Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and tenth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Shay Welch. Shay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College and the 2024-2025 Scholar-in-Residence for the city of Atlanta’s public art program. Her latest publications explore the relationship between Borderline Personality Disorder, embodied cognition, and epistemic injustice. Shay’s current work on public art explores how performance art can act as an embodied mode of democratic deliberation with passersby, which can change biases about marginalized bodies. In her free time, Shay trains as a circus artist and races motorcycles.

[Description of image below: photo of Shay, who sits on a chair with her legs and arms crossed in front of her. Her head is tilted slightly to the right and her long wavy hair cascades over her right shoulder. She is wearing square-framed glasses and knee-high patterned boots with pointed toes.]

PLEASE NOTE: This interview includes discussion of suicide and suicide ideation.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Shay! Your route to professional philosophy was neither straightforward nor typical. For the benefit of our readers and listeners who do not know you, please describe the journey that brought you to your current position in the field.

To say that I am a first-generation student is a bit of an understatement. I was raised in a family that had very little education. Many members of my family, including members of immediate family, did not receive education beyond middle school. Education was not something that was considered, much less valued. I have spoken about this matter in other interviews and have written about it in one of my books—there was extensive addiction, violence, and domestic violence in my family.  Most of my family members have been in jail and a couple of them were locked up in the fed and state for a hot minute. 

When I was a kid, family members would pick on me for reading books; but I was by no means a good student. As many readers and listeners of this interview would suspect, I was disciplined a great deal in school for trouble related to “resisting authority.” I was kicked out of middle school(s) more than once and then kicked out of high school. I did graduate, but barely. The ironic thing is that I was repeatedly put in advanced classes to keep me stimulated and out of trouble. 

For the most part, I raised myself once I hit my teen years. I moved out of the house when I was in high school. I never went to class. One day, I got a letter in the mail from the University of South Alabama inviting me to attend school there. I had never heard of Mo-Bile (I had no idea how to say it), but I figured “why not?” Every single day, for a year and a half, I worked double shifts at Hooters, saving my money. Then, one day, I packed up and moved South. I was going to college. I did not really hear from my family after that. They thought that I was self-important, that I believed that I was better than them, which was fine. 

I floated through college in a way that brings back almost no memories related to classrooms or professors, or even the classes that I took. I do have vague memories but they are more like flashbacks. In college, I spent all my time working in nightclubs until 4 am and then going out after I finished work. I failed a few courses, including my Intro to Philosophy class. The course was literally the worst thing that I had ever experienced. I swore that I would never take a philosophy course again. 

In my last semester of college, however, I had to fulfill my final humanities requirement and philosophy was the only class compatible with my work schedule. This time taking philosophy was different: I was a bit older and the course was an ethics class. I fell in love immediately. I decided to stick around for a fifth year and did my philosophy degree to put on top of my political science degree. I did not know what one could do with a degree in philosophy but that did not matter to me. I changed my whole way of living. I over-enrolled my schedule, took every philosophy class offered, and came out that year with nearly a 4.0. That was the beginning of philosophy keeping me alive. 

I remember sitting in class one day waiting for the professor to come in and someone asked me what I was going to do after graduation. I just shrugged. Who knew what tomorrow would bring? But I did tell him that if, when I grew up, I could be anything in the world that I wished to be, I would be a philosopher; but philosophers did not exist anymore. He laughed and said I could go to graduate school and get my Ph.D. I said, “What is graduate school?” and “What is a Ph.D.?” I was in my 5th year of college and had never heard of graduate school, nor had I heard the term Ph. D. Seriously. As an aside, I had also never heard of women’s studies, Africana studies, or ethnic studies. He told me all about it and I was like “bet”. 

So, after graduation, I moved to Tokyo to get a chance at that international big-city night life and applied to graduate school from there. I applied to graduate schools based on the weather (face palm). I had no idea that different graduate schools did certain kinds of things. Yet again, I was just out in the world bumbling around with the intention of getting anywhere. Out of all of the schools to which I applied, I got in to one: Florida State University. No funding, obviously, but when they told me that, I didn’t care because I had no idea what funding was. So, I packed up in Tokyo to go live life in Tallahassee. 

FSU was clearly not a good fit for me given what it specializes in, but it got me in the door. I was never happier living life than when I started living this life, and I wasn’t even doing anything that I liked. I read everything that I could get my hands on. I was gifted funding halfway through my first year—something that had never happened in the department’s history until I came along. Since then, it has been a wild and crazy roller coaster of deep thoughts and yellow highlighters. I thank the goddess for philosophy every. single. day. 

I like this story. It reminds me that through everything, “I done good.” 

You conceive of your experience with respect to Madness in philosophy as intertwined with a refusal of respectability politics. How do you understand this experience and the politics of refusal that you enact?

