This dissertation presents an historical overview of the interdependent representations of gender, class, ethnicity, race, nationality, sexuality, and (dis)ability in a selection of films and first-person written autobiographical texts from the 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Cinematic and written autobiographical representations of “mental illness” reflect and shape various models of psychological trauma and wellness. I explore the ways that these two genres of representation underscore, exert influence upon, and interrogate socio-cultural understandings and interpretations of deviance and normalcy, madness and sanity, and pathology and health. Some models of health and illness carry more ideological weight than others, and thus differentially contour public policy formation and the materiality of people’s daily lives. My project is distinct from other kinds of scholarship on the subject of women’s “madness.” Whereas scholarship has been written on “madness” and cinema, and on “madness” and autobiography, this related academic work has not consistently drawn linkages between multiple genres or utilized interdisciplinary methodologies to critically explore texts. Feminist scholars who address the interconnections between autobiographies and cinematic representations often pay only limited attention to psychiatric survivors. I draw parallels and distinctions between these genres, based upon my training in social work, cultural studies, film and autobiography theory, medical and linguistic anthropology, and disability studies. My perspective hinges upon my longstanding involvement with and commitment to the subject of women’s “madness” in both personal and professional arenas.

Using Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnographic approach to doing research, I explore through interviews with disabled workers how workplace accommodation policies, such as the New Policy on the Duty to Accommodate Employees with Disabilities in the Federal Public Service and the Department of Fearless Advice’s Workplace Accommodation policy, work. Starting from the standpoint of disabled employees, I map out what happens when a disabled federal public service employee activates one of these policies. I also show that the audit-based compliance evaluation process developed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to safeguard government Departments/Agencies against systemic discrimination actually facilitates discrimination. These textually-mediated ruling relations situate the problems that disabled workers encounter in the workplace in their biological makeup, rather than in the Government of Canada’s unwillingness to transform their workplaces to meet the needs of all types of workers, as legislated by the Eldridge and Meiorin Supreme Court of Canada decisions. I show, further, that the on-line recruitment process used to select employees into the federal public service encodes normality, thereby discriminating against disabled workers. I also demonstrate that, although federal public service accommodation policies accomplish the legal obligation of the employer not to discriminate against disabled workers, the individualization of accommodations forces disabled workers to take it upon themselves to find ways and means in which to fit into workplaces that have not been designed to meet their needs. I conclude by proposing that in order to change this situation and to counteract the unprecedented number of human rights complaints that have been brought against the Government of Canada for discrimination on the prohibited ground of disability, disabled workers need to follow in the militant footsteps of Canadian First Nations peoples. / Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies

This qualitative study is based on the narratives of two families who each parent a young disabled child. It focuses on the children’s and families’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion within educational settings and the implications of these experiences for pedagogical change. New Zealand’s policy and curriculum contexts are considered in relation to education, disability and inclusion. I examine how the families’ perspectives and experiences interact with dominant, deficit discourses of disability. In my interpretation of the family narratives I identify particular disciplinary mechanisms that operate as tools and tactics of disabling power-knowledge production (Foucault, 1977, 1980). I argue that the policing of disabled children and families’ participation are primary processes and outcomes of these disciplinary mechanisms. The study uses a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) framework to understand and approach disability as socially, politically and culturally constructed. The assumptions underlying traditional Western educational knowledge and norms are critiqued from a counter-narrative based on experiences of disability. I use DSE research and literature to challenge knowledge regimes that interpret disability as an individual deficit requiring ‘special’ intervention and treatment. I argue that a ‘disability critique’ makes an important contribution to understanding the workings and effects of Western, Eurocentric knowledge traditions on children and families. This research further argues that exclusion is experienced by those within and outside of the dominant culture. I envisage the main research audience of this thesis to be early childhood and primary school teachers, teacher educators, early intervention and special education personnel, therapists and medical professionals. The stories and experiences of the families in this research may support teachers and other professionals to critically reflect on, and make changes to their thinking and practices. I hope to contribute to the growing body of research that can be used to support parents and families of disabled children in their efforts to promote educational change and to support the full inclusion of their children as valued people and learners within their educational contexts. I develop two main arguments in this research. The first is that in order to transform education, deficit discourses and their effects must be named and understood. The second is that New Zealand educationalists can build on existing, local frameworks to develop critical, narrative and relational pedagogies to transform exclusionary power relations and support inclusive experiences for all children and their families. I argue that approaches to disability and education based on a belief that exclusion is ‘inevitable’ and that creating a fully inclusive education system and society is an impossible dream, should be challenged and rejected. A lack of optimism and vision reproduces exclusion, and leads to weak reforms at best. Disabled children and their families deserve and have a right to an inclusive life and education and this requires people at all levels of society to take responsibility.

