Media coverage often frames violent crime in terms of mental disability, especially psychiatric diagnosis. In Mad at School, Margaret Price describes how reportage on school shootings creates an “overdetermined narrative of madness leading inexorably to a violent explosion” (146). To support this narrative, shooters’ lives are scrutinized for evidence of madness, with a particular focus on what they said and how they said it. Their words are reduced to mere indicators of pathology. Building on Price’s research, I examine the case of Jared Loughner, a schizophrenic man who opened fire on a crowd while attempting to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011.
In the wake of the shooting, portrayals of Loughner hewed to the madness/violence narrative. Speculation about Loughner’s mental state began immediately. The press focused on YouTube videos he had produced in the months leading up to the shooting. These videos, which news articles described as “disturbing” and “rambling,” were cited as evidence that Loughner was “dangerously mentally ill” and had long harbored a propensity for violence. As in the school shootings that Price examines, most journalists interpreted Loughner’s video-recorded words not as meaningful rhetoric but as psychiatric symptoms.
Drawing on concepts from disability studies and rhetorical theory, I analyze representations of mental illness in media coverage of Loughner’s case. Implicit in these representations is the premise that people with mental disabilities lack what Price and other scholars (Prendergast, Lewiecki-Wilson) call “rhetoricity,” i.e., “the ability to be received as a valid human subject” (26). To challenge this premise, I then perform a rhetorical analysis of Loughner’s YouTube videos and argue that audiences should accommodate, rather than fearing or dismissing, mentally disabled rhetors.
About the presenterAnders Rains Bruce
Anders Bruce graduated from James Madison University in 2013 with his B.A. in Writing and Rhetoric. He now works as a tutor in Baltimore and volunteers weekly at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. He hopes to attend graduate school in 2015 to study disability and rhetoric. In his spare time, he enjoys running and reading science fiction.