Lecture Response: The Freight Elevator?

David Gissen’s lecture traced a throughline between radical disability politics and broader anti-capitalist critique, centering groups like the Socialist Patient Collective (SPK). Emerging from 1970s anti-institutional movements, SPK reframed illness as a systemic condition produced by capitalist society, radicalizing the “medical” model that disability movements had operated within. Rather than rehabilitating individuals to fit the workplace, SPK called for dismantling the economic structures that produce alienation, drawing explicitly on Karl Marx. In this view, psychiatry and medicine function less as neutral sciences and more as tools of normalization, where even “treatment,” including medication, can become a form of institutional control.
A central thread of the lecture was how disability and governance intersect in the United States and Japan, resisting eugenics, institutionalization, and state control over bodies, advocating instead for patient-run care, collective living, and what we might now call crip-technoscience. Parallel movements, including Japan’s Green Lawn movement and affiliations with the Black Panther Party, extended these critiques globally, advocating for patient-run care and collective living, even as they faced repression. It’s important to remember this, especially now, that if creativity can serve as political rhetoric, it can and should also serve as a force for resistance.
Entangled with histories of measurement, performance testing, and eugenic thinking, the built environment begins to feel less like a neutral base and more like an opinionated bouncer, deciding who gets in and who doesn’t. The irony of hosting such a lecture in an inaccessible space like Hastings Hall at Yale underscored the persistence of structural barriers—I thought, as I rode the freight elevator with a group of disabled people to leave Hastings Hall.