Emphasis Type="Italic"Concubitu Prohibere Vago/

Authors: Ralph Sandland

Publish Date: 2013/03/10

Volume: 21, Issue: 1, Pages: 81-108

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Abstract

This paper interrogates Michel Foucault’s claim that the spread of psychiatric power originated in concerns around the educatability of idiot children in the latter decades of the nineteenth century before being applied to adult “defectives” It is argued that Foucault although partially correct fails adequately to consider the extent to which the base concept of “instinct” was linked in particular ways to female idiot sexuality The paper challenges Foucault’s view through an analysis of a series of nineteenth century cases involving the rape of female idiots arguing that their sexuality was understood in terms of a relation to instinct which manifested in terms of an opposition between dangerousness and vulnerability It then traces that opposition into the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 where it is argued it functioned in a collapsed form—now the vulnerable were dangerous and the dangerous were vulnerable—and in which form it underpinned a psychiatrised regime for the control of mentally defective women through the control of their sexualityThe phrase “Concubitu Prohibere Vago” which I encountered reading Blackstone’s Commentaries Morrison 2001 Comm I 438 translates as “to forbid a promiscuous intercourse” It seems to me to capture the issues with which I am concerned in this paperThe influence of Michel Foucault’s “histories of the present” 1977 31 on contemporary understanding of psychiatry social work and medicine and much else particularly human sexuality has been profound In a number of texts Foucault argued consistently that the benign caring or protective aspects of these “disciplines” merely dissembled their exercise of normative power However as has often been noted Foucault’s work lacks any sustained analysis of the gendered dimensions of power In this article I seek to add to that body of scholarship which is critical of Foucault in this regard My focus is on his explanation of the spread of psychiatric power as a mechanism for the policing of sociocultural norms in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century I will argue that Foucault’s failure to consider gender means that he fundamentally misrepresents the path taken by that developmentThis claim will proceed by way of an analysis of the nineteenth century legal construction of the “sexuality” of women and girls with what would these days be called “learning disability” It is important to understand both of these terms as discursive artefacts and as normative injunctions with existential effects The substantive shape and scope of such terms—what counts as sexual what indicates learning disability what constitutes normalcy what is deviant or abnormal—is not selfevident or inherent Rather such things are determined to some extent at least by their historical limits Contemporary knowledge is the product of the historical and ongoing interplay of truth claims power plays and resistance to power of innovation subversion and appropriation The contemporary term of “learning disability” for example has been the subject of an intense politics over the last several decades The consequence of this has been the traditional medical individualised model of disability—which sees disability as the problem and as inherent to the individual—has given much ground to a “social” model of disability which by contrast “sustains a focus on stigma and exclusion” McRuer 2011 112 Such models understand “disability” as a lived reality to be a consequence of the way in which normative social economic and other structures consciously or otherwise have exclusionary effectsSome reject the term “disability” in favour of “disablement” Oliver and Barnes 2012 seeking in so doing to address two concerns First that the concept of disability shares a common assumption with terms that have fallen out of professional usage terms such as “retarded” “defective” “idiot” and “imbecile” in that all are pejorative or victimblaming Second such terms are also seen as constructive the life experiences of those so labelled are mediated through the discursive frame of the label as a social reality At the start of the period in which I am interested the orthodox term as had been the case for many centuries was “idiot”1 but this term lacked precision and was used interchangeably with the equally ancient term “imbecile” It functioned as little more than a label with very little if any formal substantive content Certainly medical professionals had very little interest in idiots Similarly law had very little to say about idiocy other than recognising that idiots existed and providing irregularly for the management of their affairs Unsworth 1993 This was to change with a series of rape cases beginning in 1846 Thereafter the law had increasingly more to say about idiocy and it articulated its discourse through the vehicle of the sexuality of female idiots In a sense this paper is a study of the development of meanings for existent but vacuous labels and the construction of new ones by law and by discourses articulated in other fields—psychiatry evolutionary biology and eugenics social policy—in ways which were to significantly affect the life experiences of significant numbers of women well into the twentieth century For there can be no starker example of the point that the categories which are developed to name and identify intellectual impairment inform the experiential the material embodiment of the individual than when the consequence of the identification or diagnosis of that individual as a member of the category in question is her sometimes lifetime incarceration in an idiot asylumMy analysis covers the period beginning with the legal construction of the sexuality of female idiots in these cases and traces the husbanding of that construction through to the Liberal Government’s Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 during which period idiocy was both refined and expanded in meaning maturing eventually into the much broader concept of “mental defective” This was not merely a shift in terminology but constituted a significant expansion in the target population In 1820 the asylum doctor JED Esquirol who as will be seen below has a crucial role in the history of idiocy and whose work had set in train the series of events which led amongst many other destinations to the 1913 Act noted that “idiocy is a rare phenomenon among us since out of 7950 insane persons of both sexes there are only 203 idiots” 1845 479 Esquirol was referring only to those detained in an asylum in Paris and no doubt many idiots were housed elsewhere Nonetheless by the time of the 1913 Act “rare phenomenon” could clearly not be used to describe the 133000 “feebleminded” citizens revealed by the 1901 National Census Thomson 1998 21 and the “feebleminded” were only one of the target groups of the 1913 ActThe 1913 Act was intended to provide a longterm solution to the “problem” of the sexuality of “mental defectives” defined to embrace both idiots and imbeciles along with two newer categories of defective person namely the “feebleminded” and “moral imbeciles”2 Although guardianship was an option under the new regime3 the Act is mainly remembered for its implementation a policy of segregation and institutionalisation for those vulnerable and/or dangerous mentally defective adults who were unable to care for themselves or for whom care was not otherwise available By 1939 almost 100000 individuals were under some form of control imposed by the 1913 Act Thomson 1998 2 many more having passed through the system in the intervening years From the start the use of the 1913 Act to control mentally defective women through controlling their sexuality was conspicuous Walmsley 2000Basing itself on the instincts nineteenth century psychiatry is able to bring into the ambit of illness and mental illness…all the serious disorders and little irregularities of conduct that are not strictly speaking due to madness On the basis of the instincts and around what was previously the problem of madness it becomes possible to organize the whole problematic of the abnormal at the level of the most elementary and everyday conduct… In this way instinct becomes the major theme of psychiatry and occupies an increasingly prominent place Foucault 2003a 132

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