Demanding Money with Menaces: Fear & Loathing in the Archipelago of Confinement.

This article aims to expose the ways in which, from the mid-19th-century onwards, professions and institutions of confinement have both stoked and assuaged emotions toward people marked with intellectual or cognitive impairments, and consequently profited from the regime of truth they have helped to construct around what are now commonly called Learning Difficulties. Under this regime, people marked with intellectual impairments or perceived deficits are represented as menacing or risky Others; at the same time, the professions and institutions of confinement assume authority over ‘the problem’ by relocating and segregating stigmatized individuals and assuring the public that ‘the problem’ is under control. Beginning by alluding to the birth of the asylums in the mid-19th-century, I then concentrate on two periods, the early 20th- and 21st-centuries, to illustrate how this process continues to this day. This process, which initially had charitable aims and thus required income generation, now serves ablenationalist interests whilst also creating significant corporate profits across various locations, widely dispersed across what might be termed the archipelago of confinement. I conclude that it confines and denigrates not only disabled people, but the professionals charged with caring for them