I have always tried to let students know that it does not matter where you come from and that the best way to get out is to follow their true passions. Some people would say that I am no role model because I do not consider my past as something that I had to “overcome,” but rather as a history that I embrace, as that which made me who I am. And maybe they are not wrong. But I try to be honest about who I am and where I have been, and hopefully I can be an inspiration to the few who feel out of place or alone. I have taken each step forward in my life unashamed of my Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I recently went through full testing and popped for BPD, Bi-Polar II, severe ADHD, OCD, CPTSD, chronic depression, and autism. I was not surprised: I am extra spicy and now know why I cannot spell.  

I suppose that I consider respectability politics as a systemic framework that says it does not matter where you have been so long as you recognize where you are now, which is “better.” This kind of politics insists on the story of “overcoming” for betterment. It is a politics and story about transcending, rising above, and finally “making it” to a “better” place. Respectability politics, to me, is a kind of insidious classism: although respectability politics feels inclusive—because it commits to not judge where one comes from—that feeling of inclusion is a veneer that hides a certain kind of elitism based on the hierarchy of social capital. So, when one refuses to turn away and transcend from a life that gave them everything that they needed to make it to where they are, the practices of ostracism kick in. 

I am not only speaking of myself. I have seen it happen to others. I have seen brilliant and creative people be sidelined for not changing their way of speaking when they crossed the ivory threshold. Class code switching has always been a thing and has always been the professional expectation. Class status and class presentation are the final bastions to the gatekeepers. The norms of switching expected for those who are neurodivergent are invisible because “social justice,” but they stand firm. I mean, they are impossible to satisfy unless you are properly “socialized” or medicated. I always assumed that academia was in a world where we were supposed to fight against that. Something, something, rage against the machine of “professionalism,” or whatnot. That is why I thought that academia would be a good place for me. A place where what mattered was your ideas and not your demeanor. It took me a long time to realize that people on the outside are not wrong for calling it “the Ivory Tower.”

When I was young, I saw the way that “respectable” people spoke to my family and me. I saw how they would take any advantage to insert some kind of social power over us: my junior high-school teacher who told me I would never be anything because I was “just another Welch;” the lady at the food stamps counter who insisted that my sister call her “Mrs. X” and took great offense at my sister’s failure to approach with humility. You just do not forget stuff like that. I view the insistence on titles and honorifics and automatic deference as a move to exert and express social and moral superiority over people who just cannot get a leg up. As if the janitor has not worked harder than the doctor whose office they clean. I swore that I would never make anyone feel like I was trying to be above them, which is why I have never gone by “Dr.” Welch. I may have a Ph.D., but I look around, and I see so many people—people who work their fingers to the bone—who are condescended to and marginalized because they are not “respectable.” These people really know something about hard work. My paper cuts and late-night reading and writing sessions to meet a publication deadline ain’t it. 

I try to show my messy humanity and always present myself as just another person who happened to choose differently, not better. The fact that I found a choice, when so many could not, means that they are the ones with whom I need to remember my place. Respectability politics requires one to be respectable; and I consider one’s heart and character to be the source of respectability, not their titles and dialect. But that moral belief has never served me well in a world where, according to people like my junior high teacher and a grad school professor, people like me are never supposed to be. “Trashy.” “Bat shit crazy.” And I am fine with it. That has made me cling harder to who I was, which led to who I am, which only makes matters worse. I know this sequence, but I never could find a way to force myself to change. It felt like a betrayal. But the new heavy medication seems to be doing the job. Heavy medication helps a lot of us finally fall in line.   

Shay, in our preliminary discussions about this interview, you indicated to me that writing about Madness has saved you. How would you describe this process and the results of it?

Writing from my personal experience, in one way or another, is the gift that philosophy bestows unto me. Writing in this way has given me a voice when the world seemed to think that there was nothing any of us had to say worth listening to. Each book that I have written has been tied to my life, loves, values, and passions. 

In the past, Madness has not been central to my writing. But I spoke to my personal experience of it as often as I could. I wrote about it in my first APA interview, I wrote about it—along with the Madness of the other women in my family—in Existential Eroticism. I named Madness in every public moment that allowed me to do so. BPD is one of the only affective and cognitive differences that people continue to feel entitled to blame and disparage—stigmatize—others for who fail to properly manage themselves in accordance with generally accepted comfort levels. Between society, media, professions, and psychiatry, we remain the last enclave of proper “crazy bitches.”

I have struggled with suicide most of my life. It’s a common reaction to Mad people’s recognition of their exclusion from respectable social relations. It is why 1 in every 10 of us dies by suicide. Theoretically, it is called Thwarted Belonging and Perceived Burdensomeness. The idea is that you feel so alone and on the outside of life that your attempts to participate in it feel intrusive and a burden to others who would prefer not to bear…you. Years ago, I attempted suicide twice. So, I started some medication and seemed to be evening out to what I thought brought me pretty close to respectable. Apparently not. Recently, I went through something that was driving me to the edge. Sitting around writing letters about who gets my motorcycles and my dog. Opening and closing the stockpile of various pills that I have accumulated over the years. I was running out of options. 

So, the only thing I had left to do, besides triple my medication, was to write. Write about my value and the value of others like me. Write in defense of my existence and the existence of others like me. Write for life and scream into the void. Saying that I am not wrong or bad or broken. And neither are the rest of us. The things that I have been writing are a reclamation of my self-love and a politics of refusal to more than just respectability; they are a politics of refusal to my feelings of thwarted belonging and perceived burdensomeness—to my feelings of utter worthlessness and failure at existence. Philosophy saved my life at 22 by giving me a way out of a life that would have killed me sooner rather than later. Philosophy gave me something to cling to over a lifetime of spinouts and breakdowns. Just out of sheer stubbornness, I refused to let myself drown because I felt as if there was so much more that I needed to say. And philosophy saved me again, just the other day, from a despair so deep that it seemed as if I was in the very deepest part of the pit of hell. 

Having a voice means everything to someone who feels like no one cares about the things that they have to say. For this reason, I always say that philosophy can feel like a home for the Mad, even when others think that we are just bad.   

By now, Shay, you have published a series of articles on Madness. Please summarize some of the central arguments of these publications.

For the most part, my pieces focus on the injustice of the stigmas and stereotypes and the refusal to find any value in people with BPD, especially in their distinctive BPD traits. Speaking out about my diagnosis has always been a point of self-pride and self-love. But finally writing about it has felt like a practice of self-defence to literally protect my life. 

“Am I Safe Enough for You Now?” is written in direct response to a severely traumatic experience that I had recently. But it articulates a struggle with which I have fought for most of my life. As a result of this experience, I was “forced,” “unwillingly,” but not explicitly, to triple my medication or, metaphorically, lose my life. In the case of the recent experience, I knew that I would lose my life, literally. This traumatic experience was directly tied to my personality and how I can come across due to my unregulated affective expressions. As I discuss in the paper, many people who are Mad do not hate themselves for being who they are. Some Mad folks, including me, quite love who they are because of the way that their Madness traits can shape their life, even though sometimes the Madness goes awry and wreaks havoc. Not all Mad people are Mad all the time, nor do all Mad people want to make their Madness go away.

In the paper, I set out to analyze specific virtues of Madness that go unrecognized by people who are not Mad because these people regard 5 minutes of discomfort as more weighty than 55 minutes of uniquely practiced excellence. People who are not Mad do not feel comfortable with expressions of Madness, especially BPD, and so subject Mad people to practices of blame, punishment, and ostracization until the Mad person finally chooses—or caves—to medicate heavily enough that they no longer are the person that they were before. In doing so, they kill off all of their unique virtues that come along with their Madness. But at least they are now tolerable and acceptable to the affective norms of the Sane. So, in “Am I Safe Enough for You Now?” I argue that people with BPD experience severe forms of epistemic injustice and are also subjected to a deep and extreme form of material violence, that is, they are forced to take substances that literally alter their brain to change who they are to be considered “appropriate.” 

I wrote a piece on Women and Madness in Philosophy for the APA Blog. This piece was more straightforward insofar as it speaks to the experiences of Mad persons in academia, and philosophy, more specifically. Lots of people struggle with Madness; and Madness can—and does—ruin many people’s lives. Academia is not the worst place to be Mad, but it is its own unique place, that erects significantly unique barriers to navigate because so much of an academic’s identity and competency are tied up with their appearance as Sane and rational.

Philosophy itself is so perilous for the Mad for this reason; that is, we not only have to struggle with institutions denying us tenure and forcing us out because we don’t “fit,” are “difficult,” “irrational,” or (as people whisper in the hallways) “crazy,” we also have to worry about the fact that our very ability to philosophize rests in our disembodied, non-emotional, objective capacities to exercise rationality. Anything short of this marks us as failed thinkers and, in fact, precludes us from the category of legitimate thinkers at all. I speak to my experiences in academia as a Mad person, and very specific others, because so many people talk about disability inclusiveness but they marginalize the “pathological.” Those who are all about inclusivity in philosophy may speak to the brilliance or creativity of the Mad, but they do nothing to accommodate and include them. 

