Airless Spaces and mental illness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“the author of Airless Spaces is no longer… even a subject, of feminist history.” Kathi Weeks, ‘The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s.’ (2015)

Somebody Has to Stand up for  Shulamith Firestone

The implications of that quote above is not only that Shulamith Firestone has been kicked out -no, let me be more refined – evicted by feminists of academia from feminist history, but that her worth as a human being has been diminished only because she dared to write and publicize her experience, and that of other women, as a mental patient in and out of a psychiatric hospital.

You do the math: if she (ever) had worth and value  as a feminist, by removing her from feminist history her value didn’t increase, it diminished.

Yes, you are doing like the men of patriarchy who have always ‘taken away’ from women history. Congrats: you are aiding and abating patriarchy.

My name is Lourdes Cintron, I was Shulamith Firestone’s first mental health case manager, the one to whom she dedicated Airless Spaces. Thus, I must know something about her, how she battled the illness, and about how she came to write Airless Spaces, among other things. True, I can’t put my experience with her in fancy writing, won’t even try it. But as I always did, I’ll stick my neck out for her now. I’ve got nothing to lose or fear. My hope is to somehow motivate someone with writing skills to take on writing the 51 years overdue biography (there is none as of today) of this much despised by some feminists but exceptional human being.

And in the process of their calculations, they have shown their antipathy for mentally ill people. Now she is so worthless to some feminists  that they don’t even want her near them on account that she came out officially as mentally ill

It is the kind of unstated, parenthetically subtext in the ‘feminist critique’ quoted above and publicized in the internet by some feminists of academia that has moved me to start this blog, to put back what they have taken out: her humanity and dignity.

I believe that Shulamith wanted her struggle with mental illness be part of her legacy. That’s why she wrote Airless Spaces and collected all the records about her illness, as I discuss here. She knew she would be discredited because of her illness and, paradoxically, could only rely on records and those who knew her struggle to tell the truth of that part of her life.

Today she and her work are being savaged by some fearful feminists of academia afraid that their intellectual work will be discredited if linked to a feminist already discredited by the 2nd wave of feminism as ‘crazy’. And thus no one dares to stand near her or up for her.

Shulamith Firestone’s last book, ‘Airless Spaces’ (AS), has been received by the general public with admiration and compassion, and with scorn by some in the feminists’ camp. But running through almost every comment posted about it is the specter of stigma and prejudice expressed as fear and or repugnance of the stories about surviving mental illness in it. One ‘feminist’ went so far as to say that AS “seems designed explicitly to discourage sympathy”. Wow.

For me it’s not easy to tell the part of her story I know personally.

First, as you already noticed, I’m no academic, no intellectual, no professional nor expert in mental health; and I still think in Spanish and have to translate my thoughts to English. So I give here only opinions, some well-informed, others not so much so, and some as witness of the events. Secondly, it is painful for me to go back and remember what happened and what could and should have happened.

Feel free to post your comments. I’m looking particularly for those who met Shulamith to share their memories, especially if they tell their story with compassion. There’s a lot of demeaning and demoting of her going out there, but not one article praising or painting a loving-compassionate-empathic picture of her.

Let’s start doing that here, please.