The Spectre Of Institutionalization: Disability, Law, Performance, And Policy At The Pennhurst State School & Hospital And Pennhurst Asylum

Abstract

This dissertation combines archival and ethnographic research to investigate the Pennhurst State School & Hospital (PSSH), a custodial institution for dis/abled people turned haunted attraction, primarily staffed by dis/abled performers. I ask how Pennhurst became a performance venue which commodifies violence for entertainment, while paradoxically fostering community for the very people the former institution sought to eliminate. In doing so, this dissertation uncovers how institutionalization constructs and enforces legal, medical, political, and social notions of disability, producing identities which simultaneously dehumanize and sustain dis/abled people. I theorize institutionalization as an ongoing social process and show how one dis/abled community uses performance to reinterpret and reclaim it. Chapters examine the commitment process to the PSSH through the lens of disability, law, and performance (Act I), and compare official “accounts” of care at the PSSH with the experiences of those forced to exist at the institution (Act II). The first half of the dissertation ends by examining the lawsuits that closed the PSSH, and Pennhurst’s influence on current disability policies (Intermezzo). The second half of the dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of the contemporary Pennhurst Asylum haunted attraction (PA). The PA’s immersive performances of horror elide fact with fantasy and conceal ongoing violence against dis/abled people (Act III). The dissertation ends by showing how (in Act IV) the community of dis/abled and nondisabled people who work for PA perform vernacular dis/ability heritage work through their collective inhabitation of and care for this former institution. In doing so, they reclaim the space once intended for their segregation from society to create a space for dis/abled people made by dis/abled people.