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Publications by Leon Hilton

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping the Wander Lines: The Quiet Revelations of Fernand Deligny

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2015

FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla... more FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla, weaver of networks, cartographer of wandering lines. A visionary but marginalized gure oen associated with the alternative and anti-psychiatry movements that emerged in the decades aer World War II, Deligny (1913-1996) remains dicult to categorize-an enigmatic sage. Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs-he called them "attempts" (or tentatives, in French)-for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. Aer settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be "outside of speech" (hors de parole).

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

The forum offers a wide range of interventions both on a theoretical and on a methodological leve... more The forum offers a wide range of interventions both on a theoretical and on a methodological level, as well as within and across disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. As editors, we have not enforced one specific understanding of affect, disability, or psychiatric experience, in the hope that the plurality of perspectives will foster a truly engaging discussion.

Research paper thumbnail of Presence, Rhetoric, Difference: Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater

TDR/The Drama Review, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of "Madness Is Contagious": Language and Violence in the Goodman Theatre's 2666

Research paper thumbnail of The Horse in My Flesh": Transpecies Performance and Affective Athleticism

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of “Sex, Death, and the Welfare Check: Disability and Sexuality in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives.”

Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Psychopower and Psychopolitics

Research paper thumbnail of The Real End of a Nightmare: Amateurism, Feminism and the Politics of Therapy in Jane Arden's 1970s

Research paper thumbnail of "The Bright Shapes Were Going": Disability, Neurodivergence, and Theatrical Form in Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury

Research paper thumbnail of Avonte's Law: Autism, Wandering, and the Racial Surveillance of Neurological Difference

This article situates recent policy proposals designed to expand the technological surveillance a... more This article situates recent policy proposals designed to expand the technological surveillance and policing of the "wandering" tendencies ascribed to autistic subjects in relationship to longer histories involving the surveillance of blackness and disability, and maintains that that such proposals are inadequate to sustaining the persistence and flourishing of autistic and other neurologically divergent forms-of-life. Drawing from discussions of the politics of bodily movement in black studies, performance theory, and the emerging discourses of neurodiversity, the essay argues for the necessity of cultivating alternative approaches to conceptualizing, representing, and doing justice to the "problem" of autistic wandering.

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Q... more We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence
in American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 2, June 2017, pp. 291-302
Edited by Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon Hilton
Table of contents:
Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence
pp. 291-302
Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, Leon J. Hilton
Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools
pp. 303-308
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Quagmires of Affect: Madness, Labor, Whiteness, and Ideological Disavowal
pp. 309-313
Rachel Gorman
Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health
pp. 315-319
Regina Kunzel
On Affect Theory's Hidden Histories: Toward a Technological Genealogy
pp. 321-326
Jaspertina Lim /Jasper J. Verlinden
Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience
pp. 327-331
Zahari Richter
Turning Mad Knowledge into Affective Labor: The Case of the Peer Support Worker
pp. 333-338
Jijian Voronka
Agitation and Sudden Death: Containing Black Detainee Affect
pp. 339-345
Louise Tam
This forum traces its origins to a roundtable, "Affect Theory Meets Mad Studies," that took place at the 2015 American Studies Association conference, one of the first panels to be sponsored by the ASA's then newly reconstituted Critical Disability Studies Caucus (CDSC). In responding to the ASA's notably "affective" orientation within its recent conference themes—from the "pleasure and pain" of 2014 to the "misery" of 2015—members of the CDSC felt the need to address the often-unmarked ableist potential of such keywords, which have too often led to the centering of privileged affective states. With this panel the caucus sought "to trouble the ways that mental illness is theorized and employed without consideration for the lived reality of an ableist and sanist society" (as noted in the original panel description). Since affective registers are distributed unevenly among those who bear them, both the panel and this subsequent forum emphasize the situational differences of affect under racial capitalist settler colonialism. That year's ASA conference's location in Toronto, Canada—known internationally as a hub of antipsychiatry and mad activism / mad studies work—further confirmed the importance of centering hemispheric and transnational perspectives that could invite critical engagements with the differential developments of mad studies and antipsychiatry activism, which has until recently been quite pronounced in Canada and rather more lacking in the US academy.
More specifically, contributors to this forum address madness, mental illness, and psychiatric disability by engaging with the wider, cross-disciplinary attention to the politics of affect and emotion that has surfaced over the past several decades. In light of affect theory's ongoing importance within the far-reaching theoretical challenges to models of liberal subjectivity, settler colonial sociality, and racial capitalist knowledge production that have defined American studies scholarship in recent years, this forum offers urgent engagements with (and at times critiques of) discrete traditions and genealogies of affect theory by insisting on the necessity of critical disability and mad studies perspectives to these debates.

