Language Lives in My Wounds: Personality Disorders, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Vulnerability
Ahana Mulgaonker is an independent scholar and writer based in Austin, Texas, who writes outside the margins of academia on a blog called Tenderly Borderline. This is the first time she has spoken publicly about her work, and it is a conversation worth hearing closely. Her essay, The Politics of Vulnerability, argues that borderline personality “disorder” and other personality “disorder” diagnoses are not descriptions of individual pathology but political acts. They function, she argues, to absorb and erase the evidence of structural violence, redirecting attention from the systems that wound people toward the people who carry those wounds. She calls this PD phobia: not simply discrimination against people with these diagnoses, but a broader social fear and disgust directed at visible woundedness itself, a way of absolving society of ethical responsibility by blaming those it has harmed. Ahana traces this through her own experience: immigrant displacement, upper caste Indian family dynamics, childhood abuse, heterosexism, and ableism. The diagnosis did not explain what happened to her but instead covered the tracks of it. The conversation moves through several ideas that RTM listeners will want to sit with. Reification, borrowed from Marxist theory, describes how the complex histories and power relations that produce a person's distress get erased and displaced onto individual personality traits, just as the sweatshop disappears into the price tag of an iPhone. ‘Childism’, an emerging framework, names the oppression of children as the foundation of all other oppressions, with PD phobia functioning as its continuation into adulthood, protecting adult authority by diagnosing away the evidence of what that authority does to children. And emotional regulation, the clinical standard used to measure whether someone is managing their distress appropriately, she reframes as a demand that the hurt conform to the same system that caused it. She also introduces what she is developing as anti-sanity theory: an extension of anti-psychiatry that interrogates not just psychiatry but the broader social norms of sanity itself, and the ways sanity naturalizes the status quo while casting resistance to it as disorder. Bernadine connects all of this to the lived reality RTM listeners know: that society's response to distress is to silence it, medicate it, and seclude it, and that asking someone to behave as if they have not been harmed is its own form of harm. This is a conversation that keeps opening up the more you sit with it.
Find Ahana at tenderlyborderline.substack.com and on Instagram and Bluesky at @antisanitygirl.
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