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Insist on Your Sanity: An Interview with Kate Millett

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... The person who fights for so many good things like civil rights, women and gay rights and protests against wars has to have reasons or let say stimulation why she is an activist. As (Penney, 2003) However, twenty years later Millett's closest family decided she has mental problems and incarcerated her into one of those so hated hospitals. She was there at least four times. ...
... She has never faced up to betrayal of her husband, sister and mother. (Penney, 2003) Finally, the last stimulus as the icing on the cake, the already mentioned lectures only pushed Kate forward to a new life. ...
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Kate Millett (1934–2017) is best known for her text Sexual Politics (1970). Despite her sudden rise to popularity in the women’s liberation movement, she was quickly dismissed and forgotten, even while continuing to produce new works. Victoria Hesford and Sheila Jeffreys have, respectively, examined the role of homophobia and shifts in feminist theory on Millett’s cataclysmic rise and fall. Expanding on these accounts, the article addresses how sanist discourse pathologized Millett’s bisexuality and polyamory as symptomatic of mental illness to delegitimize her critiques of heteronormative patriarchal psychiatry. It draws a connection between Millett’s public outing in 1970, her first involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in 1973, and the unfavourable and problematic literary responses to her memoirs Flying in 1974 and The Loony-Bin Trip in 1990. Relying on Maria Rovito’s Madwoman theory, the article argues literary critics participate in the silencing and pathologization of Millett by continuing to frame her as mentally ill, instead of as a survivor of psychiatric abuse. It seeks to demonstrate that Madwoman theory is an ethical feminist disability methodology for literary criticism that restores Millett’s voice by unveiling the intersections of heteronormative monosexism and sanism that functions to silence queer Madwomen through epistemic violence and social death.
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