The forum can be accessed via Jstor and other academic databases (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36559). For those who would like a copy but cannot access these databases, contact one of the editors for PDFs.

(While you are there check out the stellar adjacent forum on “Tracing the Settler's Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe's Life and Legacy” and Rober Warrior’s presidential address).

Content warning: academic language, theory heavy, numerous mentions of violence (including racism, ableism, sanism, colonialism, homophobia, slavery, DSM, deportation and more).

Papers by Leon Hilton

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

American Quarterly, 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Q... more We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 2, June 2017, pp. 291-302 Edited by Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon Hilton Table of contents: Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence pp. 291-302 Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, Leon J. Hilton Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools pp. 303-308 La Marr Jurelle Bruce Quagmires of Affect: Madness, Labor, Whiteness, and Ideological Disavowal pp. 309-313 Rachel Gorman Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health pp. 315-319 Regina Kunzel On Affect Theory's Hidden Histories: Toward a Technological Genealogy pp. 321-326 Jaspertina Lim /Jasper J. Verlinden Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience pp. 327-331 Zahari Richter Turning Mad Knowledge into Affective Labor: The Case of the Peer Support Worker pp. 333-338 Jijian Voronka Agitation and Sudden Death: Containing Black Detainee Affect pp. 339-345 Louise Tam This forum traces its origins to a roundtable, "Affect Theory Meets Mad Studies," that took place at the 2015 American Studies Association conference, one of the first panels to be sponsored by the ASA's then newly reconstituted Critical Disability Studies Caucus (CDSC). In responding to the ASA's notably "affective" orientation within its recent conference themes—from the "pleasure and pain" of 2014 to the "misery" of 2015—members of the CDSC felt the need to address the often-unmarked ableist potential of such keywords, which have too often led to the centering of privileged affective states. With this panel the caucus sought "to trouble the ways that mental illness is theorized and employed without consideration for the lived reality of an ableist and sanist society" (as noted in the original panel description). Since affective registers are distributed unevenly among those who bear them, both the panel and this subsequent forum emphasize the situational differences of affect under racial capitalist settler colonialism. That year's ASA conference's location in Toronto, Canada—known internationally as a hub of antipsychiatry and mad activism / mad studies work—further confirmed the importance of centering hemispheric and transnational perspectives that could invite critical engagements with the differential developments of mad studies and antipsychiatry activism, which has until recently been quite pronounced in Canada and rather more lacking in the US academy. More specifically, contributors to this forum address madness, mental illness, and psychiatric disability by engaging with the wider, cross-disciplinary attention to the politics of affect and emotion that has surfaced over the past several decades. In light of affect theory's ongoing importance within the far-reaching theoretical challenges to models of liberal subjectivity, settler colonial sociality, and racial capitalist knowledge production that have defined American studies scholarship in recent years, this forum offers urgent engagements with (and at times critiques of) discrete traditions and genealogies of affect theory by insisting on the necessity of critical disability and mad studies perspectives to these debates. The forum can be accessed via Jstor and other academic databases (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36559). For those who would like a copy but cannot access these databases, contact one of the editors for PDFs. (While you are there check out the stellar adjacent forum on “Tracing the Settler's Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe's Life and Legacy” and Rober Warrior’s presidential address). Content warning: academic language, theory heavy, numerous mentions of violence (including racism, ableism, sanism, colonialism, homophobia, slavery, DSM, deportation and more).

