That science fiction mirrors, fractures, twists, estranges, and comments upon contemporary and historical events is not a new assertion, yet direct connections between the lived realities of disabled and Mad people physically and epistemically isolated from the “real world” and the “unimaginable” practices of science fictional medical abuse are seldom made. Yet, when we strip the pages of their accouterments, nominally speculative works tend to depict existing practices of medical, carceral violence—kidnapping, forced institutionalization, denial of food and water, filicide and its enablement, and more—visited upon predominantly disabled and Mad (or Maddened) people, yet done largely behind closed doors, within segregated environments, or within situational locations in which there exists unique justification for said violence: they are lab rats, genetic freaks, alien races, hardened criminals. They become narrators whose perspectives, however committed to justice, are a priori unreliable, whether as a result of pre-existing pathology or via the paradoxical assertion that the long event of institutionalization itself has rendered them worthy of confinement.
In Failure to Comply, the relentless “unreliability” of the narration—not to mention, the unreliability of genre—creates a sense of claustrophobia that it is difficult to escape. Both create a confusion of place which mirrors the carcerality of those institutions which conceal, condemn, and (in so doing) create the Mad. If genre is a ward, whose fluorescents beat steadily, routinely, in eventing my path, then anti-genre is no-place. It is the no-place where non-things are felt by non-people in a series of non-moments. Silence is a powerful tool within what Smilges (Queer Silence 26) names as a rhetorical matrix of words, gestures, expressions, and other modes of communication, including refusals to do so. And yet silence, when mandated, disappears: The asylum is a great silencer, performing a disappearing act, the first and most primary being the disappearance of itself. The asylum, itself a partner and microcosm of the settler colony (Coleborne; Whitt), invents the real by removing contradiction, squeezing steadily until the plate of possible realities has been thinned to one great, terrible event.
dededos
kaledo-art
2087
jacobvanloon
yousharknotpass
