Abstract

This article examines the stigma surrounding mental health, drawing out implications for Christian theological anthropology and ethics. As I argue, the stigma surrounding maternal madness engenders the sociocultural and religious veiling of affective and sexual difference within Western Christian milieu reflecting a heteropatriarchal framework for articulating the value of bodies, emotions, and control. In practice and theory, this framework places mothers with affective mood disorders outside of economies of care and goodness. Such logic veils the ways in which maternal madness calls us to embrace the transformative power of grace as dis-ease through welcoming unpredictability within God, self, and others; resisting easy fixes; and actively discerning the politics of emotion.