A common method of depathologizing trans identity teases apart transness and madness, paralleling the ways gay people, historically, claimed sanity to advocate for their depathologization and the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. But concretely, even if you accept the assumption that gender dysphoria itself is not mad or that transgender identity is in actuality rationally determined, the statement “I have never met a sane trans person” still bears truth. Studies consistently show that mental illness, distress, trauma, and suicidality affect the vast majority of trans people. Trans people are situated in the mad subject position regardless of the psychiatric classification and how medicine treats gender dysphoria. Mad subjectivity is part and parcel of actual, multifaceted trans lives. The elevation of trans identity to sanity entails disavowing the actualities of trans lives, which exist at a maddening coordinate in society. The pervasive social antagonism that structures trans cultural life is deeply maddening.

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Trans identity is sited on the abject and inhospitable terrain of madness by a stratum of reasoning. The obvious and most superficial reason is that it permits cis society to render transness “abnormal” and thus something that can be corrected and policed. If one stops digging here, the resignification of transness as normal and sane is clearly the most applicable tactic of liberation. However, there are deeper layers of sediment that provide footing on the coordinates at which transness and madness intersect and upon which sanity and cissexuality build their alliances and fortifications. The notions of deviance serve to differentiate trans identity from idealized conformity with “natural,” binary sex. Cis identity is conciliatory with medical knowledge-power’s forcible citation of bodyminds, acquiescing to a durable administration of bodyminds through the interpellation of sexed identity. Meanwhile, transness performs dissent, noncompliance, maladjustment, and disconnection with a society organized on a regime of stable and self-sustaining identity that the heterosexual compulsion of binary, “natural” sex secures.

In my estimation, madness, as a form of nonnormativity, performs its identity through a similar mechanism of dissent, noncompliance, maladjustment, and disconnection with the regulatory and normalizing imperatives of social life, weakening the regulatory practices that stabilize identity and cohere subjectivity to synchronize bodyminds with the affective organization of political dominance. Madness is the dissolution of coherent identity and subjectivity. Power always qualifies coherence: consistency with the temporalities and spatialities of domination, unity with the directionalities of force relations, and the use and deployment of meanings that are continuous with the meaning-making modes authorized and privileged by social power. Madness is the name given to the meaning-making practices of identities and subjectivities disqualified and marginalized within the affective and semiotic economies of power. Sanity is the name given to the meaning-making practices that are qualified, authorized, and privileged as coherent, united, consistent, and continuous with social power. By this token, transness is positioned as mad not merely as a means to pathologize and stigmatize but also because trans identity enacts a psychic, embodied, erotic, affective, and temporal dissolution of coherent identity through performing practices of meaning-making asynchronous with the structures of social life.

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Trans subjectivity turns back against and exposes the fragility and artificiality of the power that produces and regulates it, maddening the logic of gender that also articulates it. Mental distress, similarly, enacts meaning-making that turns back and exposes the structures of power that produce and regulate it. Distress stages a rhetoric that maddens the structures that injure bodyminds and yet still demand orderly emotionalities that abide by their terms for our collective life. Emotional dysregulation maddens the rationalities that compel subjectivity to conform its expressions to an intersubjective perceptual field conditioned by, and that naturalizes, social power. Gender dysphoria performs a rhetoric of revelation, unveiling structures that forcibly mark and reduce bodies in correspondence with binary gender norms, refusing the demand that their minds simultaneously facilitate and allay the violence. Transgender identity abandons the regulation of the body that becomes the site of rationalizing and sustaining the coherence of sexed norms. Emotional dysregulation gestures at unruly, injured subjectivity that casts aside, or can no longer bear, docility in the operations and rationalities of power.

Madness is the unsettling of power, disquieting the ways the rational possibilities of the human psyche are circumscribed to materialize the imperatives of social power, with rational behavior and experience socially practicing political ideologies, interests, and values codified and prescribed as the normative. Rationality is any discursive technique employed to guide the systemic organization and structuring of modes of life. Madness appears when social governance is unsettled by practices that decouple from and confound the rationalities that mobilized them. By that measure, transgender practices are not sane because they disorient the political rationalities that animate the cis mind, the ostensible universality of which mobilizes transness—it engages in the felt undercurrents that cut below the rationalities of gender, following the guides of feeling that rationality, in the form of cisness, repudiates.

For example, as a trans woman, my name was suggested by my mother, but I chose to adopt it for myself. Choosing one’s name is a uniquely rebellious act against a world that coercively assigns us a sex and a name without regard for our needs, interests or who we are. Names and sexes are given in keeping with a regime of binary, natural sex, to which trans people revolt. Trans women, in particular, often provoke fear, disgust, and hatred. We are hotly debated objects throughout Western society. We are subject to various descriptions, names and labels in the public’s imagination. We are called predators in bathrooms, f-slurs on the street, monsters in the presence of children, and fetishes in the minds of cis men. Everyone seems to have their own words to affix to our bodies. Everyone seems to want to monitor and label every feature of our existence.

Naming is just as violent in the case of personality disorders. People diagnosed or labeled with personality disorders have an extensive descriptive canon. To start, there are clusters A, B, and C, each with its own labeled typology. Cluster A is described as unusual and eccentric. Cluster B, within which I fall, is seen as dramatic and erratic. Cluster C is marked by severe anxiety and fear. We also have gender identities associated with our diagnostic names. People labeled with borderline or histrionic personality disorders are more likely to be female, while those called sociopaths or narcissists tend to be male. And all of us are called disruptive and are often labeled as evil, abusive and aberrant. We are grossly distorted in the world’s imagination. Armchair diagnosis and relentless vilification lob us around as if we are pawns in an interpersonal and social struggle, as if we are not real. People with diagnoses of personality disorders are not seen as living human beings, and we are rarely treated as such.

Personality disorder-diagnosed life becomes wholly and solely determined by the struggle against antagonistic names. The possibility of our lives is reduced to the futile choices set by “the abuse question”: you can either struggle to refute what people say about people diagnosed with personality disorders or become its casualty through submission or even death.

This relentlessly hateful discourse compels us to distance ourselves from the very categories through which our lives are framed. For instance, if I talk about the liberation of people labeled with personality disorders, I am forced to first convince others that I am not abusive like that person diagnosed with a personality disorder, that I speak as one of the “good ones” and something other than the monster they have heard so much about.

I have decided that this is a waste of political energy. Therefore, I refuse to address and resolve “the abuse question,” which is often posed as, “Are people diagnosed with personality disorders truly abusive?” I am often asked, “What can you say about this?” Implicit in this question is the idea that personality disorder liberation is legitimate only if this is addressed. This question frames, boxes in, and limits my advocacy before I even begin to talk or write. It orients me according to what the world wants from me, what it wants to take from me. I am allowed to talk about the interests of people diagnosed with personality disorders only insofar as I preserve widely accepted social interests that are antagonistic to our lives.

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and pro-Palestinian candidate for the Mayor of New York City, is asked everywhere he goes to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” and prove how he is not an anti-Semitic danger to Jewish people. It is a losing and futile endeavor to prove this, as it is with personality disorders, because this notion of “danger” is deployed as a tactic to kill his goal and repress him. It aims to destroy what he stands for, to capture and neutralize his socialist vision for New York City. It is leveraged not against what he says, but against who he is.

Similarly, “the abuse question” is just a question intended to capture, neutralize, and kill people diagnosed with personality disorders. Therefore, I refuse to prove and explain how people labeled with personality disorders are not dangers to the rest of you. I refuse to bridge the gap of difference to justify our lives, dignity, and political desires. I seek new and better possibilities beyond what this looming question allows. “The abuse question” is a counterinsurgency tactic. It is meant to defeat any meaningful resistance to the oppression of people diagnosed with personality disorders.

Personality disorder diagnoses plug people into a massive ensemble of names, words, labels, and descriptions, all of which drive deprivation and death. Personality disorder diagnoses are not for those whom it names. It is only used against them. People diagnosed with personality disorders are precluded from using their own identities in any way not oriented toward their destruction, correction, or submission. Personality disorder diagnoses are the material for everyone except for the people they name. It is an impossibility for a person diagnosed with a personality disorder to claim for themselves what others use against them. My therapist tells me I should not identify with borderline. Conventional wisdom for borderline advocacy is to reject this name which is violent to me.

However, this does not square with my experience. I am not borderline, yet everyone treats me as if I were borderline. They would treat me as a borderline even if I told them I just had trauma. Why is it that everyone can treat me as a borderline and can use borderline against me, but I cannot use the label for myself and for my own political interests, needs, and desires? Rejecting it will not change the ensemble of words used against me. Other people will use the diagnosis even if I do not reclaim it as a political identity. Rejecting it gives other people the agency to do whatever they want with the name for their own self-serving, reactionary purposes.

I have decided that the only way to counter a name used against me is to use it for myself, thereby disrupting and reversing its intended function, contesting its violence. My enemy is not the label itself but how any label, whether it be borderline, trauma, autism, or some other euphemism, is used against me and not for me. It is the antagonistic and life-denying objective of the name that I must refuse and which I must redeploy for my own life-giving objective. What is at stake is not the name itself, but how a name is applied and toward what end.

The radical rebellion of trans people in choosing their own names is not simply in the name itself. Rather, it is the choice to decide how the name is applied and the objective it reflects. We choose our names to ensure they reflect our interests, needs, and desires rather than reinforcing the coercive force of the regime of assigned sex. Trans names are used for trans people, instead of for a regime that works against us, seeking to subjugate, correct, and eliminate transness. In a similar way, I believe that people diagnosed or labeled with personality disorders must forge a relationship with our diagnoses, or whatever names and words we exist under, that serves ourselves. Why do our names serve everyone except us? Names must serve the people they name.

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But sanism still relies upon some of the same old, tired tactics. Today, when I, as someone diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, with experiences of paranoia, emotional and relational instability, as well as ‘splitting,’ speak genuinely about my oppression, I am often cast as speaking from my pathology and not from my humanity. My political consciousness, the critical thought I deploy, is not a legitimate form of knowledge but is portrayed as distorted thinking and ‘willfulness’ as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, the primary treatment of BPD, might call it. Every day, I fight to make my experience and its deprived realities legible, to carve out the harsh truth of the world’s culpability and complicity. A war over legibility fundamentally marks mad resistance, and sane oppression takes the illegibility of mad experiences as its reason for being.

When I mention to my therapist my work on madness and personality disorder advocacy, she tells me that I should not identify with the lived experience of being politically and socially affected by that category, as it detracts from the work of the cure. The goal of the cure is to force the Mad person to recognize their illness and agree to the power and knowledge of the therapist to shape them, to get them to acknowledge that all their problems and struggles in life stem from something defective or ill in them, and to disavow the possibility of self-created agency. Treatment is to step into an agency fashioned in opposition to their lived experiences of madness. It is depicted as salvation whose antagonist is the Mad person’s continued experiences of mental distress. Correction starts with accepting that their Mad identity is incompatible with their survival and thriving, positioning sanity as the route to freedom and madness as the route to hell. The cure assumes that this hell is grounded solely in psychological, medical, and biological factors, rather than in the political and social contexts that provide our culture’s ways of experiencing and relating to distress.

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We should question whether mental distress is really opposed to agency, survival, thriving, and freedom, whether Mad identity is truly incompatible with living full lives, and whether Mad deprivation is indeed rooted in the body rather than in how the body is (not) attended to and cared for. What is at stake in the experience of distress is not the behaviors it yields, but the politically skewed social relations through which both sane and Mad people experience that distress. Those with mental distress will be able to live full, free lives and claim agency only if they embrace their Mad identity, aligning their lives with it, and if the world recognizes their distress as a valued form of embodiment that requires ethical attention, consideration, negotiation, supportive care, and communal embrace. Rather than outsourcing the ethical imperative to attend to the painful experiences of Mad people to psychological services, which pathologize madness to control it within institutional borders, we must take charge of the ethical dilemmas, challenges, and necessities that distressed people present to society. Rather than repudiating, blaming, or disavowing the distressed to shore up our own comfort and avoid our ethical obligations to those who are suffering, we must turn toward the people who need it most.

The Mad liberation movement mirrors the aforementioned reform movement of former asylum inmates through its foregrounding of mad lived experiences over the external observations of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sane people. The leveraging of lived experience includes not just sharing in the embodied realities of mental distress but also highlighting the testimonies of Mad identity, revealing the institutional, political, social, and cultural experiences that underpin it. Like nineteenth-century former asylum inmates, the Mad liberation movement reveals how everyday and dramatic forms of violence are as part and parcel of the lived experiences of mental distress as the emotional and embodied realities themselves. The dominant ways in which society relates to mental distress worsen it not only for Mad people but also for the people who enter into relationships with them.

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Attending to the experiences of Mad people includes attending to their distress as well as the ethical issues that arise alongside it. It includes an active attempt to understand their suffering from their point of view, a humility regarding one’s claim to know it, and centering their experiences of suffering rather than the supposedly difficult experience of caring for it. It means not defining, subsuming, or engulfing the experience of distress, and even the social identity of the Mad person, within the supposed difficulty of the relationship. We have the agency to choose which part of the distressed experience characterizes the whole and serves as the basis for social action and relations, whether the ethical challenges of care underwrite the distress, supporting it, or the pathologizing response to these challenges instead subordinates the distressed person.

We get to choose if our response to ethical challenges is the elimination of mental distress, to pressure its presence into absence, and logically therefore also the distressed person, or to embrace it through active care of madness. In therapy, it is often said that our emotions are our responsibility, not others’. We can’t experience others’ emotions for them. Such a tautological banality might be true, and it might be true that we can’t take control of others’ emotions, which would mean taking control of them. But perhaps we need to discard a model of individual control and responsibility—through which we subordinate emotions to our will—and focus instead on how emotions can be cared for within the relationships in which they appear, rather than controlled by the bodies to which they are supposedly attributed. Rather than supplanting distress with the maddening experience of being in its presence—a presence structured by the self-aggrandizing demand for its absence—we must undertake the radical act of making the Mad person’s lived experience legible, rather than privileging a future-bound ideal of sanity that would replace it. It is not just a matter of ethical service to the Mad other; it is also a compassionate relationship that humanizes and supports the needs of those involved, securing those needs not in opposition to one another but in support of one another’s presence.

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What would it mean for a distressed person to reside in a community that cares for her distress because it values her presence in social life? What would it mean for a borderline-diagnosed person such as myself to have friends and lovers, family and collaborators, acquaintances, to make a friend and not wonder when a stray emotion will render me other to him? I’ve learned it is only a matter of time. What would it mean to talk to someone at work, no longer silently hoping she won’t notice the pain written on my face or maddening my relationship with her, desperately scared at the prospect of communal repudiation? What would it mean for the relations around me not to seek the absence of my emotionally debilitated self, with my individual absence apparently serving their social presence? What would it mean for communal embrace to be the primary form of relationship with distressed people, rather than social death?

Nineteenth-century former asylum inmates, making known the brutal realities of confinement, almost unanimously argued that caring for madness in their communities and at home was singularly better than shutting it away in asylums, which not only harmed the Mad person but also did nothing to treat the distress.3 It made it worse. They argued that the social presence of madness enabled recovery. Contrary to sane ‘wisdom’, making space for distress, giving it a place in our communities and cultures of relation, and embracing it as a social condition within our relationships is more likely to heal it rather than exacerbate it. Excoriating the distressed does nothing to meet the needs of people who are not distressed. It makes it worse for everyone.

If, in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, it is said that non-acceptance of pain leads to even more suffering, then this insight does not primarily apply to the distressed person. It applies mainly to the social experience of distress, to the relations in which it is experienced, and to everyone involved and with a stake in our collective experience of distress. By not accepting the presence of distress and fashioning it as bound for absence, everyone suffers. Making distress legible serves us all by enabling the development of new social forms, practices, techniques, and models to care for its existence rather than engaging in a persistent social war of control, exclusion, and elimination that denies its reality.