Research paper thumbnail of Mapping the Wander Lines: The Quiet Revelations of Fernand Deligny

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2015

FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla... more FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla, weaver of networks, cartographer of wandering lines. A visionary but marginalized gure oen associated with the alternative and anti-psychiatry movements that emerged in the decades aer World War II, Deligny (1913-1996) remains dicult to categorize-an enigmatic sage. Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs-he called them "attempts" (or tentatives, in French)-for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. Aer settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be "outside of speech" (hors de parole).

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

The forum offers a wide range of interventions both on a theoretical and on a methodological leve... more The forum offers a wide range of interventions both on a theoretical and on a methodological level, as well as within and across disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. As editors, we have not enforced one specific understanding of affect, disability, or psychiatric experience, in the hope that the plurality of perspectives will foster a truly engaging discussion.

Research paper thumbnail of Presence, Rhetoric, Difference: Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater

TDR/The Drama Review, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of "Madness Is Contagious": Language and Violence in the Goodman Theatre's 2666

Research paper thumbnail of The Horse in My Flesh": Transpecies Performance and Affective Athleticism

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of “Sex, Death, and the Welfare Check: Disability and Sexuality in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives.”

Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Psychopower and Psychopolitics

Research paper thumbnail of The Real End of a Nightmare: Amateurism, Feminism and the Politics of Therapy in Jane Arden's 1970s

Research paper thumbnail of "The Bright Shapes Were Going": Disability, Neurodivergence, and Theatrical Form in Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury

Research paper thumbnail of Avonte's Law: Autism, Wandering, and the Racial Surveillance of Neurological Difference

This article situates recent policy proposals designed to expand the technological surveillance a... more This article situates recent policy proposals designed to expand the technological surveillance and policing of the "wandering" tendencies ascribed to autistic subjects in relationship to longer histories involving the surveillance of blackness and disability, and maintains that that such proposals are inadequate to sustaining the persistence and flourishing of autistic and other neurologically divergent forms-of-life. Drawing from discussions of the politics of bodily movement in black studies, performance theory, and the emerging discourses of neurodiversity, the essay argues for the necessity of cultivating alternative approaches to conceptualizing, representing, and doing justice to the "problem" of autistic wandering.

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Q... more We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence
in American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 2, June 2017, pp. 291-302
Edited by Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon Hilton
Table of contents:
Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence
pp. 291-302
Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, Leon J. Hilton
Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools
pp. 303-308
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Quagmires of Affect: Madness, Labor, Whiteness, and Ideological Disavowal
pp. 309-313
Rachel Gorman
Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health
pp. 315-319
Regina Kunzel
On Affect Theory's Hidden Histories: Toward a Technological Genealogy
pp. 321-326
Jaspertina Lim /Jasper J. Verlinden
Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience
pp. 327-331
Zahari Richter
Turning Mad Knowledge into Affective Labor: The Case of the Peer Support Worker
pp. 333-338
Jijian Voronka
Agitation and Sudden Death: Containing Black Detainee Affect
pp. 339-345
Louise Tam
This forum traces its origins to a roundtable, "Affect Theory Meets Mad Studies," that took place at the 2015 American Studies Association conference, one of the first panels to be sponsored by the ASA's then newly reconstituted Critical Disability Studies Caucus (CDSC). In responding to the ASA's notably "affective" orientation within its recent conference themes—from the "pleasure and pain" of 2014 to the "misery" of 2015—members of the CDSC felt the need to address the often-unmarked ableist potential of such keywords, which have too often led to the centering of privileged affective states. With this panel the caucus sought "to trouble the ways that mental illness is theorized and employed without consideration for the lived reality of an ableist and sanist society" (as noted in the original panel description). Since affective registers are distributed unevenly among those who bear them, both the panel and this subsequent forum emphasize the situational differences of affect under racial capitalist settler colonialism. That year's ASA conference's location in Toronto, Canada—known internationally as a hub of antipsychiatry and mad activism / mad studies work—further confirmed the importance of centering hemispheric and transnational perspectives that could invite critical engagements with the differential developments of mad studies and antipsychiatry activism, which has until recently been quite pronounced in Canada and rather more lacking in the US academy.
More specifically, contributors to this forum address madness, mental illness, and psychiatric disability by engaging with the wider, cross-disciplinary attention to the politics of affect and emotion that has surfaced over the past several decades. In light of affect theory's ongoing importance within the far-reaching theoretical challenges to models of liberal subjectivity, settler colonial sociality, and racial capitalist knowledge production that have defined American studies scholarship in recent years, this forum offers urgent engagements with (and at times critiques of) discrete traditions and genealogies of affect theory by insisting on the necessity of critical disability and mad studies perspectives to these debates.

