Free Britney? Free Us All.
Does the “Free Britney” movement advance or undermine disability justice?
After years of speculation that she has been held, medicated, and generally manipulated by a nefarious network of familial and state actors, on June 23, Britney Spears finally spoke.
During a 23-minute statement to a Los Angelos Superior Court judge, Spears explained the details of her conservatorship with excruciating clarity:
“I worked seven days a week, no days off, which in California the only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking, making anyone work, work against their will, taking all their possessions away — credit card, cash, phone, passport card — and placing them in a home where they work with the people who live with them. They all lived in the house with me — the nurses, the 24–7 security. There was one chef that came there and cooked for me daily, during the weekdays. They watched me change every day — naked — morning, noon, and night. My body — I had no privacy door for my room, I gave eight gals of blood a week.”
To many, this was shocking. It confirmed the comments that have been left on her social media accounts, and validated what rabid fans have been saying for years — that Spears is being controlled.
As a Mad and disabled person, I try to avoid public spectacles. This one has been particularly distressing, not because I think Spears shouldn’t be liberated, but because her experience hits so close to home. And, even worse, the rhetoric around her is antithetical to freedom for myself and many others.
First, those railing the loudest have actively harmed disability and Mad rights organizing by claiming that Britney is “sane.” Sanity is inherently a product of power relations, and by distancing one celebrity from the millions who live under similar coercive regimes, you’ve thrown us under the bus.
Next, Britney is not experiencing this because she’s a celebrity. You know about her experience precisely because she is a celebrity. There are people who are involuntary institutionalized at your local hospitals right now, who are being forcibly medicated, tied in 4 point restraints, and held in padded rooms. Their cell phones have been confiscated and they have no access to technology. Do you care about them?
And, most importantly, this conversation reproduces the same conditions that make psychiatric violence possible. The “Free Britney” movement individualizes what is fundamentally a collective struggle at the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, ableism, and sanism.
To expand:
Psychiatry emerged as a “legitimate” profession in the 18th c. during economic upheaval in Europe. The unemployed were “Mad” because to not work was unfathomable, and these people were confined to institutions alongside beggars and thieves. In other words, Madness has always been tied to productivity. Psychiatry was then exported via colonialism and became a crucial part of nation building projects. The docile body, the laboring body, and the “sane” body-mind are inextricable from the consolidation of economic power by, in, and through the state.
In other words, liberation for Mad and disabled people demands interrogating our assumptions about what is means to be “productive” (and, by extension, virtuous, moral, and good). Claiming that Britney isn’t “crazy” due to her output reinscribes hierarchies of ability. And, by suggesting that those who can’t work “truly” deserve what is being done to her, you’ve done the job of psychiatry (and therefore the state) on its behalf. This is by design.
Also realize that arguments about who is “redeemable” always privilege wealth and whiteness. No one deserves freedom because they are palatable or have made you personally feel positive.
When analyzing phenomena, then, we must always remember that the Canadian and U.S. occupied territories are settler colonial projects built on rigid, binary conceptions of “badness” and “goodness.” Those who deviate too far from the latter are penalized through a million, often imperceptible (but sometimes overt) mechanisms. Returning to the idea of redeemability and its relationship to class and race: Ask yourself who gets labeled “sick” (that is, bad but capable of becoming good) and who is always-already “bad”? What traits does each group have in common and how is each disparately controlled?
In practical terms, who gets sent to prison or murdered, and who is forcibly medicated, involuntarily committed to psychiatric wards, and coerced into behaving as a happy, healthy, productive citizen? What are the consequences when one can’t or won’t do this, and how do the systems we’re embedded in legitimize social exclusion as a reasonable end?
Each of these questions has concrete, obvious answers. These dynamics are present not just into homeless encampments, shelters, impoverished neighborhoods, and regions that are segregated on the bases of race and culture, but also in places that are categorically “normal” (i.e. the suburbs). They are omnipresent and invisible. As networks, we are also mapped onto places that also have “bad” and “good” connotations, and our movement is mostly confined to spaces that correlate with our social roles. This is why perceptions of “reality” depend on our social locations. This is why abject suffering is normalized for some and shocking for so many others.
I have been purposefully broad, here. Ultimately, though, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and heteronormativity are THE structures that organize our lives. Once we’ve recognized this, we will no longer be surprised by the news cycle. And we will have no choice but to become abolitionists, not just of prisons, but of the police, psychiatry, and the state itself, for all collude to achieve the same or similar outcomes.
