Ritualizing Madness: Case Files as Sites of Enforced Performativity, 1894-1950


 In this article, I argue that case files kept by doctors, nurses, and attendants in Canadian Asylums, act as sites of performative madness enforced the observer. applying Foucauldian performance theories, look at production knowledge, influence power, which allow for encoding a ritualized behaviour is repeatable outside individual being recorded mad. To illustrate point, use several from Brockville Asylum to highlight how certain physical characteristics behaviours were pathologized support medical argument inmate question was fact mad belonged asylum. suggest one not born mad, but they become through ideas madness, observer’s categorization characteristic or mad.