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You would have needed people who saw that all the ways our bodies are made wrong, held responsible for our own mistreatment, blamed for showing the impact of oppression, all the ways our nature is called defective, are connected, rooted in the same terrible notions about what is of value. …Our bodies…hold political truths about the world we live in, about damage and resistance, about truth telling and healing…

—Aurora Levins Morales, “Mountain Moving Day” in Kindling: Writings on the Body

Vulnerability derives from the Latin word vulnerare, which means “to wound.”^[i] Wounds are realities within the fragile processes of becoming through which we all live, grow, interrelate, and die. All forms of life are susceptible to wounds and display them differently: some hide them, others bare or perform their hurt. A third type of display is more contrived and technological. It seeks to excise these vulnerabilities from existence, developing ever more novel ways to control, regulate, divert, and channel hurt away from an honest reckoning with its presence and uneven distribution, thereby eliminating critical analyses of pain that identify how our dominant mode of production, consumption, and power hurts all life on Earth. The wounds of people diagnosed or labeled with personality disorders reveal something deeply vulnerable about how we inhabit multiple, contradictory experiences at once. Yet our wounds, what I refer to as a kind of intensified vulnerability, also reveal something deeply vulnerable and troubling about the world across multiple registers. The social world blames us as a way of looking away from its own hurt—how it undermines its own future. We embody proliferative hurt that exceeds what society can accept because it destabilizes the fragile rationale on which it relies to sustain the intolerable realities that determine and distribute political privilege, economic profit, and social benefit. We often repudiate people with emotional disabilities because of what they reveal about our own vulnerabilities and investments in the system that produces, exploits, and depends upon them. PDphobia (a term I’m coining here) is the oppression of people diagnosed or labeled with personality disorders. But it also names a further logic of reductionism, distortion, evasion, disavowal, repudiation, and intolerance leveled at the vulnerability, contradiction, difference, imperfection, and struggle concentrated in personality disorder-diagnosed experiences.

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Many personality disorder-diagnosed people were abused or deeply hurt as children, often by parents and caregivers.^[ii] We developed wounds that have irrevocably shaped and formed us. Society filters our vulnerabilities through moralistic and behavioral interpretations that absolve it of its failure to protect us as children. The proper interpretation of our lives as telling stories of systemic child abuse and ongoing oppression is reversed and transmogrified into individualized pathological conditions. This deflection and projection of responsibility onto our bodyminds shields a society that normalizes and accepts the oppression of children, especially those of us already marked by political and social difference. Many of us are subjugated in preexisting ways, and personality disorders become yet another means of pathologizing the suffering and harm mandated by the dominant interests of the social order. At times, I wonder whether learning about the abuse I suffered as a child, and about the ways that abuse shaped the vulnerabilities I bring into relationships today, would incentivize others to treat me with greater understanding, whether such knowledge would alter how people respond to my having borderline personality disorder, and to the fact that I continue to struggle with it. In this essay, I reimagine what are considered ‘defective’ personalities and behaviors through the lens of embodied vulnerability, which ethically implicates all of us in the broader ways in which systems of social power abuse vulnerable life.

Wounds Tell a Story

I cannot rely on others to use knowledge of my wounds compassionately because the reification of borderline personality disorder is the dominant way in which borderline is produced and experienced. Reification is a term in Marxist theory that refers to the process by which complex histories and social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them. Throughout my childhood, I was immersed in a multiplicity of relations, histories, and political forces. Shaped equally by Indian upper-caste practices of arranged marriage and the displacement generated by global immigration flows of the 1980s, my parents were conditioned by thick social and cultural histories, including Maratha cultural legacies of hypermasculinity. These cultural and social relations provided fertile ground for my father’s abuse, which I experienced as a child. His misogyny and heterosexism, combined with relations of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, enveloped and violently repressed my developmentally disabled, queer, trans self.

Borderline is the name given to the vulnerabilities that materialized through a history of immigrant displacement and the instantiation of cultural imaginaries of caste, masculinity, normalcy, ethnicity, and religion, as well as through mutually reinforcing relations of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness operating in school and at home. Yet despite this, people today do not experience my vulnerabilities as attributes of these discourses, histories, relations, and forces. Instead, they experience them as attributes of my behavior, personality, and moral disposition. Reification functions as a convenient tactic that absolves others of ethical attention to my history of trauma and to the power relations that produce and sustain my wounds. Others can merely, solely, and wholly focus on my person. It becomes thinkable to circumscribe a tangled political story through devaluing the truth my bodymind can tell, identifying me as the problem, as the danger, as the difficult reality and removing from awareness how I can signify the ways ableism, heterosexism, hypermasculinity, and patriarchy are the actual problems, dangers, and intolerable realities to every one of us. My bodymind tells this second story. The experience of behaviors as exhibiting a defective attribute of my bodymind depends on the social erasure of my past and on the subjugation, within experience and discourse, of how my bodymind carries that history and remains deeply vulnerable because of it. There is a refusal to witness this history, and a refusal to witness that borderline is not a defect of my being but the vulnerability of my survival composed through that history.

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These days, when I face ableist devaluation or violence, my consciousness flips into a distraught, overwhelmed ‘not again,’ recalling my flesh’s accumulated memories of ableist harm. Borderline is not a pattern of behavior, but the narrative that begins with an oversaturated history of subjugating violence. Borderline and other personality disorders police lived evidence of beings facing the unthinkable. No personality disorder-diagnosed person is only diagnosed with a personality disorder. Intersectional feminist perspectives in social theory inform the claim that no woman is simply a woman. Instead, the normativity of the category itself is fractured and destabilized by multiple asymmetries of power, including race, class, ethnicity, nation, ability, sexuality, cissexuality, age, appearance, and more. Similarly, an intersectional perspective on the category of personality disorders elucidates that none of us are merely diagnosed with personality disorders, as if the diagnosis is separate from the concrete social relations and systems through which it manifests and is produced. An intersectional approach attends to the fact that personality disorders often surface from the specific social realities of structural abuse, violence, and subjugation during childhood. Defining personality disorder-diagnosed people solely by ahistorical and depoliticized behaviors renders us deserving of violence and unworthy of liberation and does not attend to our complex vulnerabilities that develop over a lifetime living at the intensified intersections of power.

In my view, personality disorders mark warrior-casualty status. Audre Lorde, a Black feminist poet and philosopher, reminded us that not only were we never meant to survive in this system, but that we are both casualties and warriors within it.^[iii] People diagnosed with personality disorders are among the most politically vulnerable—their embodied, wounded vulnerabilities are direct counterparts to their intersecting political vulnerabilities and social precarities. The category of personality disorder reappropriates vulnerabilities produced by the socially manufactured conditions of capitalist, colonial, eugenic, cisheteropatriarchal, and white supremacist society, subsuming these wounds under the interpretive hegemony of the same culpable system. These diagnoses refigure embodied responses produced through the social exploitation, magnification, and alienation of vulnerability, enclosing these responses within the boundaries of psychiatric diagnosis. They institute simultaneous structural magnification and avoidance of vulnerability within the interior of the bodymind, problematizing “disordered” processes of social personality rather than problematizing the unethical and unjust realities in which bodyminds are made to function. PDphobia isolates the imperfect, damaged, and disruptive ways in which bodyminds function but eliminates lines of questioning that inquire after the compulsive social and power relations that disable that functioning, which force people diagnosed with personality disorders to operate consistently with the exigencies imposed on them. The system of social power turns many into casualties, while the ways in which their bodyminds become vulnerable through war waged on them by power are described as the problem. None of us will be able to connect in the ways our vulnerabilities make us different from others until the political system’s effects on bodyminds everywhere are collectively addressed and attended to, rather than projected onto and transferred only to personality disorder-diagnosed bodyminds.

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People diagnosed with personality disorders will be recognized as holding tremendous value, but this requires disrupting the ways in which value is defined and enforced. The world’s systems of social power harm all of us while also designating a regulated emotional schema through which we are permitted to experience and express that harm. And if we do not adhere to that schema, more harm follows. This schema ensures that hurt does not turn back against power by destabilizing our docile, libidinal investment in its legitimacy. Hurt carries rebellious, revolutionary, and explosive energy, interrupting and protesting the linear progression of the social conditions that produce it. Personality disorders break through, proliferate, and subvert the field of possibilities within which individuals are forced to choose relations to their pain that conform to the same structures that produce it. I am reminded of a quote by a famous psychiatrist associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, R.D. Laing, “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”^[iv] Personality disorders need not denote a breakdown of social connection; they can also break through management of social connection that ultimately upholds and knits the social and political system. They can bring to light a more essential yet disturbing truth about power in our society by foregrounding wounded subjecthood—normally excluded from speech and thought because it threatens embodied investments in the structures that both produce and regulate the emotional experience of harm.

Why do we blame the people harmed by systems of social power, but not the systems of social power themselves? Why do we live in a world that diagnoses people with personality disorders while repressing political and critical diagnoses of power and capitalism? We seek to cure and correct personality disorder-diagnosed peoples, but where is the same urgency and zeal to cure and correct the violence of the capitalist, colonial, eugenic, cisheteropatriarchal, and white supremacist system that both produces and targets people diagnosed with personality disorders? We feel compelled to repudiate and disavow personality disorder-diagnosed people, but do we repudiate and disavow our own complicity in reproducing social power with the same automatic, visceral force? On the question of where disability justice’s attention ought to be directed, toward curing impairment or combating disability oppression, Eli Clare asks, “how do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human—while not equating disability with injustice?”^[v] Some of the most eager consumers and practitioners of popular psychology, as well as the most frequent users of psy-services, are marginalized individuals. This is not merely due to coercion and pathologization, but also because of the self-initiated desire for bodymind safety. There is growing awareness of the effects of power and capitalism on bodyminds; there has even been the development of political and liberation-focused therapy, and conversely, therapeutically informed theory and collective politics. Many people are becoming aware that injustice hurts us psychologically and impacts the body. Trauma has received widespread cultural currency and intelligibility. And yet, people diagnosed with personality disorders have frequently been made into the villain, demon, and enemy that animate and organize these cultural projects. Is it ethical to draw a line beyond which suffering becomes unintelligible to our notions of care? Does it not impoverish our humanity to create a category of suffering and wounded vulnerability other to our own? It will protect everyone if we see suffering everywhere and wounds of all kinds as reflections of our own. We face a choice: either to continue to displace our unexamined discomfort with power structures onto people diagnosed with personality disorders, using their emotional impairments as metonyms for our unease with injustice, or we can diagnose and confront those structures in order to care for and embrace emotional impairments. I advocate for the latter; the latter will be more emancipatory for everybody, including those not diagnosed with personality disorders, for all our bodymind safety will be prioritized. What should be our locus of scrutiny? The structures that fail to meet the needs of bodyminds, or the bodyminds themselves. Which kind of scrutiny serves life and which serves death?

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Fires of Children

As individuals shaped by childhood trauma, people diagnosed with personality disorders unveil and televise discontent with a well-known secret of the world: the world is sustained and thrives on childism—the oppression of children. They force a confrontation with a reality that most know is terrible, yet most people’s tranquility depends on looking away and denying its ethical implications. Through personality disorders, we come face-to-face with the harsh fact that not only is every child oppressed, but adults also depend on accepting the apparently immutable political asymmetry in the lives of children. Briefly, I want to untangle the relationship between childhood and adulthood. As adults, we have, at some undefined moment, supposedly severed ourselves completely from the experience of childhood. We are meant to develop, or ascend, beyond children. Children are behind us, below us, that is, until one gives birth, adopts, or cares for a child themselves. Then, we are confronted with a social experience we left behind, one that differs from the one we currently inhabit. Because it is an experience we left behind and have placed below our current state, we implicitly disavow the child even as we confront the ethics of caring for it. We are not the child, but the child is ours, belonging to adultdom. What is the consequence of not being what is ours? Is ‘not being what is ours’ the relationship of property, control, and domination?

Developmentalism, the dominant cultural, medical, and sociological ideology that weds itself to and is embedded in the relationship between childhood and adulthood, posits a gradual ascent from a lower, less-formed state of life to that of a capable and free actor in social life. Developmentalism is a linear cultural relationship to time that is imposed on lives from birth. It offers the individual the only path to entry into normative, fully formed political subjecthood. The implication is that children are malformed adults, and non-normative subjects are akin to children. Developmentalism tells us a linear story of self-actualization and “coming of age,” but in reality, this triumphalist narrative presupposes, imposes, and enforces a hierarchy between adults and children (and those figured as children), naturalized by the apparent objectivity of time’s passage and supposed necessities of ‘normal’ biological and psychological growth. The discourse of childhood development produces the social relationship between adults and children, the interiorized (and stabilizing) relationship between our past child selves and our present adult identity, and the identity of the social order as composed of realized and autonomous social agents, all of which depend on a disavowal of actuality of the child. This social relationship, subjectivity, and structural system create a world that, at its core, sustains itself through abuse, oppression, exploitation, discipline, violence, and abandonment of children.

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The pain of abused and harmed children, as they move into adulthood, contains revolutionary potential. This potential, which threatens a world sustained by the destruction of children, is pathologized and blamed by diagnoses of personality disorders and other mental illnesses to protect the power of adults. The suffering of current and former children, within which child abuse traps many, cannot be ignored, and we must overturn and upend the world and ourselves for them. The fires of abused and harmed children must leap into our faces, must spread around the world, burn the world, and bring about a renewal in our relationships. It makes sense to feel sweltering heat when coming face-to-face with those who have experienced child abuse because it is the most brutal reality of our society, a reality in which every adult is complicit, a reality that stabilizes and reproduces society and social subjectivity. People diagnosed or labeled with a personality disorder, whose emotional and social differences emerge from childhood trauma, should disorient us. It is our obligation to reorient toward a world in which their experiences of abuse are cared for, and children everywhere are treated as their own persons rather than the mere substrate for the exercise of adult identities, temporalities, agencies, and subjectivities. Childhood, either via actual children or figured through traumatized adults, should subvert, challenge, and disrupt the unethically complacent world of adults, forcing transcendent adult agency to descend and acknowledge the disavowal that helped it ascend in the hierarchy.

Trauma and abuse have accumulated, incited, and been saturated with discourse. I write this in a global political moment rocked by the release of the Epstein files, which contain the names and violations of powerful and wealthy individuals who collaborated with and profited from sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s exploitation and abuse of children, implicating complicity by much of the current US political class, including two current or former Presidents of the United States, and many billionaires, including the richest man in the world. I write this essay in the context of epistemological developments in the history of psychiatry that increasingly base metaphysical and treatment models of madness on trauma and the ways the psychosocial environment of childhood harms future mental health. I write amidst pervasive confessions and testimonies of childhood experience, and of the pains born out of it, which are as commonplace and as constitutive of the modern subject as the confession of one’s sex has been since the Victorian age. I write this essay with knowledge of how, for more than two years, the state of Israel has systematically slaughtered children in Gaza through a genocide supported and enabled by the most powerful forces and institutions in the world. I write this the same week the United States bombed a girls’ elementary school in Iran to showcase its domination over the world. Finally, I write this essay with full awareness of a long history of Western society calling non-normative people children, and thus less than fully human, and of the reciprocal and co-constitutive histories of the disciplining and repression of children and the disciplining and repression of ‘abnormal’ individuals. Normality was born in and spread through childhood and the relationships of power that adults had over children and individuals deemed as legally, socially, and politically children. Most of our modern realities of power, otherness, violence, and oppression are connected to or bear some constitutive relation to the experience of childhood.

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Violence against children is not an exception to the social order and political system but a vital lynchpin of the whole social and political world. The social and political world treats the child as a template for all forms of oppression. The template of property, control, extractivism, and destruction that operates through relations to children unifies that world. Social identity is formed in a childhood saturated with disciplinary power. Child oppression is nearly universal. Every single person in US society has experienced the power concentrated in children’s lives. Childist power is formative and preconditional to adult identity. Childism, in my view, is both repressive and productive. It includes child abuse and violence against children, ranging from the killing of children in colonial wars to the abuse that occurs in and due to the nuclear family. It also includes productive power, such as the disciplinary power of the school, the medical power of the pediatrician, and the guiding power of the parent. Often, repressive childism is rationalized, mobilized, and transmitted through productive childist power relationships. PDphobia is merely the extension of childism that continues into adulthood, and childism is the means through which other forms of power articulate with the bodymind of the child. The continuum of childism and PDphobia captures and pursues survivors of child abuse, articulating power relations in childhood and covering up their tracks as children consequently develop wounds.

