Abstract
Amanda Lee Koe’s short stories (2013) redress the limited tolerance for the mad citizen-subject, whose subjectivity is obscured, if not erased, by medical prescriptions. Official and often state-sanctioned conceptualizations of the peculiar mind are grievously justified in behavioral manifestations deemed socially unacceptable. Koe’s stories about idiosyncratic Singaporeans illustrate the way personal experiences—of memory loss, homosexual tendencies, and emotional self-expressions—are informed by, and in turn inform, the biopolitical regulation of Singaporean citizens rendered objects of biopower. In this way, her stories invite a meditation on the state, people and power. Foregrounding fractured and unorthodox characters, these stories serve to intensify individual voices articulated in personal narratives addressing affective experiences, including sadness culminating in loneliness. Furthermore, the stories attest to socially constructed norms instigating the repudiation and criminalization of sexual deviants. Significantly, they add to the “cultural apparatus”—which C.W. Mills defines as “the source of Human Variety—of styles of living and of ways to die”—by questioning the nation’s ideological imperatives, including heterosexual norms, social insistence on mono-cultural marriages and state/family-endorsed medical intervention. Offering a critique of ideological state apparatus embedded within the power structures inherent to psychopathology, Koe’s Ministry of Moral Panic challenges the established ways of viewing “Others” who are ostensibly “mad”. Consequently, her stories mediate a broadening human experience, by calling for inclusivity amid the social rejection and insular treatment of afflicted subjects with alleged disorders.
Highlights
Illness in LiteratureLiterature provides a significant avenue for counter-narratives about subjects effectually struggling against state prescriptive knowledge and epistemology, as it articulates socio-cultural factors underscoring “conflicting human needs, aspirations and values” (Szasz 1961, p. 117)
Amanda Lee Koe’s short stories (2013) redress the limited tolerance for the mad citizen-subject, whose subjectivity is obscured, if not erased, by medical prescriptions
Perhaps the most contentious categorization of mental illness lies in the label of homosexuality, a prominent theme in identity politics not least due to the persecution, stigmatization and exclusionary practices faced by same-sex partners
Summary
Literature provides a significant avenue for counter-narratives about subjects effectually struggling against state prescriptive knowledge and epistemology, as it articulates socio-cultural factors underscoring “conflicting human needs, aspirations and values” (Szasz 1961, p. 117). At its best, the anti-psychiatry movement (led by psychiatrists themselves, including David Cooper, Ronald Laing and Thomas Szasz) falls short of dismantling the association between mental illness, with its intricate pathological underpinnings, and natural human experiences such as depression, dementia, homo-, bi-, and trans-sexual tendencies, and other emotional ailments Failure at such disengagement and disconnection is attributed to the persistence of the mental illness term, which Moncrieff calls out as “unhelpful” (Moncrieff 2013) for presuppositions of interventionist medical treatment, including institutionalism and drug therapy in view of a “disease-centered” (Maisel 2016) approach to the afflicted mind. Koe presents new insights into the variegated identities of Singapore that allow for autonomous choices, instinctive drives, and natural life struggles From this perspective, a psychiatrist’s role in delivering state biopower when, wittingly or unwittingly, discounting the human aspect of the diagnosed psychic disease contributes to the subject’s coercion into or complete deletion from the “official version of world reality” (Mills 1963) propagated by the state. Her stories mediate a broadening human experience, by calling for inclusivity amid the social rejection and insular treatment of afflicted subjects with alleged disorders
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