NeMLA 2023 Panel: Untelling Stories: Mad Techniques of Narrative Noncompliance
This accepted creative panel invites abstracts for the upcoming NeMLA 2023 conference at the University at Buffalo in Niagara Falls, NY from March 23-26, 2023.
As Mad writers, we are called to confess: in the form of scholarship based on disclosing “lived experience,” activism which centers individual stories of trauma and healing, or sanitized “mental health” narratives which point only toward a legible life. Amidst the ever-growing demand for “mental health awareness” and concomitant psychiatrization of everyday life, Mad writers face increasing pressure to plate recovery-oriented stories for sane consumers. In the face of this pressure, I ask, where do we go? What do we write? And how do we know?