Liat Ben-moshe

“Foucault’s conceptualization of genealogy, which is largely about uncovering subjugated, disqualified knowledge. Foucault identifies two elements within this term. First, it is the buried histories that have been subsumed by “formal systemization.”1 It is these excavated “blocks of historical knowledges” that have been obscured that he terms subjugated knowledges. The second meaning of subjugated knowledges, besides being buried, is forms of knowing that had been disqualified, considered nonsensical or nonscientific. It is “the knowledge of the psychiatrized, the patient, the nurse, the doctor, that is parallel to, marginal to, medical knowledge, the knowledge of the delinquent, what I would call, if you like, what people know.”2 By stating that it is the knowledge of what people know, Foucault is not referring to the taken for granted or dominant form of knowledge circulating but localized, particular, specific knowledges, what we might also call marginalized, experiential, or embodied knowledge.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“As Rachel Gorman claims about current-day mad pride organizing, it is hard to decenter whiteness in mad organizing if people of color can’t afford to take up the mad identity, because of a variety of reasons, including already living under surveillance by medico-judicial apparatuses, not having access to mental health care, and the seeming irrelevance of mad movements to the lived experience of racialized and colonized people.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition