Women and Madness

PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso,
héroe

Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen etimológico del término “compromiso” y su relación con la figura del héroe. ¿Son ámbitos diferenciados, irreconciliables o, en momentos determinados, él héroe puede lidiar con cierta locura que implicaría la realización del acto heroico, de un compromiso con su sociedad?.

KEYWORDS: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, madness, engagement, hero

Through the analysis of selected scenes from the last chapter of Homeland's sixth season and the film Sully, I reflect on the etymological origin of the term “commitment” and its relation to the hero‟s character. Do they belong to different or irreconcilable areas, or at certain moments, can the hero deal with a certain madness that would imply the accomplishment of the heroic act, of a commitment to his/her society?.

Is there a thing such as a ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’? A closer inspection indicates that this idea might as well be a myth. Indeed, one only needs to take a quick look at the statistics per sex of stalking, coercive control, or emotional abuse to see that the idea of a ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ does not match with the numbers. Still, in the media and the minds of people, the myth lives on.
This dissertation, therefore, aims to demonstrate, through an analysis of the stories of Medea, Joanna of Castile, and Rebecca Bunch, three ‘crazy ex-girlfriends’, that the myth of the crazy ex-girlfriend is a  social tool of control founded on a patriarchal fear of women's power. It also looks at how this myth is nowadays being reappropriated, and if it can be subverted. Ultimately, it aims to open a discussion about how love is nowadays still a gendered subject.

“Mental Health Issues: Alienists, Asylums, and the Mad” traces the developing discipline of psychiatry in the long nineteenth century, or Age of the Asylum, and discusses a broader cultural history of madness with subsections dealing specifically with gender and race, crime, and institutionalization. This chapter begins with an examination of moral treatment and the new asylum movement in England and the US, including Phillipe Pinel, Samuel Tuke, and Dorothea Dix. The second section begins with the quintessential nineteenth-century madwoman, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester, and then discusses African American mental health via W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. The third section deals with changing concepts of criminal insanity in the English courts, with special emphasis on major legal cases: the trials of James Hadfield and Daniel M’Naghten. This section also includes a discussion of how medico-legal concepts such as monomania and partial insanity found their way into popular literature through Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The final section discusses efforts by ex-patient Elizabeth Packard and reformer Nelly Bly to challenge the asylum system’s excesses and failures, and ends with physician/writer Anton Chekhov’s criticism of the cultural and social power of medical diagnoses in his short story “Ward No. 6.”

Keywords: madness; mental illness; insanity; moral treatment; asylum; psychiatry

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms?

Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the “madness” of our relationships with animals intersects with the “madness” of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that “animaladies” are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or “crazy” distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life.

While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues—as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

This is a talk (unrevised) that I gave at a American Literature Association conference in Mexico in 1999. For obvious reasons, it is a companion piece to my talk "Grif, Interrupted," which it spawned many years later. I locate Kaysen's memoir in the context of contemporary disability memoir and discuss how she avoids certain pitfalls in the conventional genres and discourses used to narrate disability, mental illness in particular.

One of the literary obsessions of the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the movement of feminism, and the question of how she could give this movement a boost. In time, she found the perfect way to do this, which is, simply via writing. I analyse her work "The Yellow Wallpaper" from a unique perspective, that is, I show, within the scope of the Victorian age, how the nameless protagonist, usually interpreted as 'a lady in distress' with a feminist flavour of the phrase, is actually that individual who shows patterns of social control, hidden domination, and individual achievement over 'the man'.

This paper examines two contemporary North-American memoirs that address borderline personality disorder: Rachel Reiland's Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder (2004) and Merri Lisa Johnson's Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality (2010). The analysis is framed within the feminist approach to the historical revision of madness and its treatment, which emphasises the gender bias of psychiatry (Ussher 2011). One of the modern diagnoses that pathologise women's distress is borderline personality disorder. In order to understand the meanings given to the borderline experience by these diagnosed women, three discursive features have been studied: narrative linearity, idiosyncratic imagery, and assimilation of external discourses. The analysis shows that the use of linearity and stereotypical tropes accompany the assimilation of the mental illness/recovery model, while non-linearity and innovative tropes are explored to reject master narratives and address different frames of understanding madness.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath invites the reader into the inner and outer world of Esther Greenwood, an aspiring young writer who moves to New York City and subsequently experiences depression due to difficulties in adjusting to her self and cultural expectations. Esther’s transition into “madness” is depicted in the novel as both a diminishing and division of self, and her transition into “normality” thereafter is through the adoption of a false self. ~ BY Charlotte Lai Hong Lan

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” embodies the idea that Victorian women were oppressed both by the institution of marriage and the male-dominated medical profession, as seen in the narrator’s disempowerment, infantilization, and, ultimately, true madness caused by the resting cure.

