Race, Gender, and Genetic Privacy in Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me.

Abstract

This essay analyzes two 1990s memoirs of women struggling with hereditary mental illness, who express anxiety about revealing their conditions and about whether their revelations will violate the privacy of their close relations. Midcentury confessional poetry influences the modes of self-disclosure in Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me (1998), though the memoirs feature concerns about genetics and biological psychiatry absent from the 1960s confessional poetry. As we show, the language surrounding mental illness structures women's privacy in clinical settings and contains gendered and racial barriers to authentic self-representation. Intersectional language allows women to give voice to their conditions and to access a private identity on their own terms.