“coherence,”

as a scholar.”[8]

to which I ask where, when, how, and to what extent have we, precisely, taking ourselves to task?

To put it otherwise, this project’s methodological impulse is not a reaction to anything but a queer, disabled, and autistic way of life.

become uncomposed?

omposing.

This project will, in the words of Stacey Waite, “commit rhetorical disobedience.”[5]

" (538).

quite queer

In “Disability Justice/Stonewall’s Legacy,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha importantly cites Dorian Taylor’s Disabled Black History blog, in which Taylor explains that “the NYPD refused to investigate Johnson’s death because they wrote her off as a ‘crazy woman,’ refusing to change her death’s labeling from suicide to murder[8].”

I do not wish to conclude this section of the project, only to reemphasize that by understanding these two interlocking rhetorical strategies – those of the white, individuated self as well as linearity and continuity – as strategies through which reformist arguments are maintained, “we” may more fully understand and come-to-know how conversations about abolishing the psych ward and carceral institutions more broadly end before they begin. To put this into one sentence: white liberal understandings of development and progress cannot continue to frame discussions around abolition and its possibilities.

liberalism’s very notion of the self.

Reason and Understanding, one on side, and mental disorder on the other.

the urgency with which white liberal attempts to recuperate the police state

In a May 30, 2021

activist movements for liberation

Museum

timeline

I also want to question whether the version(s) of “DEI” being dismantled are worth keeping in their current form(s).

Copernican

Smith is still protesting as of Friday, July 19, 2024.

What might it look like for a dissertation to reject the discourses and traditions that came before it? What might it feel like to read a dissertation that rejects linearity and continuity? This dissertation is an experiment, a mosaic of pieces that are pieced together as thoughts and fragments toward something altogether otherwise.

In other words, Black feminist thought and praxis precedes any supposedly “radical” or “new” assertion on the part of white feminist theories as it relates to anything remotely close to a reading of “the human” – including readings of disability and models of disability.

the here and now

ground(ing).

This image

I am autistic, rather than I have autism, rejects the impossibility of autistic being.

What if we take autism seriously as a practice, or praxis, of the self? Autism as praxis. Autism as a political, cultural, and embodied practice of everyday and everynight life.

love, intimacy, concern, and emotion.

probiotics

regions of the brain

robots

[4].”

question

THIS SOUNDS FUN!

Autism as Culturally Elaborated, Not Medically or Scientifically Determined Genre as Embodied Praxis / Categorization of the Living/Dying: Knowledge/Unknowledge Wynter as Compositionist: Writing and/as/for World-(Un)Making

“war against ‘consciousness’”

settler-colonial, ableist, white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal frameworks.

This section is written for, with, and alongside Wynter's teachings that are at the core of this entire project.

In other words, rhetoric scholar-teachers should ask foundational questions that actively push us to identify the ways that disabled people and disabled bodyminds are actively excluded from rhetoric and composition as a disciplinary space, from rhetoric as civic and public life, and from rhetorical possibility more broadly.

And, it is not enough that they be led by “caring” able-bodied allies. Critical self-reflexivity alone is not enough. It’s time for disabled people to completely dismantle able-bodied academic discourses and spaces that simultaneously benefit from our Otherness while maintaining it as such from a distance.

entry

this part of the essay will be organized by letter

There’s something about the color violet, despite my being color blind to the point where one color can become another. Or, perhaps, it’s because of it. Either way, becoming violet. What might becoming violet mean? How might it feel to be in constant transition? To be in between colors and palettes and textures? Disability justice is right t/here…in the transitory space. Becoming violet. Between blue and ultra-violet. Between. Moving between. Always moving. Bodies in (co)motion.

As in, I have zero patience left for some of y’all.

Justice and whiteness will never be a couple. I see you rolling your eyes

Toast-adjacent, we’ll say.

conference 20 years after her death

On Saturday, April 16, 1955,

I leave this section with you as a means to (not) conclude that which must remain open: an inquiry into the foundational juridical and political systemic articulations of in/voluntarity fuel the violence of the psych ward. The very fabric of the penal system, the insane asylum system, and the psych ward network (now largely privatized) is held together by the liberal, humanistic notions of self that maintain the notions of Reason, Continuity, and Logic which undergird in/voluntarity's violent deployment.

undergird the institution's

a nineteen-year-old

While Deutsch's essay is significant, he claims that the "main reason [for the significant rate of Negro insanity after the Civil War] lay not in emancipation, but in the expansion of institutional resources," citing that the insanity rate of white people "increased proportionately during this period...for the same reason" (480).

I find it very interesting, yet unsurprising, that the very first mention of the phrase "insane asylum" in a Texas newspaper is directly preceded by explicit notes about unruly Blackness and Black protest or rebellion. The discursive connection between the emergence of the insane asylum and 1866 riots in the wake of the Civil War is not coincidental.

I wish to extend Jackson’s work on the 1955 Rebellion by putting forth three concrete contributions to the record (so to speak). I will...   • Trace the archival contours of the transformation of the institution from the East Texas Penitentiary to East Texas Hospital for the “Negro Insane” to Rusk State Hospital with particular attention to the ways through which the insane asylum and psych ward ran/run parallel to the emergence of the prison and jail [2].   • Analyze the material, discursive, and rhetorical violence and resistance in the 1955 rebellion – both during the “event” itself and through media coverage.   • Articulate the current-day relevance of an analytical framework that understands the insane asylum and psych ward as an ongoing mode of white supremacist, ableist, colonial, and corporate violence.

Want to read the first draft of this section?

primary political, ethical, and critical objective of this dissertation

I must admit the guiding force of this project is anxiety – anxiety about not finishing the project in time, anxiety about not finishing my doctoral program, anxiety about exceeding the temporal limits set forth by my University. The Texas Christian University (TCU) 2023-24 Graduate Catalog describes it as follows:   "The work for the Ph.D. degree must be completed within six years after the student has been admitted to candidacy. Extension of time must be applied for in writing through the chair of the major department who will then make a recommendation to the appropriate dean. The letter should explain why the degree was not completed within the time limit and should present a schedule for completing the program."[1]   On time. Time limit. Within six years. Schedule. The temporal bounds of academic life, and the pace of capital – which is the motivating force of such temporal bounds – are fundamentally unsustainable. In “The Ethics of Pace,” Moya Bailey importantly explains that “Efficiency and productivity drive the pace of life, and the ethics of that pace – the demand it makes on the human body – is rarely if ever questioned.”[2] Not only will this project question this pace and the effects on my/our bodyminds, but it will ignore the rulebooks, written or unwritten, governing the production of dissertations – whether in the context of the discipline[3] or the University[4]. This project will, in the words of Stacey Waite, “commit rhetorical disobedience.”[5]

Volume 48, Issue 3 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly,

As can be implied by the (non)structure of this website, the project will have no conclusion, only gestures toward a world - or new worlds - in which the psych ward could and must be abolished as part of the ongoing struggle for abolitionist revolution.