Conclusion: Expanding the Concept of ‘Containment’

Abstract

This chapter conceptualizes the notion of ‘containment’ in its different capacities and forms, reconsidering what it means to live within an institutional context and to experience institutionalization, taking care to think through how gender intersects with other markers of systemic oppression, including race, Indigeneity, sexuality, and class. Intersectional oppressions impact how we think about and discursively constitute different groups of people as mad, sick, or mentally ill and how these discursive characterizations and classifications contribute to institutional/ization efforts to contain, surveil, control, and otherwise re/transform marginalized bodies. Drawing from the discussions offered throughout the chapters we consider how this plays out differently for men, women, and transgender people, noting similarities across different institutional sites. It is our hope that this collection will inspire critical discussion about the role and power we continue to afford psy discourses and practices to name, identify, classify, and intervene upon the lives of disparate groups of people and how gender and other identity and status markers come to affect the material experiences of men and women caught up in different institutional forms of containment.