I've been reflecting on a particular phrase used by Dr LeFrancois, during the lecture I attended the other day. They referred (once or twice I think?) on the need for Mad Studies to maintain an 'ethics of care.' In other words: to take care of one another, as a matter of priority, as a foundation to the aspirations of the mad movement.
Friends of mine travelled to Glasgow the following day to see a subsequent lecture by Dr LeFrancois (which unfortunately I missed due to a conflict in my calendar) and they reported back that the theme of the Glasgow lecture was 'community.' I suspect that the 'ethics of care' was invoked during this lecture as well.
It's resonated with me as a phrase used also by Carol Gilligan, in her book Joining the Resistance (2011) which was itself a reflection upon the work she did in her seminal text In a Different Voice (1982). She has since published In a Human Voice (2023) which brings her thinking up to date. And she has written other books as well, but those are the three that I've read.
This inspired me to dig through my papers to find a piece of work I did – oh, a decade ago now? It was a model I sketched out, when I was trying to think through Gilligan's theories and make sense of my own feminism, at that stage. Finding my voice through writing was a significant thread in the fabric of my feminism, and finding feminism was a prominent ingredient in my recipe for madness. So when I look at this model, I see some of my madness there.
It's certainly not user-friendly: there's a lot going on in it; it's quite busy and possibly headache-triggering. I'm not sure the overlaps are clear – or what the central space represents, if anything. And it needs to be more explicit somehow that this represents a whole, a complex – that we can be existing in any of these spaces at different times and in different ways.
I'd welcome others' thoughts. Does it make any sense? Does it serve any purpose? The world is glutted with conceptual models, is there any point in trying to develop this one further? I could certainly write up a text to accompany it, point by point to try to explain what I meant in each section of the graphic – though it would require a bit of archaelogy to do so. In my scribbled notes that accompanied the drawing, I made references to Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, all of whom I was reading around the same time as Carol Gilligan. I honestly can't remember all the connections I was making!
In any case, whether or not I take this model into any further direction, I do want to revisit the ethics of care within the context of the mad movement. Gilligan's original framing – based on her research – had been to counterpoise ethics between voice and relationship; in her later thinking, she counterpoised ethics of justice with ethics of care. And in her most recent work, she counterpoises the human voice with the patriarchal voice. We would add here: the mad voice counterpoised with the sane voice.
These all come across as very binary, though. They offer a starting point rather than end point. I think here is where we must take heart and approach the wizard of transcontextuality; invoke the spirit of Warm Data - which aligns very well with another point made during Dr LeFrancois' lecture: that Mad Studies values emotional knowledge (or as my friend R once put it: feelings are facts.) One of the great tragedies of sanism is its disavowal of emotions as valid information. It's simply not possible to set aside the emotional dimension of human experience. Why do we pretend that it is, and twist ourselves up into pretzels trying to be 'objective' and 'rational'?
Anyway, anyway, anyway: voice-and-relationship model. Thoughts?
Touched by your model, I drew moving intersecting lines, collapsing the nominalisations into what I was sensing for me. I noticed the autonomy-rights-agency were sticky and less dynamics. And the others had more energy in them. The voice came to me as an emergence. Almost like a kite 🪁 flying in the sky.
I was naturally drawn to this as a vennophile (lover of venn diagrams, obviously!) Julie.
I am not in any way familiar with the work but my intuitive response was to change this to 3 circles. Realm of self and Realm of others are clearly two of the circles.
I wasn't sure about the third but my best guess (looking at my notepad where I have scribbled this) was 'quality of relationship'.
I enjoyed the exercise so don't feel any obligation to respond and certainly not any forced attempt to compliment my efforts.
Still, I'm sharing on the off chance it triggers something useful for you.
Good luck!