Participation Literacy

One of the stories in Stone’s book is called Risking Themselves: Identity in Oshkosh (p 45 ff). It starts with a quote from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

On July 23, 1990, a 27-year-old woman filed a complaint in Oshkosh, Wisconsin charging that Mark Peterson, an acquaintance, raped her in her car. The woman had been previously diagnosed as having Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). She claimed that Peterson raped her after deliberately drawing out one of her personalities, a naïve young woman who he thought would be willing to have sex with him.

The trial ended with Peterson’s conviction. The verdict upholds Wisconsin law – and probably most law systems – as the woman was treated as mentally ill and it is against the law to have sex with a mentally ill person. Stone’s line of arguing draws on the question if this woman was really mentally ill. The name Multiple Personality disorder says it is an illness, and most mental health professionals agreed with the verdict, but not all of them. A few of them had wished the outcome to be the reverse since that would lead to the opportunity to “decriminalize” MPD (p 62). One of the most distinct subtexts of Stone’s story is a question: What if all personalities in a person with MP(D) are normal “good” citizens, no murderers and robbers and things like that, in what way is it a disorder; and how strong is the line between an embodied person with – possibly nontraumatic - MP(D) compared with something we could call MWP (Multiple Web Personalities) - The concept MWP is not in Stone’s book. I made it up?