A college professor at a university in the States will be using the enigma that is Kanye West as his primary subject in a case study on mental illness.
A college professor in the States will use Kanye West as his primary subject for a lecture on mental illness titled Name One Genius That Ain’t Crazy: Kanye West and the Politics of Self-Diagnosis.
Titled Name One Genius That Ain’t Crazy: Kanye West and the Politics of Self-Diagnosis, the lecture will be given by Dr. Jeffrey McCune, Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at St. Louis’s Washington University.
According to Hypebeast, Dr. McCune will argue that we label Kanye as “crazy” because he acts outside the constructs that are built for him. “[U]ltimately what I’m getting at in this lecture is not just about Kanye, it’s also about the larger notion of crazy and how we utilise it,” he said.
McCune also plans to argue how race intensifies the label “crazy” as a mental illness versus the usage of “crazy” to refer to a type of innovator.
Talking about his overall goal, he said: “I want to give people permission to be enraged. Give people permission to be upset, to be angry, to be frustrated. Give people permission to have moments where they break. Give people permission to have moments where they experience depression. I want to give them permission to have those moments without being characterised as being some type of deviant figure in the community. I don’t want to take away that experience and call it crazy. It’s reasonable. And it must be addressed with love, compassion, care, generosity.”
[via Complex]
