Queering Rhetorics of Insanity: An Exploration of the Northern Wisconsin Home for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic

Abstract

This project discusses the institutional, historical, and cultural narratives surrounding the Northern Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled-originally known as the Northern Wisconsin Home for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic. It remembers the Asylum Era as the period in which there was the highest number of mental health institutions is the U.S.­ approximately 1850 to 1950-and applies Queer Phenomenology, as developed by theorist Sarah Ahmed, to voice the stories ofresidents within the home's institutional narrative. To compliment historical and archival analysis, the project additionally weaves in its author's owns embodied experiences to reclaim the physicality of structures left behind by the site itself, to complicate the linearity of the happiness scripts of the institution.