19Disability Studies

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews major recent publications focused on madness and neurodiversity. It is organized into four sections that explore the boundaries of mad studies and disability studies. The first section, ‘Is Mad Studies Disability Studies?’, provides a brief introduction to mad studies and asks whether it should be considered a branch of disability studies or a separate field. The second section, ‘Voices’, reviews a special issue of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health edited by Jijian Voronka and Lucy Costa to overview how various mad studies scholars are contesting and expanding the boundaries of the field. Who is the ‘us’ of ‘nothing about us without us’? Whose voices are included, and is inclusion enough? The third section, ‘Literatures’, reviews the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health, edited by Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and the monograph Black Madness :: Mad Blackness by Therí Alyce Pickens, calling for deeper attention to racial difference in mad studies and suggesting that real inclusion should be transformational. The fourth section, ‘Rhetorics’, goes outside the boundaries of mad and disability studies to review Jordynn Jack’s Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric. The chapter calls for future scholarship that is not only transdisciplinary but also attentive to the enmeshment of mind and body, madness and disability. I argue that, while the two fields should not be collapsed, disability studies should dialogue with mad studies wherever possible, and vice versa.