The world of the mentally disabled is in constant flux.

Often shuffled indiscriminately between hospitals, homelessness, prisons, and continuous social stigma, the mentally ill can find themselves isolated and confined for the majority of their lives. In Catherine Prendergasts essay, On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability, she examines the missing voice of the mentally disabled in rhetoric but does not go further in search for the effects of this silence. If the voicelessness of the mentally disabled is coupled with Foucaults causal situations, it becomes clear that the absence from rhetoric perpetuates and enforces their incarceration by highlighting and defining their vulnerability. Beginning her essay, Prendergast describes describes a close friendship with a woman named Barbara, a woman who is living with mental illness and diagnoses from schizophrenia to bipolar with psychotic features (47). The value of this relationship leads Prendergast to investigate the absence of the mentally disableds voice from rhetoric. She explores the criminalization and categorization of the mentally disabled and the complexity and stigma of the label eventually stating, to be disabled mentally is to be disabled rhetorically (Prendergast 57). During Prendergasts argument to credit the mentally disabled with a place in rhetoric, she emphasizes the incarceration of the mentally disabled as a consequence for their tongues being silenced; For the mentally disabled the threat is in speech This illogical fear is what accounts for the present banishing of the severely mentally ill to stream grates, dumpsters, jail cells, and isolation tanks (58). But Prendergast fails to acknowledge the possibility that this speech is dismissed because of the discomfort many feel when confronted with the irrational tradition to imprison and isolate the mentally disabled. When she mentions Barbara has at times compared the managed care organization that handles her outpatient treatment to the Gestapo,

forcing her into voluntary commitment (50) Prendergast highlights one aspect of that very discomfort. Barbara, a mentally ill individual, uses her voice to call attention to the callous system to which she and so many others are subjected. Barbaras exclusion from rhetoric may be due to both her frankness and banishment. Though Prendergast chooses the word banish she uses it to structure any type of exile or isolation. The body of the mentally ill becomes a husk to be placed; whether imprisoned or isolated, the body is punished for the faculty of the mind. As Foucault explains: in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain political economy of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use lenient methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at the issue the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution, and their submission. (25) Foucaults nod to submission particularly concerns the situation of the mentally disabled; the force of a vulnerable body is submission. Though voiceless and subjected, Barbara did not want to commit herself, her body, to a hospital. Her vulnerability as a silenced, mentally ill individual, however, made it possible for the medical staff to coerce her body to be submitted to a hospital, a confined location. Thus a power structure is established between the forceful and the submissive, the medical community and the mentally ill. Foucault examines power relations in situations of imprisonment and notes, the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the privilege, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions(26). Power is so

easily exercised on the mentally disabled because as a vulnerable body, there is no capability to exercise power conversely. Even within the prison system, other inmates, in a seemingly similar powerless situation, exercise their own power over the mentally ill (Prendergast 51). A new hierarchy of power is established: guard over prisoner, prisoner over mentally disabled prisoner. The vulnerability of the mentally ill eliminates any ability to position power convincingly. An exercise of power is necessary in order to claim definition and knowledge. As Prendergast succinctly states, If people think youre crazy, they dont listen to you (57). Because the mentally disabled lack the ability to implement power, they lack the ability to define themselves. Foucault, however, describes a political anatomy, as a necessary object of knowledge, not power: One would be concerned with the body politic, as a set of material elements and techniques for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge (28). Knowledge, therefore, is already gifted to the mentally disabled by the very nature of being human. The established knowledge of the self, however, does not benefit the mentally ill because they cannot assert the power or gain the recognition to present their own definition of self. Rather, their knowledge is only accepted in the refusal to be declared officially disabled, a cue to the medical community the mentally ill has no insight and thus cannot identify themselves (Prendergast 47, 53). Even though Foucault grants the knowledge of the self, it cannot be identified within the mentally disabled because of the exposure and submission to the power of anothers knowledge.

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Works Cited Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. Prendergast, Catherine. "On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability." Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Carbonvale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 4560. Print.