What Does Borderline Do? Thinking with Debility and Capacity

Abstract This essay grapples with several debates surrounding “borderline personality disorder (BPD),” a highly stigmatized and gendered psychiatric label disproportionately given to cisgender women and used to invalidate their experiences. There is a growing effort to destigmatize “BPD”—particularly on social media—and advocate for better treatment. However, these movements can overlook long-standing feminist critiques of the diagnosis itself, as well as Mad feminist interventions that affirm borderline epistemologies while critiquing psychiatry. This essay interrogates how and why both mainstream and Mad approaches to destigmatizing “BPD” seem to be located in White, globally elite spaces. We argue that any universalizing attempt to reconceptualize “BPD” risks benefiting elite borderlines and the neoliberal state while continuing to criminalize, pathologize, and neglect structurally precaritized people who are labeled with “BPD.” Rather than unpacking what “BPD” really is or should mean, we explore what “BPD” does, for whom, in which contexts, and toward what ends.