published works.
Elissa Washuta’s My Body is a Book of Rules: A Crip Mad Reading of Psychiatric Compliance and Resistance
Disability and Indigeneity, special issue in Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, 2021
In this article, I discuss how, as a mixed-race indigenous woman, Washuta defies societal norms and narrative conventions, often embedded in colonialist and heteropatriarchal structures of genocide and annihilation, by making space for the irrationality, deviance, and contradiction associated with madness, gender, and indigeneity. The focus of the analysis maddens Washuta’s memoir, locating and revealing mad “holding spaces'' within the text that resist individualizing and pathologizing clinical psy protocols, implicit in the formation of heteropatriarchal, settler colonialist, and neoliberal capitalist ideologies.
Cripping Care for Individuals with Psychiatric Disability: Looking Beyond Self- Determination Framework to Address Treatment and Recovery
Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 13.4 (2017): 1-20.
This article argues for a politics of care that attends to the material and structural conditions of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to a person’s mental distress, as opposed to placing the onus of recovery on the individual with a psychiatric disability, through the treatment protocols of self-determination, and peer support that have been co-opted and assimilated into mainstream psychiatric treatment and ideology, both nationally and globally. The paper offers a feminist materialist framework that attends to the caring needs of people with psychiatric disabilities while highlighting that these needs are often gendered and racialized.
Confinement and the Agency of Refusal: Maddening Spencer through an Intersectional Lens
Featured on Crip Crap’s blog Spoiler Alert!
Sample Quote:
“The film Spencer, far from a canonical tale of a white woman going mad under pressure, is a compelling portrait of madness and seeking safety as it intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality. It does not end in her death or “cure.” We should not dismiss this story, simply because of Diana’s positioning. Nor can we ignore it and read this film as a warning of what might happen when others actively refuse the role society demands of them.”
Homage to Spencer: The Politics of ‘Treatment’ and ‘Choice’ in Neoliberal Times
O’Leary, Meghann and Liat Ben-Moshe. Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection, edited by Daley, Andrea, Lucy Costa, and Peter Beresford, University of Toronto Press, 2019, pp. 115-135.
In this book chapter I reflect on the psychiatrized life and eventual death of my friend Spencer, critiquing notions of “choice”, “personal responsibility,” and “recovery” as constructs that attempt to absolve a racial capitalist settler regime of any responsibility in the vulnerability and precarity that it both creates and sustains.
Deviant Sexuality: The hypersexualization of women with bipolar disorder in film and television
Yoshizaki-Gibbons, H.M. & O’Leary, Meghann. Mediability: Transforming Disability in the Media. Ed. Joe Leeson-Schatz and Amber George. Jefferson: McFarland Press (2018): 93-106.
In this book chapter I analyze media representations of cis-gender women with bipolar disorder through an intersectional feminist disability studies framework, arguing that bipolar women characters become metaphorical devices for the stereotypical dangers assumed to be inherent in the sexuality of women, a representational trope that continues to justify women’s oppression.
