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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Spain's "Mad Movement" and its claims to epistemic authority. Using epistemic injustice and labeling theories, I analyze how the movement operates as counter-hegemonic strategy and axis of relational restructuring that challenges psychiatric hegemony.

Paper long abstract

This comunication examines the emergence of the Mad Movement (Movimiento Loco) in Spain within struggles for recognition of difference. Based on ethnographic engagement and analysis of activist discourse, I explore how this movement constitutes a space of convergence for individuals and collectives who have experienced psychiatrization.

Drawing on Miranda Fricker's concept of "epistemic injustice" and labeling theory, I argue that the violence experienced by psychiatrized individuals—both testimonial and hermeneutical—serves as the movement's point of origin. Psychiatric diagnosis operates as a colonizing force over subjectivity, systematically silencing alternative understandings of psychic suffering beyond biomedical frameworks. The Mad Movement emerges as a counter-hegemonic response, creating liminal spaces where individuals can re-subjectivize beyond diagnostic capture.

A central tension concerns the use of madness as an axis of identification. Through analysis of Mad Pride celebrations, activist discourse, and community radio narratives, I demonstrate that the Movement neither defends mad essentialism nor proposes closed definitions of madness. Rather, madness functions as an operational category constructed through articulating oneself as a subject of rights, confronting expert knowledge that has historically foreclosed this possibility.

I argue the struggle centers on relational restructuring rather than identity affirmation, advancing relational autonomy that challenges individualistic conceptions of selfhood. The Movement demands recognition not of a supposed mad condition, but of the right to participate in defining problems and solutions beyond biomedical frameworks, while acknowledging interdependence and vulnerability as constitutive of human existence. This includes advocating for social acceptance of diversity, legitimacy of vulnerability, and epistemic authority of lived experience.