We never simply disavow or sever ourselves from childhood. Quite the contrary: adult identity depends on, is produced by, and hinges on childhood experiences of power. PDphobia relies on bisecting personality disorder identity between the emotionally abnormal present and the abused past, between the maladaptive, blameworthy adult and the surviving innocent child, between the person one can repudiate and the little one from whom we can’t look away. However, the grounding of identity in the past through repressive power produces emotional and social debility. The image of the adult as completely and unproblematically responsible for their actions rests on subordinating the child to a position devoid of agency. Repudiating the traumatized hinges on erasing the past in the obligations of the present.

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I concede that I appear before you as an adult with forms of agency and responsibility. Yet my childhood also tells us how I appear before you as a survivor, as a warrior, as a casualty, as a victim, as the definition of endurance, resistance, and vulnerability to atrocity. How can you throw stones at me when you have not been in my place of individuality and have not lived exactly what I have lived through? I will not stone you for what you have lived through or for the places you have been. Do you see yourself as separate from me, as somehow better, simply because you are not as damaged? When you deal with me, you deal not only with my present, not only with what I can be for you in the future, but also with my past, for, like anyone else, I am a product of my past experiences. It just so happens my past damaged me. And I’m not ashamed of that at all. The only factor that distinguished me from you is the contingent experiences through which either of us matured. You could have easily been me, and I could have been the one repudiating you. We have all moved through the architecture of power in childhood, and none of us has emerged completely intact. Open yourself to the vulnerability we consequently carry. Reject the construction of artificial divisions based on whose vulnerability is rendered valuable and deserving, whose vulnerability is brought into sharp relief, and whose vulnerability is sanitized as normal.

Conclusion: Vulnerable Ethics

My position of personality disorder liberation operates with the belief that PDphobia is not the enforcement of ethics or morality—it merely uses the cover of morality to justify maintaining the social order. It suspends ethics in specific times and places for certain people and certain bodymind differences. The PDphobic use of morality does not aim to care for the vulnerable living being of the other but seeks to secure one’s own position and belonging in society. It is not formulated and implemented to care for myriad others; instead, it shores up the self, often at the other’s expense or in opposition to the other. This shoring up of the self is not the display of ‘splitting’ attributed to many people labeled with borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, in which anger outbursts are performed out of a vulnerable, perceived or real need to protect the bodymind from harm. The difference between the real or perceived need for protection that characterizes splitting and the PDphobic desire to shore up the self is that shoring up secures political power and privilege, while splitting often develops from a lack of political power and privilege and from precarity. Splitting tends to persist when safety remains absent in a person’s social life. Often, childhood abuse is reproduced in adulthood through PDphobia. If the world collectively and ethically were to attend to and embrace personality disorder-diagnosed distress, splitting could reduce in intensity and frequency, and healing would become possible. In contrast, PDphobic shoring up of privilege and political power does not diminish through ethical care. It diametrically opposes and structurally antagonizes, while concealing, what might otherwise be an ethical relation, supplanting ethics with a distorted, self-aggrandizing morality. The category of personality disorders serves two interrelated functions that are connected to an overarching objective. First, it naturalizes and sustains investment in the social order and the systems of social power that defend it by casting expressions of discontent as the result of ‘problemed,’ ‘troubled,’ and ‘disruptive’ personalities. Second, it convinces the world that it owes no ethical responsibility to the traumatized and wounded by declaring them as faulty and blameworthy. Both functions work to maintain and defend society’s existing political realities, preventing a reckoning with the ways we are all continuously harmed. PDphobia ultimately maintains the self of the normate as it is embodied within and secured by the construction of the social order. Are our ethical obligations vested in the social order or in the many people harmed and hurt as a result of the social order?

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Personality disorder liberation does not posit an amoral project but moves toward the most profound, serious, and transformative front of ethics. In this essay, I moved within our common, collective, and intersectional vulnerability. I spoke about how the pathologization of personality disorders enables society to disavow this fact, and how living vulnerability relates to and is abused by the systems of social power through which society sustains itself. Emotional behaviors are not our enemy. Our enemy is the structures of power that hurt bodyminds to the point where they become emotionally debilitated. While fighting and diagnosing this structural enemy, nurturing, practicing collective care and love for emotionally debilitated bodyminds will be part of our ongoing resistance. Why do you blame and disavow me for my emotional responses to the horrors I face when the horrors I face are simply rearticulations and reflections of the same horrors you face? Maybe our common enemy is not my emotions or my vulnerabilities, but the horrors that magnify both of our vulnerabilities. Personality disorder ethical agendas ask us to confront the horrors of the world as they hurt us both, together. The vulnerability of personality disorders is intersectional. They do not appear as simply ‘pathological’ behaviors, even if others treat them that way. Personality disorders offer us a rich experience for intersectional analysis and resistance. Personality disorder diagnoses pathologize and seek to remove from social life embodied responses to unbearable political realities. The social death of people diagnosed with personality disorders maintains the sanctity of the political realities of social life. PDphobia reaffirms and reimplants other experiences of power.

I do not deny that vulnerability does not remove someone from ethical relationality; rather, it places one in deeper need of ethical relationality. Being wounded does not absolve one of ethics but rather deepens one’s need for ethical attention: both from others and from oneself. Vulnerability does not make one innocent or free from the powers that make one vulnerable and wounded. It merely highlights how important ethical care is. PDphobia works in both directions: it motivates others to avoid caring for us, to distort our lived realities to preserve taken-for-granted and more privileged social experiences, while it teaches us we have no choice over our experiences, how they are defined and responded to, and to remain fearful of them. We must move through our experiences to free ourselves from their gratuitous power. We must go through the challenges and difficulties of ethics vis-à-vis people diagnosed with personality disorders to move forward. We mustn’t avoid ethical challenges; instead, we must commit to navigating them together. Just because someone’s vulnerabilities challenge the ways we generally conceive of ethical relationality and the typical ways we establish ethical relations doesn’t mean they are an unethical person or that it’s impossible to formulate an ethical relationship that meets the context and their specific needs. We can establish ethical relations in any context of emotional performance. It requires creativity, mutual care and commitment, and openness to deviate from the socially expected and acceptable. We must formulate ethical relations based on specific needs and contexts, rather than on norms and rules.

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I ask you, challenge you, the reader, to ask the following questions. If you are committed to Palestinian liberation, you recognize the fact that the state of Israel kills, harms, and traumatizes the people of Palestine. Many of them develop struggles with trauma that may be interpreted through psy-colonial frameworks of ‘personality disorders.’ Will you repudiate and disavow these individuals for their emotional performances or vulnerabilities while still claiming to support their liberation? Many of you believe that the victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be protected, or at least you claim to. Between 40% to 70% of individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder have experienced some form of child sexual abuse.^[vi] How can you even mention the Epstein files or claim any sort of ethical commitment to survivors of sexual assault and abuse while simultaneously repudiating and disavowing those who struggle with their emotions because of their experiences? Commitment to the liberation of Palestinians and sexual assault survivors or any other group of people harmed by power requires an ethical and political commitment to people diagnosed with personality disorders. If we don’t have compassion for the victimized, what is liberation for? Who is it for? If we acknowledge that people diagnosed with personality disorders are victims of child oppression, abuse, and neglect, then how can we not have compassion for them? How can they not deserve liberation? Ethical relations to vulnerability begin with witnessing a wound, witnessing someone’s vulnerability, witnessing their suffering either maddening or being disabled by your relation with them and responding by moving toward them, embracing them, bringing them into the fold of your living being.

I live in my body, but an enemy lives here too. It’s not the enemy you think. It’s not my dysregulated nervous system nor the scars on my arm. It’s the language forcefully, painfully kneaded into my wounds. A language steadily finding its way into my blood, a language that condemns me to my body, submits me to my instincts, reduces me to my nervous system, restricts me to my skin, defeats me before I reach the doorway to my bodily home. It is a language that speaks the cruelest words as the most passive and casual truth. It is a language that gestures its offense at the mere sight of me. It is a language I see on social media posts and headlines everywhere. It is a language that lunges at me, rips me apart, loads me into a gun, and uses me to shoot an unsuspecting stranger—reduced to insults, hypothesizing, speculation, hateful diatribes, nothing left of my body but the language. I have no idea if my wounds are real. I only know them from the language I hear. My wounds have an effect insofar as they are made to matter through language. The language of hate. The language of disgust. The language of disdain. The language of blame and defect. The language of grief and shame. The language of aggravation and desperation at the ceaseless scuffle on the threshold of my body. Language writes onto my wounds like gory tattoos—fascination and offense at my wounds articulated on my bodily home. It eats me, and I have learned both to battle and pacify it. I am skilled in both combat and as a nurse. I have to be, for an enemy lives within my wounds, inescapable, seemingly inevitable, bound in every moment. I am a fugitive and a warrior, a mending force. My body is home to profound vulnerability, but it is also home to an extensive language, a language that turns my vulnerability into a weapon against me.

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Notes

^[i] “Vulnerable,” Dictionary.com, accessed May 1, 2026, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vulnerable.

^[ii] R. Pedone, L. Pistone, E. M. Schettino, and G. Florio, “Associations between Childhood Trauma and Personality Disorder Traits: A Cross-Sectional Study in the General Population,” Mental Health & Prevention 38 (2025): 200429, accessed May 20, 2026, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221265702500039X.

^[iii] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Kindle ed (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007), 30.

^[iv] R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967), 110.

^[v] Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, Kindle ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 56.

^[vi]Christina M. Temes, Laura Rosa Magni, Mary C. Zanarini, and Blaise Aguirre, “Parameters of Reported Childhood Sexual Abuse and Assault in Adolescents and Adults with Borderline Personality Disorder,” Personality and Mental Health 14, no. 3 (2020): 254–262, accessed May 20, 2026, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10501328/.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Kindle ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999.

Dictionary.com. “Vulnerable.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vulnerable.

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974. Edited by Jacques Lagrange. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Kindle ed. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007.

McGuire, Anne. War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Morales, Aurora Levins. Kindling: Writings on the Body. Cambridge, MA: Palabrera Press, 2013.

Pedone, R., L. Pistone, E. M. Schettino, and G. Florio. “Associations between Childhood Trauma and Personality Disorder Traits: A Cross-Sectional Study in the General Population.” Mental Health & Prevention 38 (2025): 200429. Accessed May 20, 2026. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221265702500039X.

Temes, Christina M., Laura Rosa Magni, Mary C. Zanarini, and Blaise Aguirre. “Parameters of Reported Childhood Sexual Abuse and Assault in Adolescents and Adults with Borderline Personality Disorder.” Personality and Mental Health 14, no. 3 (2020): 254– 262. Accessed May 20, 2026. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10501328/.

If you make me stone

I will bruise you.

—Audre Lorde, “Journeystones I-XI” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

Neurodiversity emphasizes that normality does not characterize our neurologies. Rather, the pervasive differences between bodyminds and the fluid variations within the subject’s biological performances define what it means to be a body and mind. Nick Walker, a neurodiversity scholar who coined the term ‘neuroqueer,’ proposes that neurological identities like autism and neurotypicality are performed—the mind is organized in and through the stylized gestures of the body. I go further to say that the bodymind itself, as a thing that can perform, is performed. The bodymind is a historically specific and culturally dependent discursive construction that operates through us, just as we operate through it. The individual bodymind is a fluid living being whose state of mind and body is never constant, comparable to others, or to the moment before, because the bodymind is not an entity but a relation. It functions in and through a contingent and dynamic relation with the forces of culture, history, society, power, and discourse. I suggest that the bodymind, as a concrete entity, is somatically performed through this relation. Therefore, we are shaped not by similarity of being but by the quotidian splits, variations, and differences that permeate every fiber of our bodyminds, proliferating in time and space through individual movements and unfoldings, disjointing our contacts with one another, and rippling through the ecologies of relation in whose context the supposed stable, unified self-identity of ‘we,’ ‘I,’ and ‘you’ are invoked.

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A famous example of how neurodiversity approaches shifting the narrative on bodymind difference—away from a preoccupation with similarity to valuing and embracing difference as the precondition to life—is through theorizing the double empathy problem. The theory of double empathy relocated the disconnection between the dominant neurotypical culture and autistic people. Rather than attributing it to autistic deficits, it identifies disruption in communication and relation as resulting, as the theory’s originator, Damian Milton, puts it, from “a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing ways of experiencing the world.”1 Milton suggests that those with “similar experiences are more likely to form connections and a level of understanding, which has ramifications in regard to autistic people being able to meet one another.”2 My approach concurs with the critique Milton began, incorporating insights from critical theories of identity. It is far from self-evident that similar experiences lead to reciprocity, understanding, and connection, while differences tend to elicit disarray, misunderstanding, and disruption. The concepts of difference and similarity are saturated with power. They have been elaborated with a political design and aim—one that directs us to the normal, the ‘ideal’ state in relation to which we become interchangeable, usable, and manipulable as standardized material, able to function and respond as efficiently structured machines of utility and capital. Difference and similarity are treated as mutually exclusive, absolute attributes, or self-contained zones into which individuals inherently fall, rather than as relational and relative—the theory of double empathy emerged from relativizing difference/similarity and elucidating how they are reversible and relational. However, neurotypical people have long dominated and defined autistic people as other, preventing contemplation on how not only are neurotypical people also subject to difference and otherness in the experiences of autistic people, but that every individual’s bodymind is distinct and in flux. Instead of understanding this, autistic people are generally asymmetrically figured and constructed within the agency of neurotypical people and on their more valued terms of existence.

Dominant social, political, and economic interests are displaced, concealed, naturalized, and institutionalized through the norm. The norm—in this case, that which conceals and materializes the dominant interests and agency of neurotypical culture and sociality—is the measure by which systems of power judge and decide who or what we are, shaping the course of our lives, futures, and even who they kill. Those who approximate the norm fade into the background of a universe perceived through the lens of ‘normal.’ As ‘abnormals,’ how do we appear through the dominant lens of normal, through which the social world is scrutinized and mediated, through which we are inspected, relayed, and intervened? How do we appear to those who experience us through the materiality of the normalized world, a social world thoroughly constructed, affirmed, and mobilized on the basis of normal? How are we experienced, and how do we appear as people cast off from the norm? How are we cut on a procrustean bed by virtue of the illusory valorization of normalized similarity? What value and parts of ourselves are disavowed? Which futures are repudiated? Whom do we demonize and reject to avoid the harsh truth of contradiction in each of our lives? How can we find the courage to work with contradiction and incongruity in ourselves, world, and relationships—instead of working against the lack of sense and ease?

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For people diagnosed with personality disorders, the deeply vulnerable parts of ourselves are incongruent with the social world we live in. Personality disorder-diagnosed people are queer through the wounded vulnerability of our trauma-based disabilities. Our wounds disorient us from alignment with others. Personality disorder-diagnosed wounded selves are politicized. Our beings are heavily invested with discursive antagonism. A concentration of political discourse and practice centers on who or what we are. The world has a stake in it, just as we do in the hostile ways the world views, receives, and responds to us. Our vulnerable bodyminds are subjected to, and are incongruent with, how social life is structured, organized, regulated, and governed on the basis of ‘normal.’ Personality disorder oppression, or PDphobia, is based on the dynamic between how others experience themselves through the discourse of ‘normal’ and how they encounter personality disorder-diagnosed people through the lens of their own normalized experience—the struggle within, and the monopoly of, the agency of others in evaluating and responding to PD-diagnosed beings. Similar to the double empathy problem, an incongruence arises from how PD-diagnosed wounded vulnerabilities are unrepresentable in the normalizing frameworks into which others attempt to translate them as they relate to people diagnosed with personality disorders. Normalizing frameworks of vulnerable experience thus operate as the means through which people diagnosed with personality disorders are folded into, taken up by, and socially murdered within others’ experiences and on their dominant terms of living. Incongruence signifies the presence of two competing social experiences. Normalization privileges and prioritizes one of those experiences. It is assimilated as the rule by which the other experiences are judged, treated, and related. The same event is experienced differently. Rather than caring for that difference and connecting through it, one experience is given the representational power to dominate both its own and the other. People diagnosed with personality disorders are deprived of representational power.

