Open AccessBeyond the Feeble Mind: Foregrounding the Personhood of Inmates with Significant Intellectual Disabilities in the Era of Institutionalization
Author(s) -
Holly Allen,
Erin Fuller
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
disability studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2159-8371
pISSN - 1041-5718
DOI - 10.18061/dsq.v36i2.5227
Subject(s) - foregrounding , institutionalisation , historiography , personhood , intellectual disability , disability studies , idiot , intellectual history , backwardness , embodied cognition , period (music) , psychology , sociology , gender studies , political science , aesthetics , law , psychiatry , epistemology , literature , art , philosophy , economics , economic growth
This essay explores the experiences of persons with significant intellectual disabilities at the Vermont State School for Feebleminded Children (later Brandon Training School) in the period 1915-1960. We discuss the limits of existing histories of intellectual disability in accounting for the distinct experiences of significantly intellectually disabled people. This essay works to correct the tendency to define the nominal intellectual disability of "morons" and "borderline" cases—both in the past and in disability historiography of the past—against the abject, embodied difference of the "low-grade idiot" or "imbecile." The history we offer has implications for the present-day disability rights movement.