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" National encounters and institutional states of exception : "
Larson, Trina
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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915296
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TL7g50h7d8
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| Main Entry
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Larson, Trina
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| Title & Author
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National encounters and institutional states of exception :\ Larson, Trina
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| College
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UC San Diego
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| Date
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2012
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| student score
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2012
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| Abstract
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Following the mid-nineteenth century, every state in the expanding US founded at least one public insane asylum. Responding to the needs of those with severe cognitive and mental impairments who were poorly housed in prisons and private homes, the asylum promised enlightened management of a seemingly growing social problem. Professional discourse centered both on patients' needs for isolated and restful care and on the threat they posed to the larger community. While asylum superintendents deemed some patients cured and released them, many were found incurable and all were held for indefinite periods of time, isolated from family, friends, and, often, the protection of the courts. As such, patients proved vulnerable to abuse. Among those incarcerated and released, some published asylum accounts that publicly criticized the abrogation of their basic citizenship rights within a constitutional, democratic government. This dissertation examines such first-person asylum narratives written by women in the last-half of the nineteenth century. In this dissertation, I rely on Giorgio Agamben's notion of the state of exception to organize the work of these nineteenth-century writers. The state of exception refers to a civil status brought about by executive order that broadly suspends civil rights under conditions of emergency. Applying Agamben's theorization, I argue alongside Emile Durkheim, that executive authority rests, not only, or primarily, with chief executives such as the US president, but with the administrative branches of government that truly execute state sovereignty. Bolstered by specialized knowledge, political and legal mandates, a strong professional organization, and permissiveness that accrues to practices occurring in relative isolation, chief asylum doctors held such authority with respect to their patients. In large numbers, they suspended the constitutional rights of US citizens under discursively constructed conditions of threat in the nineteenth century
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UC San Diego
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