Come Aboard Our Ship of Folly will examine the work of feminist artist, writer, and anti-psychiatry activist Kate Millett in order to trace a series of significant but overlooked connections between feminism and political critiques of psychiatric authority in postwar American art and aesthetic practice. This essay will argue that both the feminist and anti-psychiatric dimensions of Millett’s work—as well as the correlations between them—can only be fully understood when considered alongside her career-spanning engagement with specific formal and aesthetic questions in her art practice.
Leon J. Hilton is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University, where he researches and teaches about modern and contemporary theatre and performance, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Before joining the faculty at Brown he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and received his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His writing has appeared in GLQ, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and TDR/The Drama Review, where he was also Managing Editor from 2011-2013.