ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an introduction of mad studies and its possibilities. It discusses some of the emerging debates currently taking place within this in/discipline. It outlines what are considered to be emerging theoretical debates that are made possible through the emergence of mad studies – and by interventions into mad studies by indigenous, critical race, queer/trans and feminist theories and theorists. Foundational epistemological and methodological contributions to a potential mad theory have emerged through mad studies projects of analysing and re-historicising histories of madness and psychiatry. Emerging from a social movement that is based on principles of self-identity, mad theory also contains at its kernel a tendency towards essentialism – the explicit or implicit argument that mad people have essential characteristics and are, therefore, identifiable as mad people. The most important potential sources for mad theory continue to be collective interventions into ways of knowing that come from outside the academic industrial complex, or that challenge its boundaries and authority.
