New Materialist Encounters with the Borderline

Unstable Knowledges
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-01822-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 168 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 408 g

Reihe: Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities

This innovative book, written by an author with borderline experiences of her own, explores the lived experience known as “borderline personality disorder”. It draws on neuroqueer approaches and feminist new materialist philosophy to highlight the potential of the unstable knowledges produced in the borderland.

Resisting either embracing the clinical definition of borderline personality disorder or rejecting the diagnosis as a misogynistic construct, this book focuses on the ontological aspects of borderline experience, exploring unstable and indeterminate thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and selves. It illuminates how paying attention to these unique ways of seeing and knowing can provide alternatives to the “cruel optimism” of medicalised ways of knowing BPD and challenge the harmful dualistic thinking that reinforces them.

Demonstrating how we might understand borderline experience as a diagnostic, philosophical, or mystical mode for knowing self and world through unique orientations in time, space, and reality, this book is an important contribution to the medical and health humanities and critical mental health. It simultaneously provides a fresh new way of thinking about the borderline and offers new critical perspectives and interventions for the wider landscapes of disability studies, medical humanities, and justice-oriented disciplines.

It will be of use to a range of disciplines and professions with an interest in mental health, including healthcare, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and disability studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lewis, Francesca

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete Psychiatrie, Sozialpsychiatrie, Suchttherapie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie Psychopathologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Gesundheitssoziologie, Medizinsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Invalidität, Krankheit und Abhängigkeit: Soziale Aspekte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Hope is a cruel mistress: why we need unstable knowledges, 1. Critiquing BPD/affirming borderline: Traversing the methodological borderland, 2. Borderline becomings: A new materialist reading of a history of instability, 3. Reading mad knowledges: Narrative, diagnostic, resistant, and diffractive methodologies, 4. Becoming uncategorisable: Borderline as diagnostician, 5. Becoming indeterminate: Borderline as philosopher, 6. Becoming unreal: Borderline as mystic, 7. Conclusion: Opening up the field of possibility for unstable knowledges

Über Autor(innen)

Francesca Lewis teaches in the School of Humanities, Philosophy and Religion at York St John University. Her research focuses on diagnostic cultures, neuroqueer ontologies, and new materialist epistemologies. She is co-founder (with Veronica Heney) of the Mad Feeling Collective, an interdisciplinary research collective interested in lived experience, affect-led engagements with madness on TV.