How risk is shared: an interview with Anne McGuire

ABSTRACT

This interview was conducted via email in late 2020 in preparation for Lockdown: Mental Illness, Wellness, and COVID-19, a three-day online conference organised by myself, Madison Magladry (Curtin University), Debra Shaw (University of East London), and Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London). Anne McGuire had agreed to speak as a keynote, but time differences between Western Australia and Canada made even a Zoom call keynote impractical (the difficulties of syncing Zoom sessions and time zones became one of the many new problems of academic life in 2020). Accordingly, McGuire very kindly agreed to respond to my questions via email, the results of which were subsequently published in the conference catalogue, and served as a platform for a panel discussion on the final day, which included Will Davies (Goldsmiths), Stephanie Alice Baker (City, University of London), and Jeremy Gilbert. I had become aware of McGuire’s work through my own research on neoliberal mental healthcare and the newly emerging logics of spectrality that could be detected in institutional psychiatry’s interest in dimensions of health, illness, and comorbidity, and in the popular discourses around the ‘mental health spectrum’. As an academic working in disability studies, McGuire’s work on ‘mental illness’ (or madness, as many would prefer) is thought provoking and productive in its capacity to reassess contemporary institutional and discursive reformulations of health, sanity, and normality—and, furthermore, how these reformulations are irreducibly linked to the disempowerment and exploitation of the mad. McGuire’s work took on a new significance for me in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns, and with the emerging global discussion of the necessity of a more positive stance on tele-health and digital platforms for ‘sufferers’ of ‘mental illnesses’. Her capacity to show how supposedly novel and progressive forms of psychopathology and care—such as the notion of the mental health spectrum, which purportedly moves us beyond stigmatising notions of abnormality—reproduce hierarchies and social injustice, was incredibly helpful for negotiating the rhetoric of ‘the new normal’ that pervaded 2020. It was in the attempt to locate the meaning of the ‘new normal’ for those circumscribed within the institutions and discourses of ‘mental illness’—i.e., the reinvention of existing norms, inequalities, and injustices both in response to, and in some instances by way of the COVID-19 pandemic—that I turned to, and continue to turn to, McGuire’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• Madness
• Covid-19
• risk
• care
• disability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francis Russell

Francis Russell is the course coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts Honours program at Curtin University. He has a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Curtin University and he researches the political and philosophical implications of mental illness, alongside conducting broader research into neoliberal culture. He has published with Cultural Studies Review, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Somatechnics, Space and Culture, and Culture, Theory & Critique. Alongside the artist Dave Attwood, he is the editor of The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics, published by Art + Australia in 2020. With Madison Magladry, he is the co-author of the forthcoming Screen Therapies: Digital Health, Sanity, and Ideology to be published by Routledge in mid-2022.

Anne McGuire

Anne McGuire is an assistant professor in the Equity Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and research draw on interpretive perspectives in disability studies and cultural studies and focus on questions of human vitality and precarity. McGuire's monograph, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2016), was awarded the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Her current research project traces the emergence of broad-spectrum approaches to health and illness and reads these against the backdrop of neoliberal social and economic policies.