The forum can be accessed via Jstor and other academic databases (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36559). For those who would like a copy but cannot access these databases, contact one of the editors for PDFs.

(While you are there check out the stellar adjacent forum on “Tracing the Settler's Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe's Life and Legacy” and Rober Warrior’s presidential address).

Content warning: academic language, theory heavy, numerous mentions of violence (including racism, ableism, sanism, colonialism, homophobia, slavery, DSM, deportation and more).

Research paper thumbnail of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence

American Quarterly, 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Q... more We are delighted to announce the publication of Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence in American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 2, June 2017, pp. 291-302 Edited by Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon Hilton Table of contents: Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/Violence pp. 291-302 Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, Leon J. Hilton Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools pp. 303-308 La Marr Jurelle Bruce Quagmires of Affect: Madness, Labor, Whiteness, and Ideological Disavowal pp. 309-313 Rachel Gorman Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health pp. 315-319 Regina Kunzel On Affect Theory's Hidden Histories: Toward a Technological Genealogy pp. 321-326 Jaspertina Lim /Jasper J. Verlinden Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience pp. 327-331 Zahari Richter Turning Mad Knowledge into Affective Labor: The Case of the Peer Support Worker pp. 333-338 Jijian Voronka Agitation and Sudden Death: Containing Black Detainee Affect pp. 339-345 Louise Tam This forum traces its origins to a roundtable, "Affect Theory Meets Mad Studies," that took place at the 2015 American Studies Association conference, one of the first panels to be sponsored by the ASA's then newly reconstituted Critical Disability Studies Caucus (CDSC). In responding to the ASA's notably "affective" orientation within its recent conference themes—from the "pleasure and pain" of 2014 to the "misery" of 2015—members of the CDSC felt the need to address the often-unmarked ableist potential of such keywords, which have too often led to the centering of privileged affective states. With this panel the caucus sought "to trouble the ways that mental illness is theorized and employed without consideration for the lived reality of an ableist and sanist society" (as noted in the original panel description). Since affective registers are distributed unevenly among those who bear them, both the panel and this subsequent forum emphasize the situational differences of affect under racial capitalist settler colonialism. That year's ASA conference's location in Toronto, Canada—known internationally as a hub of antipsychiatry and mad activism / mad studies work—further confirmed the importance of centering hemispheric and transnational perspectives that could invite critical engagements with the differential developments of mad studies and antipsychiatry activism, which has until recently been quite pronounced in Canada and rather more lacking in the US academy. More specifically, contributors to this forum address madness, mental illness, and psychiatric disability by engaging with the wider, cross-disciplinary attention to the politics of affect and emotion that has surfaced over the past several decades. In light of affect theory's ongoing importance within the far-reaching theoretical challenges to models of liberal subjectivity, settler colonial sociality, and racial capitalist knowledge production that have defined American studies scholarship in recent years, this forum offers urgent engagements with (and at times critiques of) discrete traditions and genealogies of affect theory by insisting on the necessity of critical disability and mad studies perspectives to these debates. The forum can be accessed via Jstor and other academic databases (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36559). For those who would like a copy but cannot access these databases, contact one of the editors for PDFs. (While you are there check out the stellar adjacent forum on “Tracing the Settler's Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe's Life and Legacy” and Rober Warrior’s presidential address). Content warning: academic language, theory heavy, numerous mentions of violence (including racism, ableism, sanism, colonialism, homophobia, slavery, DSM, deportation and more).