In addition, I have written a chapter for a forthcoming Oxford Handbook and a forthcoming Routledge Handbook on psychopathologies for clinical practitioners. One of the chapters, which is titled “Living to Die: BPD and Enduring Suicide Attempts,” outlines the phenomenology of existential boredom as the foundation for BPDer’s heightened, purposeful impulsivity and risk taking. In this chapter, I explain how some BPDers live to die to prevent themselves from engaging in suicidal behavior precisely because that attitude of living to die gives them that very risk as a thrill rather than an outcome. In turn, I make prescriptions for how clinical practitioners should look at the risk-taking behaviors of some BPDers to better understand their actions as strategic rather than always hysterically impulsive. The other piece, which is titled “Gendered Body Bias in BPD Testimony: Why We Need a Feminist Enactivism in Psychiatry”, will be co-written with Susi Ferrarello.  

I have been blending my specialization in embodied cognition with my work on BPD. Others work on embodied cognition and psychopathology, but their claims about BPD are abysmal, insulting, and deeply uninformed. Furthermore, the extent to which BPD is highly gendered in the literature—including the use of very gendered, very patronizing descriptions and clinical prescriptions in much of it—entails that the use of embodied cognition in the philosophy of psychiatry really needs to have a wakeup call regarding the broadly unjust, and specifically sexist, practice of research and analysis. I think that this situation would improve through the development of a specifically feminist version of embodied cognition that offered clinicians and doctors new ways to think about how they assess, evaluate, treat, and simply talk about women with BPD. I suppose that if they choose to ignore this feminist version, then they should be regarded as totally fine with the abuse to which many women are directly subjected due to their “objective research.” 

Shay, you currently hold the position of Scholar-in-Residence for Atlanta’s public art program. Your project combines experimental philosophy and empirical research. What are the main features and aims of the project and how will these elements of the project be sought?

This project is sort of massive and I have gotten myself into some shenanigans for which I might not be fully prepared. But that is sort of my way. I aim for great things by jumping in head first. I cannot really be innovative if I stick to the few things that I already know how to do. 

The project, which is highly experimental, is called “Public Performance Art, Democracy, and Epistemic Injustice.” The results of this project will be folded into my current manuscript, Performance Art as Democratic Deliberation and the Power of Embodied Meta-Linguistic Acts, which is currently on hold so that I can do the experiments through the Atlanta residency. Putting the book on hold also gives me time to work on the Madness stuff. 

In this residency, I will do applied research on the role of public performance art in public democratic spaces. Because dancing can be a political praxis that takes place across the material and perceptual horizons from other bodies, I want to use experiments to examine how body-body reason-giving is possible across space and time, which is necessary to understand dancing as deliberative in a public space. Importantly, I think that dancing has distinctive issues related to epistemic injustice. Through the experiments, I aim to show the real—rather than metaphorical— communicative potential for successful embodied communication in the public sphere through dancing. I want to see whether creative movement—in action—can proffer explicit communication from the body and can be given uptake by another body. 

I suppose that the experiments are the exciting part; so, I will outline some of them in this interview. I plan to measure the effects of public modes of performance art on the perceptual modes and attention spans of passersby. The performance art set-up is mine. I worked with Tony Chemero, a philosopher of cognitive science who runs an experimental lab at the University of Cincinnati. With the support of the UNCF Mellon program, I will hire several experimental performance artists to do “organic” “pop-up” performances in the public park sections of the Atlanta Beltline, where it would be rather improbable to run into performance art in the wild. There will be no announcements, no audiences, and no obvious filming of any kind. The experiments are going to be truly stealthy. I will be recording the passersby to measure the amount of attention that they pay to the performers. I will devise default measurements without the artists and ways to compare certain features of the videos to measure changes. Software programs that run facial recognition on the video will measure dynamics that can be indicative of indices of affect. I will also run a few experiments in a lab using a force plate to measure bodily changes in the passersby when viewing the performance art. 

So far, I have selected a break-dancer, a mime, a hand balancer, a belly dancer, a Butoh artist, an air and ground dancer, and a founder of an experimental theatre group. I also plan to try it myself, since I am a big proponent of putting my money where my mouth is. Their assignment is to find ways to use their craft to choreograph an explicit embodied narrative intended to engage the passersby. Rather than a project of public art that is art in the public, the project will be public art in the sense that it will be art for the public and with the public and therefore can better aim towards its democratic potential. 

I am extremely proud to say that my current student Valencia White will be going to University of Cincinnati to work under Tony. I will be hiring her as my graduate research assistant to assess the videos once the experiments are complete. She will also be helping me scout locations and think about the tech before she leaves for her first year.    

[Description of image below: photo that depicts a circus performance shot of Shay whose long hair flies in the air as she does harness work against a reflective, distorted mylar background.]  

Shay, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners can seek out for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

Honestly, I never really know what to say to end or to recommend.

Shay, your responses in this interview have been so forthright and compelling that I think no one who listened to/read it will feel deprived of what they came for. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Shay Welch’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, June 19, 2024, for the hundred and eleventh installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.