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The experiences of people diagnosed with personality disorders are part and parcel of the social world’s experiences of itself. Personality disorder-diagnosed people are not treated as individuals with the rights to their own experiences and realities; instead, they are fixed as solely ‘disruptive’ characters in the experiences of others, possessed as the malfunctioning property of others. Other people take ownership of the titles to our lives, the copyright to our bodyminds, and the permit to mine them. The social world takes advantage of the hermeneutic resources invested in people diagnosed with personality disorders to secure its own benefit. PD-diagnosed lives are indexed to, are episodes of, and indicate the experiences of others. When our vulnerable experiences lack a common denominator or cannot easily be translated into intelligible expressions across social differences and political asymmetries, others intervene, claiming to know what the problem is, informed by their own positionality and the implicit assumption that their life has a more legitimate, truthful claim to protection and definition in the situation. Attempts to ameliorate the political oppression and social difference between us are stymied by the absence of a model of communication, intelligibility, connection, relation, or collectivity capable of spanning the gap produced by others’ one-sided representational power, within which I am constructed and experienced solely within their dominant agency. The models that could serve us all are continually excised, deferred, and rendered unthinkable. I am blamed for my apparent unwillingness to meet others where they are. Yet, my struggle is compounded by their unwillingness to recognize that the interaction rests on two experiences, both legitimate. Others’ refusal to acknowledge a mutual incongruence instead asserts their experience as the only legitimate measure by which I should live and respond to my wounds. What would it mean for incongruent experiences to be held, attended to, and to aid one another in contradiction, rather than for one to assert its truth-claim, legitimacy, agency, dominance over the other? Those who benefit from the generalized assertion of a singular social agency are invested in maintaining the privileged security of the version of social life organized around agreement with that agency’s ontology and subjectivity, and around this agency’s materialization as the sole and universal standard for experiencing and responding to vulnerability. In a social world constructed without people diagnosed with personality disorders and organized around others’ self-agentic desire to eliminate our experiences from representation, our disruption is naturalized, initiated by our relations with others whose experiences are mobilized, affirmed, and espoused as against us, through a structural, discursive antagonism.

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If the bodymind is a relation, a repetitive performance that materializes the fixed boundaries between body and mind, the psychic and the worldly, self and others, inside and outside, biological and social, and normal and abnormal, then how are we to reckon with the relations of cure through which bodies and minds are intelligible, through which capacities, incapacities, abilities, inabilities, impairments, ‘behaviors,’ ‘insanities,’ diagnoses, ‘wrongness,’ ‘rightness’ are performed? Since bodyminds are performed and made visible through the relation and mark of cure, how are the bodyminds and experiences thereof of people diagnosed with personality disorders mediated by the idealization of their eradication? How are people diagnosed with personality disorders relayed and transmitted in social experience through their designation as defective and through their figuration within a narrative of biological optimization? The curative logic reshapes relations with those whose bodyminds are considered the ‘problem.’ Socially and politically installed truths circulate, are naturalized, and are cited as lived experience when we hear, see, feel, sense, or otherwise have any sort of visceral connection with the ‘problemed’. How are such citations of disruptive bodyminds merely discursive affirmations of eugenics and of the ways these bodyminds are forced to operate within relations consolidated for the objective of their elimination and eradication? As subjects (both pPD-diagnosed and others) complicit and formed in these relations, how are we bound up in and invested in this affirmation of eugenic cure through our subjectivities and bodyminds?

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People diagnosed with personality disorders contradict. They contradict others, the world, and themselves. They contradict because their wounds disorient them from the dominant agencies of this world, even contradicting how agency is conceived. My presence contradicts your agency. Yet, rarely considered is the relational fact that your agency also contradicts mine. We are immersed in a relationship of incongruence. As a person diagnosed with a personality disorder, I am marked by an explosive ensemble of investments and imaginaries. I return to the poetic lines that epigraphed this essay. I become nothing other than the stone to your flesh—that is what I am made to be. I am no longer of my own flesh, of my own vulnerability, or of my own courage, but the foil to your vulnerability, the obstacle to the freedom of your transcendent social agency. I become the empty figure through which you fasten securely your own wounds, rather than being the embodiment through which I live and accept my own. I am confined between my wounds and a society that does not allow those wounds to be mine. I become the site for enforcing the coherence, profit, and strength of your social life, rather than the site of my survival and thriving. My life becomes solely the collateral damage of your universalized freedom. I suffer from your implicit assumption that relations and the social world should operate on only one set of terms of bodymind life. Your terms, not mine. ‘You’ may include sane or nondisabled people, but disabled, Mad, neurodivergent, and PD-diagnosed people are not exempt from any relational practice mobilized on the terms of a singular experience, agency, interest, and embodiment. I envision, instead, a culture of thick collective embrace mobilized around multiplicities and interdependencies, through which my bodymind writes into your flesh the poem you make of my vulnerability, and in which I am encountered as the poem of my flesh, without my vulnerability petrifying into the inanimate stone against which your agency and vulnerability bruise themselves.

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I use the word ‘vulnerability’ intentionally as opposed to pathologizing ways to describe personality disorder-diagnosed struggles because vulnerability refers humanistically to the beings of those framed by the diagnosis of personality disorder. ‘Disorder’ dehumanizingly refers solely to the beings of others. For far too long, the struggles of PD-diagnosed people have only been reckoned with and through the agencies of others, captured and terrorized by the definitions born out of their eugenic experiences. I propose that personality disorder-diagnosed struggles should reference their own agencies, which historically have figured nowhere in the social and political experience of personality disorders, which traditionally have borne no consequence to how we live in the world. Audre Lorde reflects, “Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves.”3 Why can you not bear the faces of our wounds and the differences they create? In what ways do you replace those feared faces with your own face, and act insofar as our wounds are yours, erasing our differences? May that account for some of the friction and mutual hurt when our bodyminds touch one another? How can we relate through the mutual recognition of one another’s wounds as not only equally valuable, but also ours to define and experience in negotiation, not domination? As people diagnosed with personality disorders, the faces of our wounds will be our own faces, and no longer will they be monopolized by the faces of others playing out their own experiences.

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“Splitting” as a psychological concept permits and justifies the violation of BPD-diagnosed people’s boundaries by providing ideological cover to cast expressions of dissent as inherently distorted and irrational, logically underpinning sexual assault, intimate partner violence, interpersonal coercion and manipulation, psychiatric harm, unethical therapeutic practices, familial actual or de facto conservatorship, gaslighting, and more. Anything others don’t like is positioned as “she is just having a BPD moment,” therefore, allowing it to be disrespected and violated. The result is that a BPD-diagnosed person saying “you are hurting me” or “no” is received as illegitimate because it’s presumed to be distorted thinking. They cannot push back against abusive situations because others will assume it’s merely their paranoia or splitting. Certainly, often we do have trauma responses that alter our view of events and people, but does that mean our subjectivity should be totally removed from consideration in others’ ethical conduct toward us? Simply because an experience was conveyed through non-normative emotional performance does not permit others to release themselves from the responsibility to respect and ethically attend to that experience. The double bind is that even when not splitting or distressed, the BPD-diagnosed person is treated as if they don’t have the right to their own wants, needs, boundaries, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and choices because they are inconsistently rational in those areas. I will admit that my splitting is often erroneous, and I often disavow what I say when I split, but shouldn’t I have the right to choose if it is erroneous? Don’t I have the obligation toward myself and others to avow or disavow my actions, to say this is who I am, what is representative of my wishes, and what is not? Sane people tell me about accountability, but isn’t this what accountability looks like — does it not include self-determination, consent, dissent, autonomy and self-definition as its preconditions? Accountability is not simply obeying or submitting to what another person says is invalid, wrong, or false. It’s about being accountable for what you decide and choose is out of line with what you want and value. Accountability without self-determination is merely punishment.

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Contrary to the sanist logic, it does not help others or assist in having a beneficial relationship to doubt, suspect, or disregard the validity of the BPD-diagnosed person’s experiences. Beneficial relationships can’t be rooted in one person’s version of events. If a relationship is premised on the assumption that one person controls how an event or experience is interpreted and responded to, then it is merely a relationship of domination, in which one person’s experience is asserted as the rule or ultimatum by which a possible connection can be forged. It becomes yet another double bind in which BPD-diagnosed people are expected to develop healthy behaviors to participate in relationships, but still, what is healthy is determined not by them but solely according to experiences that are not their own. The ways they are supposed to function are formulated and disseminated without their own needs and experiences factoring into consideration. In my view, beneficial relationships are defined by a mutual consideration of both individuals’ specific experiences and needs—not by rules and norms universalized through the idealization of sanity, nor by positioning one person’s experience as more accurate, necessary, natural, or essential. We relate to BPD-diagnosed people successfully when their version of events informs and is balanced with the other, treated with equal weight, dignity, and value. BPD-diagnosed people’s needs and experiences are expected to be reshaped to better align with and account for the non-BPD other, but are others expected to reshape themselves for the sake of the BPD-diagnosed person? It implies that one person’s needs and experiences are more valid than another’s. Perhaps the ethical imperative both people share as they enter into a relationship is to reshape or enact themselves to harmonize with the other. Perhaps ethics breaks down in the case of BPD because, usually, others are not willing to meet BPD-diagnosed people where they are at.

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If I love you, it is not only an ethical obligation, but also a joyful experience to shape my life to care for your realities. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, even when I’ve failed. Often, I fail because others are not willing to do that for me because I’m diagnosed with borderline. I can’t regulate in the case of someone who will view and respond to me based solely on my emotional displays, as they only figure into their experiences. My displays exist in my realities, too. And for my realities and experiences to better support yours, they must be treated equally as mine. I am not my emotional displays. I am a full, complex, embodied, vulnerable person, who people supposedly love. If you care for and love me, I suppose you love me as a person, which requires seeing me in many more ways than the ways my trauma impinges on the world around me. Do you love me for the ways my bodymind presents to you, or do you love me for who I am? Do you love me for the ways my bodymind is pleasant to the senses, or the ways my soul engages with you and the world? Will you blame me because my emotionality can be unpleasant when my bodymind rebels against me, or will you love me because I am sweet and nurturing the times I’m in control of my faculties, when I determine for myself who I am and what I will do? Self-determination should be the measure of a BPD-diagnosed person, which is often denied to them. Another double bind again: BPD-diagnosed people are expected to be in control of their emotions, yet are denied the freedom to determine their realities and experiences for themselves. Others determine the nature of my realities and experiences and, based on that, expect me to control a social experience of my emotions that is theirs, not mine. They exclude me from full participation and control of the social experience of distress, and yet expect me to engage with and control the embodied experience of distress. Perhaps the only way for me to take care of my embodied realities is to be permitted agency in our collective and mutual realities.

Introduction: Unity of ‘Social’

Anthropology, sociology, and social theory are founded on two concepts considered universal to human existence: the cultural and the social. The social humanities and sciences base their analyses on the presumption that one is human precisely by virtue of one’s existence within the preexisting classificatory principles of “social” and “cultural”—classifications enabled by, are reflective of, and by-products of the activity and functions of that subject itself. The discursive proposition of these disciplines is that the human being psychologically, biologically, evolutionarily, and historically appears, functions, and develops according to the social principle inherent to its being. Human contingency and particularity are analyzed as developing from the fixity and universality of the ontological and metaphysical category of sociality. The organizing logic of human life is thus proposed to be social—its rational basis is presupposed to be its sociality. Analyses of the human synthesize this principle to posit the coherence of their own functionality, intelligibility, and political relevance. “Social” is thus a unity produced by the knowledge practices that formulate and implement this discursive proposition. It functions by linking discourses on the human being. In the epigraph above, Michel Foucault questions unities such as “social.” He cautions that we cannot accept as self-evident the ways in which discursive statements are grouped, divided, and regulated, arguing these groups need to be analyzed alongside their contents. “Social” itself demands interrogation as much as the phenomena it names. Following Foucault, my analysis in this essay aims to undermine the limits of the unifying function of “social.” Rather than investigating the self-identical structure of this unity, I propose the interrogation of the discursive relations through which “social” is formed. Instead of presuming that discourse is produced by “social” processes, I ask, through what multiple discursive means is “social” constituted as a unity by which reality is thinkable and analyzable? Through this question, “social” appears as the effect of a multiplicity of historically situated discursive events, rather than as the analytical foundation on which one might pose questions “concerning…[its] structure, coherence, systematicity, transformations.” How is “social” thought to have the capacity for coherence? How is its meaning made relevant to subjects’ lives? My approach is to suggest “social” itself begs questions – how it is formed, defined, delimited, and articulated as a category according to which it is possible to situate life. If we analyze the discontinuous discursive field in which “social” is constituted, its structuralist assumptions are unsettled. If we accept descriptions given by the normativity of the unity, “social” is a category recognized immediately as descriptive of human life. It is descriptive before any analysis even begins and thereby becomes the basis of that analysis rather than the target. We cite “social” without reflecting or intervening on the conditions of its formation, without interrogating the normativity immanent to it.

In view of all this, one launches an epistemic attack on the entire structure of thought that posits “social.” While I sometimes switch to this broader perspective in this essay, I attack the more specific notion of tendencies and states of “being social,” that is, the ways in which human subjects exist and operate as social beings. Sociality is conflated with social being. There is confusion between the supposed substances of “social” and the modalities through which it is said to exist and operate: social relations are said to operate based on presumed social capacities and behaviors which imbue the social with an irreducible reality. The traditional definition of sociality is often formulated as the quality, state, or tendency of collective existence based on the human capacity to form social bonds which founds, stabilizes, and legitimates social cohesion, connection, and functioning. Below are some examples of this statement in relation to Mad, disabled, trans, queer, immigrant, postcolonial, laboring, and Black subjects:

– Oral speech and communicability are the necessary mediums for social relationality.

– Emotional regulation is the precondition for social bonds.

– Conformity to developmental trajectories is the process by which social formations are inculcated and instituted.

– Bodily health enables and liberates the efficiency of social relations.

– Our culture’s kinship structure is inherent to and produced by sexed nature.

– Heterosexual desire and behaviors organize the self-generating capacity of the social.

– The biological body coheres the boundaries of the social body.

– The nourishment of life requires the removal, exploitation, consolidating control, and destruction of ‘other’ societies in its service.

– Productive bodies sustain and distribute the benefits of social life.

– The possibility of social life, even the possibility of it being taken away, needs a biology of social death against whom all dreams of social life and desire defensively operate.

In these examples, how sociality works is inextricably bound up with how social beings operate. Social being is presumed to be how human beings are endowed or built up with the ability to participate in social processes, relations, and structures—how social structure is baked into the behaviors and capacities of subjects. In other words, the functionality of multiplicities hinges on the docile activity of bodies. I rename both the social capacities isolated to bodies and the social properties specified to multiplicities as the term “social being.” In this essay, “sociality” is not employed to name the attribute, process, or state of being social, but rather to describe the discursive activity of power that induces the effect of social substance, essentializing a link between the social capacities of bodies and the social properties of multiplicities. Socialization as a concept relies on the mutual subordination and circular entailment of both definitions of social being: the social properties of multiplicities realize and are protected by social capacity and behavior, and social capacity is preserved and assured through the inculcation of social properties and values. When defined as behavior that promotes and reproduces social values, prosociality is posited as the telos of this circular account of “sociality.” But in my account, prosociality is neither reducible to behavior nor to the reproduction of social values, but rather it constitutes an imperative discourse through which social being is deployed as a regulatory rule for subject formation. While constrained by scope, this paper argues for rethinking sociality as a deployment of power, not as a natural human capacity/behavior or collective tendency, but as a historically contingent discursive mode that regulates how life is intelligible through social being. Social being is only thinkable in relation to a war waged against abnormals. The prosocial/antisocial dichotomy restores and consolidates the norm in the name of social existence.

Queer theorists like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have launched prominent attacks on sociality. If we are to accept the capacious understanding of antisociality found in this essay, whereby social substance, or the self-identical structure and identity of “social,” is constituted through political struggles with and against abnormality, many other types of theory also emerge as antisocial. Some antisocial theories challenge ethical politics, pushing against how many ethical agendas in emancipation are articulated and mobilized through the prosocial imperative. For one, queer antisocial theory has been criticized for wiping out relational agendas. The argument is that one cannot disavow relations as a mode of illuminating and realizing worlds outside the “present’s stultifying hold.” But one forgets, obfuscated by the white cisgender gays who wrote some queer antisocial theory, that those most fully opposed to the deployment of sociality are the most precarious, are those excluded to a zone of unlivable besiegement by the thriving plentitude of social life. These individuals negate the forms of power operating through sociality. Sociality delimits the region of thriving freedom to the “properly” social and socialized. Freedom is produced by the regulation of social being—by its ontological and metaphysical conditions of possibility for inclusion in collective social exchange. The “then and there of queer futurity” is produced and defined by its metaphysical and ontological conditions of possibility—by its specific discursive imaging of social being, by the futurity it performs through the normativity of social being. What counts as a social relation? What metaphysics defines what constitutes a social relation, what it can be, and how it can be operationalized? How is the very concept of social relation produced by an antisocial relation through which this concept wages war on abnormals to assert its dominance and realism? Reciprocal relations normatively materialize in and through specific social capacities, like empathy and intentionality. The concept of empathy excludes and marginalizes many Mad and disabled people, including autistic people and people diagnosed with personality disorders. It is also selectively performed along the regulatory lines of political difference and asymmetry. Do people perform empathy toward the very individuals diagnosed with personality disorders upon whom they impose the imperative of empathy? What political asymmetries are obscured by statements positing interpersonal connection and refusal? How are these political asymmetries reified and naturalized as being purely a matter of social conduct, behavior, and capacity? Collective reciprocity is not an ideality to be imagined but is a forcibly regulated norm. Often forgotten in debates about antisocial theory is that antisociality is not merely a critical or political polemic; it is a specific contingently constituted subject position, the subjugated product of a mode of power. That means we have an ethical imperative through emancipation to attend to it, not to abandon its existence, and not to cede it.

My task is to posit neither the affirmation of social relations, as policed by psychologists and the carceral apparatus, nor their negation, as embodied by Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani, nor the negation of their negation, as proposed by José Esteban Muñoz, but rather to analyze the ways in which these affirmations and negations can even appear within the field of discourse. In other words, I aim to problematize the discourse through which social relations can be affirmed, negated, and negated again, as well as the various normalizing, disruptive, and ostensibly transformative effects that result from these implications of the prosocial imperative. The discursive appearance of “the social animal” as the characterization of the human being and its dominance within political apparatuses as a norm of subjection enables one to either affirm or negate the social as the coherent reality of human existence. My concern is not social relations but rather the relations of relations –– in other words, discursive relations. How do these discursive relations perform the political and epistemic activity of deploying sociality? How are social relations performed by the relations individuals have to them? Can one say social relations only materialize in and through the performative work of discursive practices that posit “prosocial,” “antisocial,” and “asocial” as descriptive relations to those relations? This paper struggles against the implicit attitude that rhetorically asks, “Does it really count as exclusion when antisocial people are excluded?” It is not a matter of who is included in the social but how the social is even thought to be coherent in the first place. Perhaps, in the end, antisocial individuals are not as much excluded as they are constitutive, functioning as the terror-stricken boundary beyond which the social space of inclusion falls into the abyss of nonexistence. Antisocial individuals haunt the social field as the figure against which all social relations are organized, through which all imaginaries of collective life become intelligible, and through whose repudiation from all identifications with the other, ethical considerations in politics are delineated.

The Mobility of Sociality

I seek the intelligibility of sociality in its deployment as knowledge-power, rather than in the subject’s or multiplicities’ nature. I use Foucault’s analytics of power, which he presents importantly in an interview as an ethical consideration, “…one must consider all the points of fixity, of immobilization, as elements in a tactics, in a strategy—as part of an effort to bring things back into their original mobility, their openness to change.” He bases his moral system and view of freedom on the ethical technique of questioning everything’s stability, advising, “never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.” Contradicting the common claims that Foucault’s outlook on power is fatalistic, he maintains that resistance, transformation, and mobility are the mechanisms that permit an analysis of power. Foucault seeks power’s mechanisms of intelligibility in its operation as a “moving substrate” of disunified, fragile, and unstable forces. I adopt his view on the mobility of forces of power as my basic analytic, based on which I problematize sociality. My analysis returns sociality to its “original mobility” as a strategic deployment of power, counteracting its fixity as simply a natural human trait. Foucault foresaw how his analysis of power “make it possible to use…[power’s] mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order.” “Social” is an unstable mobility of power instituted and maintained as a fixed identity and condition of human life. Considering this analysis, sociality is not teleological. It is tactical. Far from being assumed in advance, sociality is defined in terms of its technology of power and the variety of concrete practices through which it is deployed. Sociality does not originate from, nor is it produced by, an inherent capacity that prefigures human relations. Rather, it is formed as a strategy in and through relations and thus is deployed, attenuated, attacked, reinforced, generalized, and transformed. It operates as a tactic formulated, modified, and materialized in discourse.

Prosocial imperative discourses, positing the compulsive necessity of the “socialized subject,” are instruments and effects of a deployment formed on two distinct but mutually constitutive registers of the human subject: the human subject as an object of knowledge practices and as a recipient of political direction. These discourses superimpose and inlay the mere fact of human multiplicity with the presupposition that a social existence necessarily characterizes it. They thereby conflate multiple existence with “social existence,” presenting them as coextensive. “Social existence” disciplines and regulates multiple existence. It qualifies as an existence precisely insofar as it governs multiple existence. Its role as a metaphysical reality depends on its primary governmental function. A prosocial metaphysical strategy conflates the mere fact of individuals in a multiplicity with the regulatory postulation of its social reality. It consolidates the intelligibility of social being in light of individuals’ function and operation within a regime of visibility and intervention. Social analyses invariably derive from the political attention paid to the subject, whose centrality is thought to be based on the possible scope of its contributions and effects within a matrix of “social existence.” The subject is intelligible within the frame of sociality by the ways in which it is situated in a “socialized” regime of power. In what ways are the subject’s relations and functions problematized within this governmental frame, a frame which is maintained as the grid by which a panoptic gaze defines and guards the intelligibility of “the social human”? How is the matrix of social life, in fact, a regime of visibility, analysis, intervention, and defense? How is socialization, in fact, the science of docile bodies? Foucault once wrote that panopticism is a “general formula” adopted, modified, and implemented by apparatuses to regulate multiplicities. My claim is not that sociality is the general formula through which the human being is defined. Instead, I argue that the received experience of sociality as a general formula, through which the human and its organizations are thinkable, is itself an effect of knowledge and governing practices that demarcate, mobilize, and defend the human as a social being. Sociality as a universal formula for human life is indissolubly linked to a thematic that asserts human life as its subject and object of discourse. The universality of sociality is symptomatic of the way “the social human” is constructed as a topic of analysis and as a site of politics. Rather than reflecting a universal domain, it is instead the effect of a particular mode of intelligibility, one that asserts the universal substance of “social” as a discursive presupposition which grounds sociality. Statements positing the monolithic capacity of sociality, as initiating a unified and coherent category of life, are not an empirical reality but are the normative effects of the presupposed unity of “social” produced within discourse, rather than imposed by a pervasive, hegemonic structure operating from within the very nature and reality of multiple life.

Sociality is unrelated to the functions of “social” but instead is deployed within the field of discourse; it is deployed in and through a variety of discursive formations as a regulatory and productive multiplicity of forces shaping possible forms of conduct and thought. As discursive practices appear and dissolve, and as their deployments vary between every point, what we know and experience as “the social” and “the cultural” are shown to be unstable terms. They are ontologically contingent upon deployments that arise within dispersed, diffuse, disunified fields of power composed of multiple points, mediated by multiple discursive means, and further riven by antagonistic tactical perspectives. The “social” deployed in the discourse of Judith Butler is not the same “social” as deployed in that of Marcel Mauss. The social(s) appearing at those two points are constituted not by a continuous lineage or coherent unity, but by the ruptures between their individual discursive means. Similarly, the sociality deployed in relation to queerness is not the same as that deployed in relation to personality disorders, even if they share points of resemblance and mutual structuration. Each appears in and through distinct discursive practices, within a different structure of regulatory activities, and according to specific discursive formations and rules. The distance between them underlines that “social” is intelligible only in and through deployment. Many theorists, since Foucault, continue to confuse or conflate “the social” and “the cultural” with the discursive. In my analysis, “the social” and “the cultural” are constituted performatively within and through the activity of discursive deployment. Discursive practices enable and constrain the possibilities of verifiable statements that can be posited about social phenomena. Representations and analyses of “the social” are discursive constructions that do not reflect a reality which either precedes or exceeds the ‘mereness’ of their discursive deployment. “Sociality” does not preexist the social and human sciences but appears only through their discursive practices. “Social” is inseparable from the knowledge domains that require it for their own intelligibility and functioning. To analyze sociality as a deployment is to attend to the specific discursive formations and political apparatuses through which it operates, rather than positing a unified and coherent form of power under the sign of “social.” It can be properly said that there are many deployments of sociality. In light of this, this essay advocates for an analysis of their points of mutual support and determination as they develop a specific strategic objective of power. The objective is to demarcate the presumed coherence and unity of the rational humanist political subject and to secure this representation within the political system. The presupposed coherence and unity of social being supports that objective. We must abandon the presumption of “social” as a unified, coherent concept and instead analyze the multiplicity of discursive rules and relations through which social being is regulated. Thus, this essay shifts critical attention from the function and processes of “social” to the discursive regulation of social being.

Sociality’s hold on the human being and its relations is not as grandiose or monopolistic as it is claimed. It is forced to relentlessly wage a war on multiple fronts to assert and materialize this effect. Its power deploys “through the antagonism of strategies” that materialize effects of truth. Social reality is not a given domain of practice but is metaphysically decided and authorized through a battle of forces. War constitutes the continuing basis of sociality. Though sociality is assumed to be the process of constituting social order, and socialized capacities are believed to support peace and cohesion, this is a discursive ruse. Contrary to the notion that social aptitude underwrites communal life, Foucault writes, “within this ‘civil peace,’ these political struggles, these clashes over or with power, these modifications of relations of force — the shifting balance, the reversals — in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.” In other words, when we analyze sociality and its institutions, we are simultaneously analyzing the tactics of war. War with and against abnormals underwrites communal life. War is congealed in the political asymmetries that sustain and defend what is called “social peace.” These asymmetries are the mechanism through which sociality runs through and induces the substance of society. Society is articulated through a relation of domination and exclusion between those abnormal individuals designated as antisocial or asocial and the rest of the population. Sociality’s normalizing operations within interpersonal relations construct a “battlefront” that cuts through these very relations, creating a self-limiting structure. Discursive tactics that deploy normative dynamics do not guarantee harmony, rather, they generate conflict in relations. What we call society is reducible to a relationship of war and force. It does not exist as itself, but rather, as a war without substance or intelligibility of its own. Social substance and intelligibility emanate from the war between the prosocial imperative and its presupposed enemies. The deployment of sociality itself engenders the very conditions that make possible the besiegement of the discursive formations it depends on. This besiegement is made possible because sociality installs itself as an ontological and metaphysical category, as a regulatory rule for subject formation, by waging an exclusionary war against antisocial and asocial individuals. It qualifies life as social life to refine and secure it, yet this security rationalizes the abjection of those it constitutes as opposite and enemies to its power.

I want to clarify two terms related to what the deployment of sociality produces and defends. First, “social being” is the naturalized effect of sociality, only possible and intelligible within the context of its deployment by specific discourses or apparatuses. Social being is conceived as the mode through which the social invests the human: underwriting human life as naturally social, making the social appear immanent to the category of human existence, and designating its capacity as decisive in the development of human formations. The production of social being, as nature, capacity, substance, tendency, or aptitude, as a mode of intelligibility legitimizes the purported universality of sociality. Despite this, the forces of sociality do not align with the apparent universality of social being but rather produce and compel it as a truth in the pursuit of their political tactics. The coherence attributed to the domain of the social is presumed to originate in human nature, as though human life is immutably social. This presupposition of social substance supports the figure of a universal political Subject imagined as unified, coherent, and rationally analyzable. The deployment of sociality produces and defends the presumption that social aptitude initiates, or silently grounds, social relations, and thus these social relations are presumed to underpin the political order. The degree to which subjects materialize within the political field designated by this universal Subject is secured by their social aptitude. However, rather than being sustained by social relations that are grounded in the social aptitude of a universal political Subject, the political order is constituted through power and discursive relations that govern individuals by designating them as social beings. In my analysis, there is a reversal: rather than claiming social aptitude serves as the mode of intelligibility of social relations and then social relations serve as the grid of intelligibility of the political order, I analyze the ways in which power relations serve as the grid of intelligibility of sociality, which produces social being as the identity of those it governs. The identifying sign of “social” obscures the historical and discursive conditions that make it possible to be social beings at all. Social being functions as a regulatory rule in and through which sociality enables or excludes discursive possibilities from political subjecthood. Abnormal individuals are marked as such by their relation to the ontology of social being. Even when not explicitly named as “antisocial,” abnormal individuals are defined by their exclusion from social being and substance. In this way, abnormality is invariably treated as antisociality.

The naturalization of social being gives rise to a mode of thought that I refer to as “social realism.” Social realism presumes the self-evidence of the social category of analysis and representation, positing that it simply follows from universal, pregiven human capacities. Social realism bases its analyses on the unifying function of “social,” rather than questioning it. Foucault is known for questioning the conflation of reality with what is posited as “natural.” Rather than accepting reality as grounded in the self-evidence of the “natural,” he analyzes how discourse constitutes what is later designated as “natural.” Foucault’s analytics may also be employed to undermine the conflation of reality with “social.” Discourse produces the reality of human existence, which is then named and legitimized as “social.” An example of this can be found in the case of madness. Foucault argues that natural processes, such as neurological structures, cannot self-evidently account for the existence of madness. Rather, madness becomes intelligible as a neurological defect through the articulation of psychiatric and penal powers working to defend the social body from disruptions. In a parallel fashion, the defense of social order cannot be attributed to social processes as such. It is reversed: social order and its processes emerge as effects of strategies of defense and war waged against madness. “Social” develops its intelligibility in and through the act of power that makes madness visible, disciplines, and attacks it, and indeed, in and through the iterability of performative acts like it. Social processes are performed in and through the activities of war against madness, but also against disability, transness, queerness, immigrants, workers, Blackness, etc. The reality of madness is not reducible to social causes. Instead, what we call social processes themselves are posited, legitimized, and defended in relation to madness and other targets of power.

To reiterate, the social is a discursive category. It has no independent reality apart from the apparatuses and discourses that deploy it. It exists in action and not as a fixed attribute of either worlds or subjects. Its reality is isolated to its tactical deployment through specific formations of discourse, for example, the ways sociality is deployed in and through the discourse of gender or sanity. On the other hand, social realism takes for granted and uses, even if only implicitly, the axiom that human beings are social animals. It analyzes and represents human reality on the basis of this presumed, prediscursive social nature. It universalizes the docile, “socialized” body and interprets its operation as the expression of innate social being. Genealogical analysis, by contrast, looks to undermine this naturalization by exposing how effects are confused as causes. In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault analyzed how the deployment of sexuality produces sex as a regulatory ideal, questioning how sexed nature is thought to serve as the origin of sexual practice. Similarly, my analysis advocates for a focus on how the deployment of sociality produces social being as a regulatory rule for subject formation rather than presuming that an innate social nature acts as the “ever-receding point” of social relations.

Sociality claims neither by right nor by nature the capacity to determine in advance the potential formations of human life. Instead, it exerts this effect through concrete governing practices. Any analysis of sociality as a deployment must therefore problematize the way it is naturalized as a universal which absorbs forms of life into its imperative discourse on what kind of life humans are: social animals. This analysis should interrogate how sociality is filtered through the schema of individual behavior, where that behavior either validates or discredits its supposed goodness and universality, thereby either affirming its irreducible truth or revealing its incoherent instability, and accordingly either reinforcing or attacking its power. The imperative enjoined on subjects to validate, affirm, and signify through the operation of their bodies this truth of social being, the prosocial imperative, compels a different kind of analysis attempting to demonstrate how subjects follow or deviate from that presupposition of social being, an analysis constituted and seized by carceral, medical, and panoptic forms of power. The terms “prosocial,” “antisocial,” and “asocial” presuppose a “social” substance of the human and assign individuals a distributed position in relation to that identity. Prosocial logics problematize individuals with the following questions. Does the individual accomplish and actualize humanity’s social nature through their being? Do they fulfill the imperative of being a social animal, and through that, sustain the social and political order that is said to have its basis in the capacities and behaviors of social being? The prosocial imperative passes the social order through the function and operation of social being. Prosocial logics compel social being as the grid of intelligibility of the social order. But the very notion of “social” as signifying both coherent order and being is itself performatively posited in and through the discourses of sociality that constitute individual relations to that content of the unity of “social.”

Social being is inaugurated only within regulatory structures of sociality that orient subjects according to the prosocial imperative. Any analysis and representation of human subjects is also a governing rule for their formation. As Foucault remarks, “I do not think there is any theoretical or analytical discourse which is not permeated or underpinned in one way or another by something like an imperative discourse.” Social being is thus as much a politically instituted identity constituting human life as it is an analytical and representational category of human reality. In fact, its validity serves its imperative power. The deployment of sociality produces and compels regulatory practices that materialize subjects by invoking and iteratively positing the imperative that defines human subjecthood as necessarily assumed through social being: humans are social animals. This approximation or assumption of the norm, the normalization of social being as that which performatively constitutes the nature of the humanist political subject, produces the “spectres” of discontinuous approximations and, with them, the (anti/a)social exclusions from both the social and political order. Humans are social animals is not a descriptive statement of attributes. It is a rule, a formation of discursive norms and regulations. Sociality operates as a mode of power, deploying prosocial imperative discourses that problematize the human and inscribes this intelligibility of social being as the regulatory ideal around which the matrix of social relations is constituted, thereby excluding certain bodies into a zone of antisociality, through whose difference it organizes the processes of substantializing, materializing, and naturalizing what counts as a human relation. Social being becomes a fixed fact only insofar as the regulatory structures of sociality are deployed in and through a performative and citational materialization of the prosocial imperative.

Conclusion: From the Socialization of Subjects toward the Socialization of Power Relations

The social animal is a tenuously maintained and upheld discursive construction. The ontology of attributes that inaugurate and designate the humanly social is arbitrarily and incoherently produced within discourse, rather than coherently predetermined by the functions of the rational subject. Broadly, it is contingently regulated, variably produced, and iteratively posited within the context of historically specific discursive strategies. To conclude this essay, I want to give the example of emotion to show how the incoherent political and discursive field is rationalized according to prosocial imperatives and metaphysical strategies. Emotional regulation operates as a spoke of social aptitude, enabling secure circulation in social bonding networks. It operates in this way because the panoptic reorganization of social matrices appeared through the generalization of psychological, health, and penal discourses that located mental illness as the naturalized origin of the intelligibility of danger, contagion, and criminality. Thus, emotional dysregulation is visible as a threat to the disciplinary regulation of multiplicities as coherent social matrices. Coherence is not a pregiven feature of the social matrix—it is a regulated institution produced by the rationalization of the disunified, discontinuous, and incoherent political field within which these discourses of emotional danger circulate and are mobilized. Discourses on behavioral danger, in and through the neoliberal rationalization of the regime of panoptic force relations, sustain emotional regulation as performatively assuming and approximating the norm of (inter)subjective coherence, thus signifying and securing the social matrix.

Individuals become coherent by way of their flexibility and malleability as self-contained and self-benefiting entrepreneurial units. They become dependent on the coherence of others as a means of extending their own coherence within this technology of entrepreneurialism. The psychology of subjects is reformulated in the terms of the self-profiting neoliberal principle of social being. This rationalization promotes an ethics of bonding that excludes those who are treated as deficits, problems, and dangers to individuals’ social (well-)being—a being performed in and through regulatory practices oriented to prosocial and eugenic imperatives of refinement and optimization. A panoptic regime of power, composing practices of social bonding through the subjection of bodily refinement, produces a grid of intelligibility and visibility that regulates scopes of socioemotional behaviors. It defines them by their degrees of continuity or discontinuity with a social matrix produced by the rationalization of force relations through prosocial imperatives such as self-improvement, self-development, self-control, self-governance, voluntary agency, and autonomy.

Rather than theorizing the socialization of subjects that protects the emotional security of sociality, my analysis proposes a focus on how prosocial rationalization, by deploying the unity of ‘social,’ socializes the power relations that regulate emotion. It transcribes power relations into an intelligible grid of social life, which is thought to be based not on power relations but on the social being of emotion. Rather than theorizing a metaphysics that postulates the socialization of subjects, I analyze the socialization of power relations, whereby a regime of power institutes itself as the intelligible interplay of social structures, intersubjectivities, capacities, and behaviors, resulting from the operation and functions of social beings within grids of political visibility and intelligibility—naturalized as social matrices, conceived to be the social wombs in which subjects are meant to derive, maintain, and transmit to one other their coherence, reason, security, and unity, in which they develop and operate as “social humans.” The socialization of power relations is the process by which regulatory practices produce and conceal themselves within a naturalized metaphysics and epistemology of the social. Socialization is rationalization, not of subjects, but of power relations.

My target in this essay has been the various forms of self-described anti-natural knowledge of the social, whose attempts at denaturalization posit the social as simply another natural order. Social explanations are not necessarily emancipatory—they can still reduce and subjugate subjects to the innateness of social causes and origins, sliding them into the place of natural causes and origins. Socialization theory is the clearest example of this. The social is posited as the natural law from which all contingent processes develop, as a horizon of realism within which the political malleability of the subject becomes possible. I argue that the social subject, which is malleable and flexible in correspondence with its social being, is incoherently produced in order to suggest that it is not always already rational, but something whose production is rationalized through an incoherent political and discursive field. My attempt to make visible the incoherence of the deployment of sociality is not to say it is “bad” or should be rejected because of this incoherence, but rather to provoke a dissolution of the normative concepts of coherence and incoherence. The process of socializing incoherent power and discursive relations produces the rationality of the prosocial imperative, the compulsive necessity through which one becomes viable as a social animal. The presupposed irreducibility of the social that these forms of knowledge elevate is, in fact, reducible to epistemic processes that transform the political field’s unintelligibility into the “stuff” of the social. The unity of “social” makes sense and orders discursive statements, institutionalizing the lack of discursive order through which the regulation of “social being” capriciously converges and diverges, reifying this discursive and regulatory field as an edifice of meaning upon which the analyses of social realism can function. At the same time, the unreason of those so-called defective social beings results from a revolt against the political war waged against them. In the place of rationality, there are the productive processes of incoherence. In the place of unreason, there are the insurrectionary processes that are interpreted in an analytical framework of war. By this reversal, I do not mean to suggest that the madness of the antisocial (whether or not they are Mad people) is very reasonable and thus “good.” Instead, I intend to turn the logics of coherence and rationality against themselves and undermine the distinctions between them and incoherence and unreason. The socialization of power relations is the process by which the operation of power is rationalized and legitimized within a metaphysics and epistemology of the social. The social is a rationality, produced by and pulled over political struggles with and against abnormal individuals. Political struggles are congealed and rewritten using the significations of the social. The tactical deployment of sociality produces and is rationalized by analyses of social substance and realism.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.

———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge, 2006.

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003.

———. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

———. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

———. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

———. “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual: Interview with Michel Foucault.” Interview by Michael Bess. History of the Present 4 (Spring 1988): 1–13.

———. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973. Edited by Bernard E. Harcourt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007.

———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

…if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

—Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Personality disorder identity is overdetermined, meaning it is “a locus of confounded identities,” as Hortense Spillers observed of Black woman identity, invested with excesses of properties in order to stabilize the identity of the social order.1 We are not only othered, but the world needs our otherness for its own self-identity. Think about how pervasive the figure of ‘the personality disordered’ has become, especially ‘the narcissist,’ usually retailed in situations that have little to do with actual, flesh-and-blood people diagnosed with personality disorders, instead mobilized to clarify the self-understanding of people without personality disorders. We are figments more than people. We are increasingly seen everywhere and yet nowhere. Still, we certainly exist somewhere—other people’s ‘here’ is organized around the shifting axis of our unseen somewhere. Others’ social senses of safety and security, self-assurance and innocence, agency and freedom, self-continuity and personal temporality, adjustment and connection, belonging and responsibility are defined by how their particularities of living colonize the flexible, fluid shape of ‘personality disordered.’ Our figure ingests others’ incoherence so that their coherence can be secured. As someone diagnosed with a personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, in particular, I experience immense grief not only for my wounded past, not only for how that past has robbed me of so many years of my life and of my light, but also for how my identity has been expropriated to satisfy others’ desire for self-definition and stable and coherent subjectivity. Defining myself for myself has never been easy. Borderline includes symptoms of feeling lost and empty due to an unstable sense of self. But is my sense of identity truly distorted, or do I struggle with myself in a real way that people without personality disorders avoid, in part, through the exploitative use of me and of people like me?

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To people with a diagnosis of personality disorder, I ask, what are we to do with our overladen, expropriated, structurally antagonized identities, identities often bearing the faces of others? In Mad liberation, the term ‘personality disorder’ is widely rejected. This stance includes me. However, in my work, you will find uses of the terms ‘personality disorder and ‘borderline.’ I want to be clear and direct about why this is the case. On the one hand, I reject ‘personality disorder’ because I do not agree with the language that locates our personalities as the innate origin of our struggles in the world, while erasing critical awareness of the sociopolitical environment within which our wounds acquire meaning, substance, and matter. The label of ‘personality disorder’ presumes that personality disorder identity furnishes the context in which our difficulties arise. Through this, it eliminates thought about how the political and social system fabricates specific relational responses to people like us, which are themselves reified by that label. Reification here means the process by which social and power relations are elided in thought and instead perceived in a displaced form through personality disorder identity. Diagnosis is an institutionalization of identity. We can debate whether personality disorder diagnoses accurately represent us (in my view, they do not). However, on the other hand, regardless of whether personality disorders accurately represent our lived experiences and struggles, they nevertheless hold a social and political reality. Diagnoses organize and emerge from, while institutionally consolidating, carceral, psychiatric, social, political, and cultural responses to our forms of life. From our perspective, the language, theories, and names of borderline, narcissist, histrionic, sociopath, schizoid, avoidant, etc., do not accurately describe us, and certainly they harm us. Yet names are only one part of the predicament of harm that affects us. They are also denotations and signs of something else entirely. They denote and signify not only their own immediate effects (those that unfold from the use of the names) but also an ensemble of relations and an entire penal, medical, social, political, and cultural system organized around personality disorders. Names and diagnoses are only the tip of the iceberg: downstream effects rather than the root processes of deprivation organized around those people categorized by them. The categories only naturalize, institutionalize, conceal, and displace these processes. If names are displacements of our real conditions of oppression, why do I use them throughout my writing and advocacy, even despite my position being one of criticism and abolition of diagnoses and the frameworks they embody? Before I respond to this crucial question, I want to address a second argument against the use of personality disorders.

An argument for the complete disavowal from emancipatory language of the use of personality disorder is based on the claim that they are mere social constructions, fake travesties imposed upon us, from which we should separate ourselves in order to achieve liberation. However, this argument relies on a conception of social constructivism that precedes Judith Butler’s reformulation in their book, Bodies That Matter, as well as later modifications and criticisms developed by many other writers. In the preface to their book, Butler challenges the terms of the tired debate between positions that insist on the artificiality of construction and those that emphasize the irrefutability of experiences:

For surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these “facts,” one might skeptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction. Surely there must be some kind of necessity that accompanies these primary and irrefutable experiences. And surely there is. But their irrefutability in no way implies what it might mean to affirm them and through what discursive means. Moreover, why is it that what is constructed is understood as an artificial and dispensable character? What are we to make of constructions without which we would not be able to think, to live, to make sense at all, those which have acquired for us a kind of necessity? Are certain constructions of the body constitutive in this sense: that we could not operate without them, that without them there would be no “I,” no “we”? Thinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself.2

Personality disorders are certainly social constructions, but systems of power and formations of discourse operate through them, and they, in turn, operate through those systems and formations. It is also true that personality disorders are forced onto us (not to mention into our subjectivities). However, as a consequence of being subjected to these same systems of power and formations of discourse, we also operate through the construction of personality disorders, even as it operates through us. This is the theory of performativity: social constructions are not merely fabrications imposed upon us—the implication being that there is an ‘us’ or an ‘I’ that could function independently of the construction. Rather, we are mediums and vectors of construction, not the inert foundation upon which it is erected. Constructions are the fabrications through which we live. They operate through us, and we operate through them. I interrogate and contest the construction of personality disorders while recognizing that constructiveness is a real condition of our lives, even as we seek to change that condition. Social construction shapes reality—it is not opposed to it. Representation and materiality, discourse and reality, are composed through a dialectical relation of their reciprocal structuration. The truths by which we live ensue from this process.

How, then, do we approach contesting a construction that is not only structurally antagonistic and violent toward us, but also that operates through the systems of our world, through everyone around us, through nearly every word said about us, our place in the world, and relations to others, and through our bodyminds and subjectivities? How are we to contest a construction that is neither immaterial nor flimsy, but is very material and powerful? How might we attack a construction whose force works pervasively throughout our world? Do we deny this enacting force with the pretense that if we separate ourselves so easily and simply, we can look away and then our problems will go away? Or, as I advocate, do we mobilize politically, socially, culturally around the experience of being affected by this construction? ‘People diagnosed with personality disorders’ name the experience of being affected by that construction through systems of social power. The mediating word ‘diagnosed’ is intentional—qualifying it as a diagnosis while also recognizing it as a construction that structures our lives. People diagnosed with personality disorders are not ‘personality disordered.’ They are the group of people affected by the construction of personality disorder. It is a naming of a political experience that reverses the psy-disciplines’ use of ‘personality disorders’ to name a pathological experience. Thus, throughout my writing and advocacy, I use ‘personality disorder’ not to name a pathological experience, but to name the institutional, social, cultural, and political experience of being affected by the construction of ‘personality disorder.’ I envision personality disorder as a provisional and only tactical tool for organizing a collectivity, for developing archives of criticality and networks of contestation for this political experience. I also envision it falling out of use as robust collective politics gives way to new social forms far from personality disorders. Personality disorders in the emancipatory sense can only ever be provisional (just as any identity must be treated as a provisional alliance of people contesting the ways that identity bears upon and through their lives).

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To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.

—Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

I want to probe our collective responsibility to people diagnosed with personality disorders (abbreviated to pwPD). Then I will move to thinking through the responsibility that people diagnosed with personality disorders have to themselves and others. If it is accepted as obvious that pwPDs are different forms of life, and that this difference legitimates their inferior treatment, whether ontologically or on the basis of ‘displays’ of their vulnerability, if this inferiority is regarded as a simple, ‘neutral’ fact of the world, then why should we believe or trust a world that holds any class of people as inferior and then proceeds to declare that condition factual, natural, and deserving even? Why should we defend a world that perpetuates the possibility of any type of inferiority as the means of its coherence, one that broadcasts the inferiority of people diagnosed with personality disorders as ensuring your stability and ‘sanity’? How does this reasoning contradict the idea that pwPDs are psychologically antagonistic to reciprocal connection? How could reciprocity ever be built on and steeped in inferiority? Is this not similar to the way in which the removal of colonized subjects is said to pave the way for a thriving settler population? Does it make sense to point to skyscrapers and well-fed white families as proof of the grandeur of capitalism when one fails to acknowledge the (neo)colonial violence that made it possible and continues to sustain it? How can we say prosocial sanity empowers connection, love, and safety if we refuse to acknowledge those whose continual deprivation and suffering are mandated to ensure this reality? Who is this connection, love, and safety for? Who is permitted to experience them?

Is this ‘reciprocity’ not merely an effect of asymmetrical power and a structural antagonism, rather than evidence of an inclusive community? The imperative of reciprocity functions as a myth that disguises how every relation operates as an asymmetrical power relation. Even setting aside that power flows through all social relationships, are we to really accept the premise that people diagnosed with personality disorders are the ones who wield asymmetry by defying, violating, or unequalizing the reciprocity that is said to supposedly characterize the lives of others? First, we must honestly account for the asymmetry of the relation, locating it and whom it benefits. For instance, people without personality disorders have more freedom to enter social spaces without shrouding a part of themselves. By contrast, pwPDs must mask and guard against the disclosure of their identity, as the threat of censure, exclusion, repudiation, and disavowal hangs over them like the sword of Damocles. Others can forge connections freely, while pwPDs’ sense of belonging is sacrificed for others’ sake. Others are freer to define themselves; pwPDs are made into texts for everyone else’s analysis, interpretation, consumption, and authorship. Others’ narratives about personality disorders pervade and circulate widely in discourse, while pwPD narratives are repressed, pathologized, or recuperated into the stories of others. People without personality disorders are far less likely to be incarcerated, homeless, or involuntarily committed. People diagnosed with personality disorders live profoundly different lives according to a different, asymmetrical set of rules than those without them, structurally less privileged and far more precarious. Who, then, truly defies, violates, and unequalizes the reciprocity we all deserve? Who truly wields the institutions of asymmetry?

We should question whether personality disorders are an ethical or even adequate hermeneutic for political asymmetry. It has become commonplace to witness people using personality disorders to make sense of power, using sociopathy to understand the machinations of multinational CEOs, or narcissism to denounce Donald Trump. We are asking the wrong questions. Using personality disorders in this way as an interpretative prop shields us from the harsh scrutiny of genuine critical thought, one that consciously learns and grows from analyses of structural power, rather than individual psychology. Critical thought should diagnose and indict the logic and wider context of the system of social power within which individuals operate, and through which their actions are shaped, rather than carving out individualized exceptions for the sole purpose of maintaining one’s own investments in the dominant regime and social order. This rhetorical move ‘others’ powerful individuals from the social order in order to resist them, but it serves an equal discursive function of preserving one’s own subsidization by the very same system that enables them. It is far less jeopardizing to identify bad actors through psychology than to identify and resist how systems of power work through all individuals, regardless of their psychological makeup—indeed, they work through you, too. “But I didn’t mean me!” Your lack of a personality disorder diagnosis does not protect you from complicity with power, nor does it assure your innocence, nor does it guarantee your belonging and safety. We must challenge what Audre Lorde calls false security and the “myth of individual solutions” that motivates such an instrumental use of personality disorders. We must call on the courage to emerge from the pretense of protection that disavowals afford us, and realize that none of our safeties, survivals, belonging, or innocence are assured in a world in which we were never meant to survive on our own terms.

Should we not inquire whether we want a world in which everything good about our social lives depends on the suffering of people diagnosed with personality disorders, and whether this is the only social world in which our needs can be met? Why are pwPD lives condemned and resigned to a despairing, fatalistic social realism? PwPD survival and thriving are not luxuries only to be allowed when it is easy, or after assimilation to normalcy, or when they are congruent with the socially ‘desirable’ and ‘acceptable’. We must find ways to accommodate and improvise all of our survivals, without the too often fatalistic citations of realism. We hear too frequently that there is no other alternative but pwPD deprivation, because there is only one social reality, only one organization of social connection, only one way to have an ethical relation to others. “There is nothing we can do.” Should we not refuse such a lazy circumscription of our imagination, agency, and collective capacity to enact alternative modes of living with vulnerability? We live in a world in which, everywhere, the needs of the dominant depend on the deprivation of the subordinate. As subordinates, pwPDs are deprived in order to meet the needs of others. Do we have the courage to reject the necessity of such a world? Do we not all have a stake in the potential of a world in which our needs no longer are given coherence through the deprivation of pwPDs or others, but instead depend on accepting and embracing them? Will that not make everyone’s needs more secure?

We require forms of acceptance whose coherence is not secured in opposition to the ‘defective,’ but through the courage to see oneself, one’s being, one’s own vulnerability and embodiment, and one’s own free and liberated experience of embodymindedness as bound up with the freedom of those of another, as connected to and enabled by, rather than disavowing and inhibited by, the freed and self-connected vulnerability of a pwPD, following Audre Lorde’s description of the erotic as power as “self-connection shared.” Others urgently need the courage to let go of the false security of imagining their bodyminds as still intact and thus their interests as separate from pwPDs. They urgently and desperately must recognize that none of our wounds can heal, none of our survivals can be assured, and none of our bodyminds can be protected if we continue to prospect vulnerabilities for their worthiness rather than connect with their power to guide how we may share in the fruits and poetries of one another’s living being.

The courage to exist with incongruent vulnerability rubs the other way, too. As a person diagnosed with a personality disorder, I struggle to find the courage to turn toward my own vulnerabilities, to witness their presence in my life and to claim the agency to decide how to respond to them. Courage is needed to work with—not against—the fact of vulnerability and incongruence that we all experience, whether or not we are diagnosed with a personality disorder. I have often struggled to find the courage to acknowledge my vulnerability and its incongruence with others, and then to act on that acknowledgment. It has led to countless heartbreaking, grief and shame-riddled episodes in my life when my inability to embrace my vulnerabilities as structuring conditions of life led to the loss of cherished people. This experience of loss is not wholly composed by oppression, even if it is a result of it. PDphobia—the intolerance for the vulnerability and incongruence concentrated in the lives of pwPDs—implanted the way I was absolutist and dichotomous in relationships. PDphobia infiltrated the relationship I had with my condition of oppression and suffering. I did not want any vulnerability. I wanted to be the same as everyone else, so I denied the fact of my wounds, refuted the fact that I was different. I decided I was whole and was on the same societal plane as everyone else. I did not consider an alternative relation to my vulnerability that did not view me as defective or other, but still recognized the fact of wounded difference. I surmised simplistically that all my problems in relationships were only because others were bigoted. I did not do an honest inventory of the hurt, both mine and theirs, and of the fact of difference. I did not act in a way that exercised choice and took care of the relations between our wounds and the differences that lay between my loved ones and me. For certain, other people didn’t have the courage to accept and relate to my incongruent vulnerabilities ethically, but the harsh fact is, I didn’t either. We didn’t dare to take each of our vulnerabilities, their incongruence with one another, and relate to one another courageously, intentionally, witnessing, acting with, and connecting through wounded difference, interdependently. We did not. For the future, I hope otherwise.

I envision a kind of collective politics premised neither on cure nor correction, nor on absolutist refusal. I envision a messy middle in which refusal abandons the eugenic impulse to discipline, exclude, and eliminate imperfect, vulnerable, contradictory life. We can be wounded and still deserve liberation. We need not be completely ‘innocent,’ nor perfect, nor passive recipients of oppression to be casualties of an experience of power that ethically demands change and transformation. We must refuse the disavowal of our collective vulnerability and the shelter of imperious similarity. Instead, we must use our vulnerability and our incongruence not as conditions to resolve or escape, but as creative resources to guide a world in which all experiences, agencies, needs, wounds, suffering, and bodyminds are valued, cared for, and prioritized because of their differences, not in spite of or by dominating them. We must witness the incongruent presence of vulnerability in our lives, in one another’s lives, and in the world. Rather than correcting or denying the fact of its presence and the challenging dilemmas it poses, we urgently need the courage, resolve, faith, and attentiveness to turn toward it. Only after this acceptance can we learn how to respond creatively, politically, in ways attuned to the mutual necessity and urgency of all of our survivals—including those of people diagnosed with personality disorders.

Author’s Note: The essay below was published in the 40th Anniversary Edition of Asylum Magazine. You can access the issue at this link: Asylum Magazine (Volume 33, No 1) - Spring 2026 - Asylum Magazine

In my previous article in Asylum about borderline personality disorder and the politics of emotional experience (Summer 2024), I outlined how the emotional experiences of sane people are formed and maintained as the ideal standard within society. It challenged the idea that the ways we experience emotions are natural, self-evident, given, unchanging, and universal. Instead, I suggested that the way we experience ourselves and others, including our emotions, is dependent on the historical, political, and social dynamics that condition it.

This article develops this idea further by outlining a politics of anti-sanity which challenges the “naturalness” and “necessity” of sanity. Anti-sanity politics sees sanity not as a natural attribute of individuals but as a political guideline that governs, leads, and shapes our psychological and behavioral experiences.

Anti-psychiatry criticises the psy-disciplines for subjecting Mad people to control and confinement. Anti-sanity pushes this analysis and resistance further. It questions the broader social and political processes through which madness is positioned as pathological and dangerous to society. Anti-sanity asks the following questions: What makes psychiatric and psychological institutions possible? What keeps them going? What makes them appear necessary to society? How is madness cast as contrary to the dominant order, thus justifying the existence of the psy-disciplines?

Sanity is the dominant order that warrants and sustains the psy-disciplines while situating madness as its antithesis. Sanity is a conception of life that presumes and relies upon the elimination of madness. Madness is treated as a dangerous way to be because sanity is asserted as the beneficial mode of arranging society. Sanity regulates and enables the social context within which the psy-disciplines are empowered and mobilised. Psychiatry would not exist and would have no function without the idealisation of sanity, which it enforces and uses to construct its taxonomy of mental illness.

The dominance of sanity targets its opposite: madness. Psychiatry derives its justification from the presumed “natural” claim of sanity to define the existences of both Mad and sane people. Sane people are those who follow sanity’s guidance, while Mad people are those who go astray and revolt. Thus, sanity casts madness as a danger to its power, while sane people are assimilated into it. Madness is understood as dangerous, risky and harmful because it interrupts and refutes the development of sanity as a guiding concept in our lives.

Sanity names the parameters through which individuals participate in social life. It necessitates and justifies the confinement, control, and exclusion of Mad people who fall outside society’s rules and definitions. Sanity serves as the standard that individuals are to follow. Madness is defined by its casting off from this ideal. Through its function as an ideal principle, sanity stipulates how both sane and Mad people are understood and treated. Madness differs from the rules baked into sanity and is thereby oppressed. As long as sanity continues to be implemented as the “natural” framework for society, Mad people will always be its repudiated opposite. The “superiority” of sanity and rationality sets the terms by which we all experience ourselves and relate to others.

We can see this in how the ideal standard of neurotypicality forces autistic people to live and relate to others on its terms. Anti-sanity views “neurotypical” as composed of what is politically idealised, not an innate set of traits and behaviors. Similarly, sanity is simply what is idealised and become dominant. Society treats autistic and neurotypical people differently based on its idealisation of neurotypicality. The same applies to sane and Mad people. The dominant position of sanity enables the pathologisation of madness. Neurotypicality and sanity establish and sustain their ways of life by defining neurodivergent and Mad people as other.

Madness circulates in the public sphere with dizzying omnipresence. It is hypervisible and at the center of social and political attention. Sanity serves as the implicit standard that regulates this discussion, deciding how madness is spoken of and thought about. The idealisation of sanity is constantly cited in this abundance of talk and debate. Sane standards silently shaped this social exchange, conditioning questions that anchor how society relates to madness. These questions emerge as the basis for social, political, and psychiatric action. It asks: how should society and individuals respond to the risk of madness? How can we prevent and eliminate it?

These questions are not simply about treatment and healing. If madness is required to be eliminated, then Mad people will be targeted and excluded from social life to pursue this goal. For Mad people, our social visibility is a double-edged sword. Although it can enable protection from the State in the form of political rights, it can also make one an increased target of power. Although it can fuel advocacy of one’s interests, it can also divert attention from dominating practices that produce Mad people as a threat. Visibility is not free from power. Instead, it is used to reinforce the exhaustive permeation of sane standards.

My point, however, is not to maintain these distinctions (e.g. between sanity and insanity). It is not to merely flip the relationship of what is valued. In addition, anti- sanity also does not mean anti-sane people. Anti-sanity’s purpose is not to argue that sanity is actually wrong and bad, and madness is right and good. My target is this distinction itself, whereby a particular form of rationality and a particular form of insanity are defined by the former’s dominance. Thus, anti-sanity doesn’t flip the relationship of value. Rather, it flips what is visible and questionable. Sanity is the ideal in the first place because it occupies the position of relative invisibility as the “default” mode of life. Individuals can invoke its implicit rules when speaking about and mobilising against Mad people precisely because they are unable to scrutinise how the dominance of sanity frames their own thoughts, actions, and relationships.

Anti-sanity is not predicated on a simple rejection of sanity. It is a way of making sanity visible, questionable, and challenging its assumed naturalness. Sanity is not a natural state to which we should aspire, but a way of controlling and guiding people. Anti-sanity tactically reverses how we talk about and perceive madness. Rather than accepting the way that sane standards control the lens by which we talk about madness, it reverses it. It scrutinises the practices that administer sanity as the rule for how individuals are “naturally supposed to be.”

And I have preserved it even as the whole world has mounted an effort to force me to relinquish it, and I have preserved it despite my own shame that equally cannot tolerate the implications of it. It is born out of the urgent necessity of my life. But I will relinquish it here, to you—for a moment. I will try my best to ease it into these words. If I’ve been evasive and circumspect thus far, perhaps it is because the thing I wish to say is knowledge I have screamed into the sky, yelled into the ground, and which has exploded through my sides.

No one has been able to decipher it, and I have made it my life’s mission to tell it in a way that one can understand. This is the first time I have attempted to articulate knowledge that has only appeared in emotional outbursts. I have borderline personality disorder, and for better or for worse, this knowledge stakes itself, leverages itself, and claims as its own political ground that experience. I speak to you with the knowledge of a proud borderline. My knowledge can be summed up by the statements that have resounded and splattered across my brain many times before: THIS is not right. THIS is not natural. THIS is not fair. THIS is wrong and should not happen. WHY do others not see THIS. WHY am I alone in THIS reality.

My knowledge emanates from how I founder on this reality. Reality, or more appropriately, the world, is my enemy. That is the first and most important lesson a person with a personality disorder learns. The world views my very life as impure and wild, defective and barbarous, dangerous and a problem, as the social enemy of everything it promotes as its own. The world’s needs, desires, interests, dreams, and freedoms are stated and elevated over my radical and “disruptive” otherness. For these reasons, enormously violent social pressure forces the defining choice of my life: either I must change myself to align with the social world, which had no concern for my life to begin with—indeed it is a world that espouses itself as against me—or I will die from the systemically deployed way in which my life is made intolerable to the point of death.

Michel Foucault, in his analysis of psychiatric power, describes this as systemic deprivation that is organized around the Mad person. He explains, “madness will be paid for by a general lack of existence, by this systemic deprivation…by learning deprivation, by learning that to make up for deprivation he must work, concede certain things, submit to discipline, etcetera, the patient will learn the care given him, the cure that one attempts to obtain for him, are not owed to him; he is obliged to get them through the efforts of obedience to work, discipline, and remunerated production.”1

Systemic deprivation, or the way in which one pays for one’s madness, presents a false image to borderlines. It depicts the restrictive redemption and recognition offered by the world as the only way to be free from that deprivation. The only real choice traditionally presented is to concede to a world that is antagonistic to borderline life, one that has never seen our lives as valuable. However, I would like to present an alternative option: a struggle for liberation that contests the assumptions held by the world. We must contest how the repressive response of society and individuals to the presence of borderline symptoms continually maintains, renews, and accelerates the deprived existence of borderline life.

Therapy identifies behavioral, emotional, and identity problems as the source of deprived borderline lives. It takes for granted the social conditions through which borderline is placed in a deprived state. To better address emotional suffering in therapy, one has to accept, agree, concede, and submit to the reasoning that speculates an innate and solely psychological cause of these conditions of deprivation. The logic of therapy is that one’s devalued life is the linear result of maladaptive behaviors, emotional and relational instability, and identity distortions, rather than the way one is made to pay for one’s borderline symptoms in keeping with a system of power built into the social world.

This penalty is stabilized and presented as a fact of one’s life, a self-evident fact to which one must submit as a precondition to address it in therapy. Within borderline politics, there is a place for therapy, but not as a means to acquire moral redemption or societal recognition. One must speak honestly about and struggle against the assumptions that ensure borderline suffering is treated as a politically uninteresting fact of the world and psychology. Borderline suffering is not simply reflective of histories and cases of trauma, but rather, it is primarily a politically and socially established artifact, one that must be challenged and relationally circumvented. Therapy should be reduced to palliative care, focusing on alleviating pain and suffering rather than correcting behaviors. It should rejuvenate and work in tandem with political struggle.

Today and every day I am alive, I face down the violently forced, truly impossible choice between, on the one hand, betraying myself in order to assimilate with the people who never saw my life as valuable in the first place and, on the other hand, my own death. My life is suspended and frozen at the moment of this choice, for neither is acceptable to me. My politics emerges from the space of that suspension as a means to find a way out, a third option. The forcible choice is an exigency that structures my living. It is the thought that pervades every waking moment. How do I cope with this choice that is formed without consideration or allowance for what I want and what I need? You may say it's imagined, a symptom of my pathology, paranoia, you say. Or you may say that I speak of only the hell that I live in due to my emotional dysregulation.

However, consider that the high rate at which borderline individuals die by suicide is not simply due to emotional dysregulation, as if it occurs in a vacuum. 10% dead is not a simple fact of how our brains work, but it reflects a political and social decision of the world. We systemically die by suicide because society not only provides us with no meaningful support to survive, but it also strategically cuts off and refuses it. It often worsens our symptoms and ensures those symptoms spiral by moralizing our behaviors, by othering us, by abandoning us, by turning us into a problem and a danger properly left to death and destruction. Borderlines are not spontaneously self-destructive, nor are they self-evidently destructive to others; rather, the world is systemically destructive to those with borderline. Most destruction characterizing the borderline experience can be attributed to the social dynamics that target it for systemic abandonment, punishment, incarceration, mistreatment, discrimination, marginalization, murder, and repudiation. It is inseparable from these skewed conditions of power.

Is it heresy to say that the biggest issue in my life is not emotional dysregulation, but how other people treat me because of my emotional dysregulation? Emotional dysregulation would be tolerable and might even heal in the absence of what I experience socially as a borderline. I am told, time and again, that I must manage my emotions and learn to seek treatment as long as, and more accurately, so that it doesn’t affect anyone else. Why must I orient my entire being and indeed my efforts to survive according to the self-serving interests of the world? Nowhere in the DSM symptom criteria for borderline does it mention suffering, nor does it describe borderline in terms of how it affects borderline individuals. It defines us not in connection with ourselves, but as corroboration of the world’s antagonistic atmosphere toward borderline life. Borderline is specified to reinforce the inimical structure of the world, rather than according to the needs and interests of the actual borderlines that the DSM attempts to represent. Any resemblance to actual borderlines is permeated with an intolerant and aberrant interpretation of how we exist in the world.

Borderline experiences are filtered through the lens of how others experience us as problems. To address people without personality disorders for a minute: How would you like it if everywhere you went, by everyone you met, by every person you ever loved, your already ever-present suffering was treated as a moral problem, as a behavior problem, as a personality problem? And indeed, YOU are treated as a problem to be segregated from everybody else, gotten rid of, eliminated, punished, and repudiated. How would that make your suffering so much worse? Can you imagine how unbearable it is to exist ostensibly forever to a society that takes for granted your diminished status and requires you to become more pleasant to it before you can accrue any value? Can you imagine how unlivable it is to move within a society that wages war against you through hostile, antagonistic, criminalizing, and cruel repudiations in every moment of your existence in social relations? This is the unstated condition that produces borderline’s sky-high suicide rates.

It didn’t have to be this way. It didn’t have to be that I cannot dare to leave my house without the ever-present fear of how people will respond to my emotions, without fear of being marked as an enemy to the social good. Is this not the definition of terror? Terror that prevents life, terror that prevents freedom, terror that makes me afraid to write this without being indicted and confirmed as one of the “bad ones.” You know…the ones not in therapy and who bask in their abuse, recalcitrant in their behaviors. We, as people with personality disorders, are all at one point or another treated as “bad ones”—it is a construction that compels us to stay in line, freezing our attempts to reach for new and better possibilities out of fear of condemnation. But I refuse to concede ground to a discourse that tells me what I am without knowing my heart. I refuse to concede ground to a terror that I will never vanquish through submission.

It is a terror imposed by the social collective on a less powerful section in its margins. For a moment, let me address the collective and the individuals whose social good it supplies. Why does your social good assert itself as superior to my needs? Why do your needs assert themselves as requiring the denial of my needs, my life, my dignity? Why do you say I refuse your needs when you are the ones who tell me my needs make me immoral, a bad person, and a problem? You are the ones who impetuously demand that my needs be changed and kept in check to meet your expectations. And suppose I express them in my emotions, for they certainly can’t be cared for in the open, since you implicitly refuse: Why do you claim I am at fault, that I must shrivel back into my corner so that you may abandon me and live freely, free to worry not about my needs, not about my emotions, not about my suffering, not about my exclusion, and not about my imminent death?

Your way of satisfying the relation between your needs and my needs is by looking away from me. It is a refusal to care for me, a refusal to attend to my difference, a refusal that always comes eventually, even as much as some of you attempt to avoid it. I am a difference that you fail to use as a fetishized object to satisfy your own desires and needs. I am a type of difference to whom any ethical relation requires one to acknowledge and work through the limits of pre-established ways of connecting, to question and expand the limits of what we can do in this social order and world.

I can’t envision what liberation will look like for borderlines because I do not believe in any final freedom, for power always rearticulates itself and will oppress some other group of people in the future if not us. But I can predict that we will find some measure of freedom when a political reality emerges wherein borderline is loved because of its difference—when we are loved because of our borderline and our symptoms, rather than in spite of them. My philosophy is that I do not love you in spite of your disability. I love you even more because of your disability. It is the work of joy, love, and pride to care for it beyond the limits of this social reality.

My wish is that being a borderline will be a desirable way to be, and that borderlines will be desirable people to live as. That starts with not ceding our borderline identities. We must not disavow who we are, for better or for worse, because who we are is a product of our experiences and the political intersections in which we find ourselves. It is ours to live and to change, no one else. We wish to change these experiences, these political intersections, these identities, because they are ours to change. That is a prerequisite to agency and to change: to refuse the disavowal of ourselves, regardless of the pressures we face.

Borderlines will never be free as a group if we do not identify with each other, if we do not take ethical stands for ourselves and for each other, even when faced with the prospect of social immolation. If we disavow ourselves and each other, there can be no hope that disavowal and repudiation will one day disappear as the social system of deprivation that shapes our lives. We will still be immolated even if we cede our identities, our critical knowledge of the world, our political energies, and our desires for lives formed on our own terms —not lives decided on the terms of a world that, right now, has never and will never value our beings unless we contest it. Redemption and recognition by the world will always be individual and come at a price that limits our vision of what is happening to us, what is possible, who we are as individuals and as a group, and what we can do if we leverage our consciousness against the world. This world relentlessly besieges and employs scorched earth tactics against us until we become the ones who relent and submit to the presumption that we have no value, that is, until we concede to self-serving interests alien to the necessities, interests, and relative meanings of borderline lives. We are already being destroyed every day. We might as well act and burst forth together here and now.

Postscript: Perhaps this essay will be read as “borderline manipulation.” Guilt-tripping, trying to influence other people’s behavior through expressions of pain, emotion, splitting, and suicide. But my question is, how cynical must your worldview and ethical practice be for you to cast expressions of pain as illegitimate and malicious? What does it say about you that you do not wish to have your ethical responses influenced by suffering? How can you look away from me as I make claims that are not flights of distorted cognition but emerge from the most clarified, abiding, and deeply felt guides of my existence?

I have coined the term “social realism” to describe political, theoretical, and cultural positions that take “society,” “the social,” and “sociality” as givens, universals, real, substantial, and natural by-products of human activity and capacities. Social realism views the human as essentially a social being. It imagines the sociality of the human as prediscursive and analyzes as discursive all that unfolds from this social being. This is the social construction of the human being, the enactment of the prediscursive sociality of the human. Social realism posits the socialization of the human and its capacities. It considers the human being as a social animal, and its existence as one that materializes through social labor and performance. Therefore, the anti-social, the one who cannot labor or perform in socially beneficial or intelligible ways, is blocked from existence, is abject, lost in the virtual, on the threshold and the voyage. Social realism expands and solidifies the reason of society by looking for the function of society - its reality, structure, working, and operation. It looks for the truth of society, of the social conditions that produce and are produced by social beings. By discovering the reality of society, it founds a community of social beings, the domain of social existence, on presupposed and optimizable capacities.

Sociality is a difficult word to define because it is an expansive word. Its expansiveness results from how social realism permits sociality to capture human existence’s full breadth and depth. The anthropological refrain, humans are social animals, reflects how the organization of the rational subject that excludes, dominates, and is in antinomy with the instinctual subject (the human and the animal, the sane and the mad, the citizen and criminal, the normal and abnormal, white and Black, etc) secures social existence at the same time as it produces its danger. This leads me to my definition of sociality, the anti-sane, anti-social, definition. Sociality is a relationship of force deployed on subjects’ conduct that naturalizes itself as an institution of peaceful, actualized existence. As a mode of actualization of the human being, it normalizes and refines existence on the basis of domination that distinguishes between the rational and instinctual subject, the one who is docile and the one who insurrects, the one who connects up to society and the one who defies social existence. The production of the reality according to which the human is a social being entails the exclusion of the instinctual subject, the one who is instantiated as the animal, the mad, the criminal, the queer, the racialized, the colonized, etc. To act as a social being that is both a product and agent in its social contexts means to be in control of one’s faculties and to have the ability to act in rational and intelligible ways, to align with others around them, and choose (while being conducted by the government of men). Given this, the social realist, sanist, and prosocial definition of sociality is the following: Sociality is the quality of collective existence based on the human capacity to form social bonds which found, stabilize, and legitimate social cohesion.

Borderline personality disorder has long had feminist political weight if you look closely – beyond its diagnostic criteria and symptoms. It is the pathology of the woman so hurt that she can no longer tolerate the effect of patriarchal domination on her psyche and body. She senses and rages against her soul’s reduction by power. Borderline is the state of the individual not recognised as a person: aching and screaming to be free. She rejects everything that society masquerades as true and just. The borderline individual is aware of the workings of power that press sharply like a knife into her body. Nothing short of total upending, transcendence, and revolution can ease the pain.

Borderline is a struggle between an individual and the operations of power.

In psychiatric descriptions and commonly held beliefs, borderline isn't a valiant power struggle. Sane people represent it as an individual’s unrecoverable moral and psychological damage.

The widespread view is that borderline pain is the result of trauma that causes an inability to behave within healthy emotional parameters. Trauma is understood as causing a defective alteration to a previously existing ‘healthy’ person. I dispute this. I argue that not only are ‘healthy’ emotional parameters defined by power, but they consequently inhibit and constrain one’s awareness of power. The requirement of emotional regulation enforces submission and the upholding of power structures. Borderline is a defiant response to power that works through social relationships. Oppression creates borderline pain.

Therefore, the real question for alleviating borderline pain is not how we mitigate borderline behavior but how we stop oppression.

Borderlines are perceived as a problem and danger to themselves and other people in their lives. It is believed that borderline emotions are destructive. They break down communication and defy understanding. Borderline threatens social bonds and therefore society at large. Thus, it is targeted for psychiatrisation, incarceration, discrimination, and marginalisation.

I wish to address what borderline means in the context of dominant emotional experiences and how this contributes to borderlines’ oppression and suffering. I challenge the notion that the ways we experience emotion are natural, self-evident, given, unchanging, and universal.

Instead I ask, according to which criteria are borderlines judged as problems? To whom are borderlines seen as dangerous? Through what processes are borderlines established as difficult and harmful? I contextualise and qualify cultural assumptions about borderline by accounting for the type of emotional consciousness that informs them. How is it true that borderlines are first, difficult, second, problems, and third, dangerous?

A preliminary answer lies in how structures of power elevate, normalise, and romanticise the ways sane people experience emotion. The assumption that borderlines are difficult, problematic, and dangerous is the consequence of the privilege accorded to sane people and their emotions. Power sets the rules for society’s emotional life, from which sane people emerge as a favoured group. Borderlines, too, begin to evaluate and inhabit their emotions by referring to sane people’s experiences.

It is important to name Sane Emotional Experience, to make it visible, and to examine it, in the same way borderline has been examined by power. Sane Emotional Experience is simply how sane people feel their emotions, but it has become the foundation for relating in and organising society.

Disability studies and justice movements have long asserted that society is constructed and organised based on the ideal body. As a result, disabled people are disadvantaged and subject to inaccessible social environments. Similarly, I dispute the notion that there is only one emotional experience, and emotions that deviate are pathological exceptions. There are a multitude of emotional experiences, but one particular way of feeling has been seized and shaped to be the norm for society at large. The emotions of everyone are judged against this ideal.

The healthy personality, his appropriate behavior, and his easy-going emotional nature are held up and constantly repeated as the model for a rationally organised society. Power produces a specific emotional life for society, just as it creates for it a built environment. Both favour some and disadvantage others, ensuring the bulk of society thrives, whilst making a great many others troublesome, faulty, and threatening.

Sane people marginalise borderlines as if they are alarming aberrations from the default innocuous emotional experience. They ignore how society is at war with borderlines while sane people remain at peace behind the frontlines. Society is at war to guarantee sane people’s tranquility. At the same time, sane people are enlisted in various capacities to perpetuate atrocities and normalise the carnage.

Countless people have been killed for their emotions: killed for screaming injustice on a subway, killed for seeming threatening even while unconscious; killed by police, killed by family members; killed for displaying the wrong emotion, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons. Their deaths are seen as necessary for the defence of society, for lives unpunctured by discontent. Their deaths prevent a questioning of power structures and enforce an acceptance of the ways things are.

Borderlines (and many other Mad people) rage and scream, posing a risk to power and the kinds of emotional responses needed to go along with it. Whether you chalk it up to medical problems or social factors, the reality remains that their emotions rebel against a politically imposed peace, against a lulled Eden defended by the sword – a peace without liberation.

Sane Emotional Experience is the willful numbness that acquits the cop who guns down a Black child and the inhuman disregard that bombs Palestine. Sane Emotional Experience is to feel in a way that conforms to and accepts power. Sanity maintains and defends a political status quo.

Borderline is a fundamental threat to oppressive systems of power, and to the desensitisation that is necessary for power’s continuation.

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This essay is in memory of Jordan Neely, Edwige Nsilu, Winzinzent Rozaro, Ryan Gainer and every Mad person killed by Sane Emotional Experience.