation of what disability scholars term “crip time,” foregrounding the recursive, non-linear experience of OCD. Pointing to circularity in the main character’s life from childhood rituals to midlife anxiety, this paper conveys how the graphic novel renders compulsive thought as durational, repetitive, and resistant to linear progression where mental disability is both visible and experientially apprehensible.

Finally, Nicole Ann Rizzo’s “Madness and Slow Environmental Catastrophe in Kushner’s Angels in America” delves into how aesthetic strategies for depicting madness and disability are connected to environmental justice concerns in dramatic literature and on stage. In so doing, Rizzo delineates how madness, climate change, and environmental justice are crucial to her conception of the trauma drama, as well as to the ways in which audiences come to understand what it means to be both a global citizen and a mad trauma survivor. By looking at what she names Kushner’s “aesthetics of mad slow environmental catastrophe,” this paper asks: What are the implications of a mad-eco-trauma studies for understanding madness in a new way?