What does borderline do? Debility-capacity-BPD


Erin Tichenor, University of Alberta

Reclamation movements such as queer and disability pride have importantly shifted discourses about difference, and have pushed states to grant rights and accommodations. Still, people have been incorporated along lines of racial, citizenship, class, and gender advantage, into colonial states and neoliberal markets that rely upon the mass disablement of specific populations. The Euro-American nations that grants rights, while professing their progressive exceptionalism, are the same nations that debilitate populations through the endemic violence of racial capitalism and (settler) colonialism. These contradictions lead us to ask, what do rights-based movements do, and for whom? How are these movements co-opted, and on whose backs? This presentation builds upon Southern Disability and Mad scholarship to interrogate neoliberal reclamation, the “ascendency of whiteness” (Chow 2002) and the obscuring of structural violence in the context of ‘borderline personality disorder (BPD).’ Mainstream (white, elite) feminists have long denounced this highly contested psychiatric construct due to its misogynistic origins, gendered deployment, and rampant stigmatization. Mad-affirmative scholars have offered more nuanced accounts, reminding that borderline can be uniquely resonant and relieving, despite psychiatry’s harmful pathologization of ‘personality.’ Furthermore, borderline affects and worldviews can be valuable and insightful. Simultaneously, influencers are using social media to destigmatize, build awareness about, and even reclaim ‘BPD,’ albeit through psychiatric frames that emphasize the need for greater access to diagnosis and treatment. These destigmatizing movements are very different, and yet both seem to be located in elite spaces that often neglect analysis of how racial capitalism and (settler) colonialism produce psychological debilitation - including that which is pathologized as ‘BPD’ and treated by the psychiatric industrial complex. Universalizing assertions about “what should be done” with ‘BPD’ neglect the fact that ‘BPD’ seems to be a swift mechanism of social control for some, and a pathway to care, or even a neoliberal identity for others. Reclaiming borderline or ‘BPD’ without a geopolitical and intersectional analysis of how psychological debilitation and psychiatric labelling move disparately across the world risks propping up “acceptable” borderlines, while continuing to criminalize, pathologize, and/or neglect structurally vulnerable borderlines This presentation explores how we might affirm borderline subjectivities, while responding to distress with greater socio-political nuance. To do so, I conduct an ethology of borderline and ‘BPD,’ an analytical method I take up from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Rather than asking what these terms are, I ask what they do, for whom, in which contexts, and towards what ends. I draw in particular upon transnational theorist Jasbir Puar’s (2017) work on intersectionality, Deleuzian theory, and American Empire in the context of what she calls “assemblages of debility, capacity, and disability.” This presentation foregrounds her work to interrogate the relationship between affirming borderline and the limits of neoliberal analytics for ‘BPD.’ For Puar, debility is that which is naturalized and made endemic for precaritized populatations. Debilitation is an built-in mechanism of the neoliberal, colonial state, which makes specific populations “available for injury” while extracting their labor and targeting them for injury (and sometimes (re)capacitation). The problem is not capacitation, but who is capacitated, who is debilitated, and who is made to undergo repeated cycles of debilitation and capacitation, where the neoliberal state “produce[s], sustain[s], and profit[s] out of disability (Meekosha 2011:668). Reclaiming borderline must not obscure the psychological debilitation perpetuated by Euro-American powers whose power relies on the continuous traumatizing of subjugated populations, and the under- and over- treating of mental distress based on specific caluclations of extractability, profitability, and disposability. Am I suggesting that we “prevent” borderline? Or that we prevent the debilitation caused by the invalidation of borderline affects and worldviews, psychiatric violence, and structural oppression? I ultimately argue that we can de-pathologize neuro- and physical- diversity from European humanist norms, while preventing widespread corporate and state violence. Borderline does not have to be doomed to the trope of the “crazy ex-girlfriend,” but affirming borderline cannot be separated from preventing the psychological debilitation of overexploited populations - many of whom never get diagnosed, or only do so for corporate benefit. These arguments have implications for how we respond to borderline and madness more broadly and for how borderlines, particularly elite ‘BPD’ activists, might mobilize against debilitation and neo-colonial calls in global mental health agendas.

Non-presenting author: Tim Barlott, University of Alberta

This paper will be presented at the following session: