ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers how Lee Godie escaped both the outsider and disabled artist labels. Godie was homeless by choice, which invites normals to imagine various diagnoses for her. The circumstances of Godie’s life and her paintings, drawings, and photography conspire to perplex the researcher of outsider artists. Godie’s personal history as a wife and mother in Chicago indicates that she once maintained a foothold in the social order. If Godie’s artmaking was a response to her fall from the symbolic order in the wake of traumatic loss, or a Lacanian recuperation of her fragmented ego through repetition, then she filled her psyche both consciously and unconsciously with the remaining debris. Godie assumed a powerful position in the 1970s that is unusual within outsider art. Godie’s bus station self-portraits are a profound, passionately narcissistic, and withering commentary on the opportunities for a liberated womanhood in a capitalist economy.