This dissertation argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives about personal and collective experiences with disease train American readers to fear illness while warning them against the dangers of being afraid. Such narratives depict the way illness ravages the physical body, disrupts interpersonal relationships, and threatens to dismantle social or municipal organization. In other words, the story of sickness is a story of terror-inducing dis-order. I study disease with a lens informed by cultural and disability studies to show that what makes disease historically and culturally significant is its power—through the body—to dis-order relationships, society, and knowledge. Anxieties about this dis-order did not go dormant when an epidemic faded; they continued to circulate in writing, their vigor magnifying with each new outbreak. Through extensive archival research into representations of disease in ephemera, popular publications, and medical writing, my dissertation proffers a new reading of canonical works depicting sickness. Literary works gothicize disease by dramatizing its possible effects that make life unrecognizable, thus feeding fears as they portray them. My analysis shows that works like John and Abigail Adams’s letters, Abigail Abbot Bailey’s memoir, editorials from Nathaniel Parker Willis, novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig are as invested in the fear of illness as disease narratives by Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe that are traditionally read as gothic. While scholars may recognize the significance of disease-induced fear in any of these individual texts, they treat each example as unique whereas I show literary authors contribute to a broader cultural anxiety spawned on the pages of popular media and spread through belles-lettres. To emphasize the relationship between the circulation of information and the circulation of disease, each chapter focuses on one disease and the written or print form that participated in sharing and shaping opinions about the disease as a terrifying event: smallpox and letters, yellow fever and pamphlets, cholera and periodicals, and tuberculosis and sentimental novels.

This dissertation investigates discourses of anti-violence strategies in the context of international development. While violence against women is, of course, an urgent problem, this dissertation explores how the urgency to end violence against women is socially, culturally, economically, and politically constructed. I consider the manufacturing of urgency in three case studies of contemporary anti-violence initiatives: i) American foreign policy including what has been branded as “The Hillary Doctrine” and proposed International Violence Against Women Act; ii) the World Bank’s report entitled The Cost of Violence; and iii) the United Nation’s UNiTE To End Violence Against Women and Say NO campaigns. In doing so, I argue that World Bank, the United Nations, and American foreign policies are too often technocratic, narrow, depoliticized, and are executed in an urgent manner in the interest of neoliberal economic growth, security concerns, and “feel good” aid at the expense of more holistic, effective and accountable responses to global violence against women.

This thesis is a three part examination of the role of perceptions of gender in the developing category of mental illness and disability during the inter-war period in England using Virginia Woolf's literature and essays, most prominently Mrs. Dalloway and her personal essay, "A Sketch of the Past." These texts provide a foundation for analyzing how disability can be represented in literature in a way that gives disabled characters a voice and simultaneously criticizes the ways in which perceptions of normalcy are defined and reinforced through literary forms. The thesis also responds to contemporary feminist scholarship that has evaluated Woolf's disabled characters in problematic methods that discount the significance of disability.

“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance. Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de-individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.

This dissertation brings together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives born of the fields of disability studies, critical race theory, cultural studies and queer and feminist studies to analyze the social significance and productive effects of cultural representations of autism. Specifically, this work addresses contemporary enactments of autism advocacy as found in the mass media, education literature and policy as well as in fundraising campaigns. In response to a global/izing economy that privileges the fast, efficient exchange of information and knowledge, I attend to how autism appears in the field of autism advocacy as an abbreviation; its multiple meaning distilled down to a series of ‘red flags’ in awareness campaigns, bulleted ‘facts’ in information pamphlets, statistics in policy reports. I analyze the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and trace their continuities so as to make legible an underlying logic: a powerful and ubiquitous logic that casts autism as a pathological threat to normative life, and advocacy as that which must eliminate this threat, thus, limiting the role of the ‘good’ autism advocate to one positioned ‘against’ autism. This dissertation shows how dominant, contemporary discourses of autism advocacy that narrate autism as some ‘thing’ to be ‘fought’, ‘combated’, or ‘warred against’ function to shape ‘life’ as conditional and cast autism as (one of) its condition(s). As autism is discursively and ideologically made separate from the vital category of life itself, and as bodies and minds of living people are relentlessly divided up into vital and non-vital parts, individual and collective life ‘with’ (the condition of) autism becomes life that is conceptualized as ‘almost living’ or ‘mostly dead’. I demonstrate how such an understanding of the conditionality of life is a necessary pre-condition for normative acts of violence – violence enacted in the name of securing the norm and violence that is normalized as necessary.

“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance. Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de-individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.

This dissertation brings together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives born of the fields of disability studies, critical race theory, cultural studies and queer and feminist studies to analyze the social significance and productive effects of cultural representations of autism. Specifically, this work addresses contemporary enactments of autism advocacy as found in the mass media, education literature and policy as well as in fundraising campaigns. In response to a global/izing economy that privileges the fast, efficient exchange of information and knowledge, I attend to how autism appears in the field of autism advocacy as an abbreviation; its multiple meaning distilled down to a series of ‘red flags’ in awareness campaigns, bulleted ‘facts’ in information pamphlets, statistics in policy reports. I analyze the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and trace their continuities so as to make legible an underlying logic: a powerful and ubiquitous logic that casts autism as a pathological threat to normative life, and advocacy as that which must eliminate this threat, thus, limiting the role of the ‘good’ autism advocate to one positioned ‘against’ autism. This dissertation shows how dominant, contemporary discourses of autism advocacy that narrate autism as some ‘thing’ to be ‘fought’, ‘combated’, or ‘warred against’ function to shape ‘life’ as conditional and cast autism as (one of) its condition(s). As autism is discursively and ideologically made separate from the vital category of life itself, and as bodies and minds of living people are relentlessly divided up into vital and non-vital parts, individual and collective life ‘with’ (the condition of) autism becomes life that is conceptualized as ‘almost living’ or ‘mostly dead’. I demonstrate how such an understanding of the conditionality of life is a necessary pre-condition for normative acts of violence – violence enacted in the name of securing the norm and violence that is normalized as necessary.