oa Voor en door gekken

For and By Madmen: the Gekkenkrant as a discursive practice

The Gekkenkrant, an anti-psychiatry zine published between 1973 and 1981, takes up an important position in the history of Dutch psychiatry. The Gekkenkrant is to be situated at the intersection of the formal experiments in both Dutch and international avant-garde literature on the one hand and the anti-psychiatric movements from the 1960s and 1970s on the other. The editors and authors of the magazine dedicated themselves to a distinctly activist, pragmatic and situated programme, which resulted in a zine that positioned itself between the aesthetic domain and the world of (anti)psychiatry. This contribution develops a discourse-analytical approach to the Gekkenkrant and approaches the zine as a discursive practice that attempted to renegotiate the relation between (institutional) power and (subjective) knowledge. Special attention is paid to the status of the Gekkenkrant as a form of (anti)discourse and subversive language; the discursive community which produced it (and which it, in its turn, produced); and the relation between its discursive practice and the notion of evenementiality.