The Politics of Form: Performance, Curation, and Reparative Reading in Mad Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines the aesthetic and formal strategies Kate Millett, and Madison Clell, Susannah Cahalan, authors of mad narratives including The Looney Bin Trip (1990), Cuckoo (2002), Brain on Fire (2012) respectively, employ to challenge the authority of dominant psychiatric discourses. It argues that in response to the "epistemic injustice" and narrative erasure inherent in clinical encounters, authors engage in a politics of form, using the very structure of their stories to perform a political critique. The analysis unfolds across three interconnected frameworks. First, it explores the performance of madness, investigating how narrators strategically select life events and rework cultural metaphors and myths of illness to reframe their experiences in opposition to institutional conventions. Second, it considers "curation as recuperation," arguing that formal techniques such as fragmentation, non-linear timelines, and the intertextual appropriation of medical records are deliberate acts of care that dismantle psychiatric authority and reassert the primacy of lived experience. Finally, the paper advocates for a reparative reading methodology, informed by Eve Sedgwick, which moves beyond a purely paranoid critique to recognize moments of joy, connection, and repair that coexist with suffering. Through analyses of selected life narratives, this paper demonstrates that the form of a mad narrative is not merely a container for content but a potent force. By focusing on how these stories are constructed, we can better understand their function as acts of resistance, self-reclamation, and political work. It will examine the different aesthetic approaches authors adopt to challenge the authority and hegemony of psy-discourses, especially in terms of the violence and suffering they inflict upon the mad person. More specifically, it will analyse the formalistic approaches authors employ in memoirs and auto/biographies (including graphic memoirs and autobiographies) of madness: how does the form of mad narratives express a political critique; speaking of form and arrangement, how is the mad narrative organised and developed; how/where do they begin and end; and what cultural metaphors and myths associated with illness in general and madness in particular feature in the mad narratives.