ABSTRACT
Poststructuralist and postmodern social theorists have had much to say about madness and its exclusion, and although their contributions have often included a problematic appropriation or romanticisation of ‘schizophrenic’ experience, some of their central concerns have been profoundly consistent with the politics of the madhouse. An intense interest in critiquing the influence of Enlightenment science, for instance, effectively extended analysis of the operations of power beyond the state and the economy, across domains such as ‘mental health’ (Nicholson, 1990). The work of Michel Foucault, in particular, which was informed by direct experience of distress, placed debate about the social origins of madness close to the heart of contemporary critical thought, developed a vocabulary of resistance against regulatory power, helped galvanise the anti-psychiatry movement, and continues to inspire critics of psychopathology. This chapter opens an exploration of the relevance of debates about the ‘postmodern condition’ for understandings of gender and ‘mental health’, and draws attention to the overlap between feminist and postmodern challenges to rationalist assumptions about who we are, and what we can know, noting the indebtedness of the latter to the former.1 Because of a continuing need to theorise enduring formations of power, I shall be making the case for an explicitly social and critical postmodernism, and a corresponding politics of complexity, and have sought theoretical refuge among those variants of postmodern
social theory that are being reconstructed in relation to challenges from feminism and other contemporary social movements (Nicholson and Seidman, 1995).