Nel contesto del pensiero greco antico, la transizione fra età arcaica e classica (VI-V sec. a.C.) fu un momento di notevole importanza per l'inizio di un'approfondita riflessione sulla follia, soprattutto alla luce di una sua concettualizzazione come "disturbo mentale". Le "Baccanti" di Euripide possono fornire numerose chiavi di lettura per intendere l'approccio greco alla follia da un punto di vista non solo terapeutico, ma anche culturale, sociale e religioso.

Audre Lorde, in her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," describes the erotic as an intrinsically female source of power that "has often been misnamed by men and used against women” and moreover that the erotic becomes “confused, the trivial, the psychotic...". Inspired by and departing from Lorde's essay, I will explore the tenuous relationship between madness and eroticism through the case study of the Bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman, killed and bathed in the blood of 600 virgin girls. In examining Bathory's sense of the erotic one comes to note that she is only able to "feel" a connection to her self in her acts of sexual perversion, torture and murder. I argue that Bathory's desensitization to "normal" life experiences fuel her pursuit of the female power of the erotic as an example that supports the patriarchal view of the danger of the female erotic as female power.
In fully embracing her desires Bathory feeds her sense of megalomaniacy thereby engaging in a sense of power of the erotic which is not curtailed by the normative socio-cultural roles. Does Bathory's megalomaniacy cause a distortion of the personal erotic that leads to a distortion of the self into pornography and obscenity as evidenced in her actions? Does the lack of feeling for the other and the more desperate desire for power make her acts of violence more obscene?

Problems of Identity was the first essay to explore gender issues in art therapy. It looks at the construction of gender, representations of women in psychiatric discourse (including the gendered clinical gaze); some feminist ideas about representations of gender, and suggestions towards a feminist art therapy. It is probably still the single most important essay written in the arts therapies on gender.




Cite this work as follows: Hogan, S. 1997. Problems of Identity Deconstructing Gender in Art Therapy in Hogan, S. (ed.) Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy. London: Routledge. pp.21-48.

Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.

Born around the year 460 BC , Hippocrates is known as one of the most remarkable physicians of all times. The ancient Greek patients had several choices when they were severely ill. But many patients turn directly to the gods, typically Asclepius, the God of medicine. Many asclepieia (healing temples) were built and from the 5th century BC onwards, and people would come to the temples hoping for a cure or a dream containing some sort of a cure. Hippocrates insisted on medicine being practiced according to natural sciences and anatomy hence physical observations of symptoms and natural treatments. But the persistent notion of the woman inhabited by a "wandering womb", "an animal within an animal" and the coexistence of Goddesses unable to control their drives and their mind contributed to the idea that women were driven to madness for anatomical and mental reasons. But with the birth of a rationalized medicine,  what would be the impact on the representation of the image of the Woman in the city-state and how would that translate into the medical field ?

This translation of Tomaso Garzoni's Renaissance "best-seller" provides a rich and revealing window on sixteenth-century views of madness and foolishness, and social deviance. Garzoni's encyclopedic work is perhaps the most important contribution of the last half of the century to the "fools" genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools also belong. Garzoni provides a spoof of academic writing on madness, with extensive "reviews of the medical literature" on certain types of madness. A final, intriguing section on the varieties of madness to be found in Garzoni's female "patients" reveals much about late-Renaissance attitudes towards women.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation examines the intersection of womanhood and madness in German-language literature and culture. While scholars have studied the madwoman of the previous centuries extensively, my dissertation presents the first comprehensive study of representations of female madness from 1894 onward. Since the late 19th century, female authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have been appropriating discourses of madness in order to critique the contradictory ramifications of mandatory adherence to the construct of femininity. Employing theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, I argue that the madness discourse represents a key site where writers negotiate the ongoing hegemony of societal ideologies defining the special status of the female psyche, body and sexuality as entities which need to be monitored, shaped or optimized. My research thus redeploys female madness as a research category. While previously applied almost exclusively to the realities of white middle-class women, I argue for an intersectional conception of critical madness studies which takes account of gender, race, and religion to offer culturally specific insights into the lives of German women from diverse backgrounds. My study addresses texts by well-known authors, such as Hedwig Dohm, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as lesser-known writers, such as May Ayim and Christine Lavant. (written in German)

DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course description. Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

Using a sample of six articles from Canadian News sources, this paper looks at how the death of nineteen-year-old Ashley Smith at the Grand Valley Prison for Women near Kitchener Waterloo was framed by the Canadian print news media in 2007 (the year of her death) and between 2012-2015 when her mother Coralee Smith attempted (and eventually succeeded in) having the initial ruling of suicide overturned by a jury who found Smith died by homicide. I attend to whether themes of monstrosity, grievability, and mental illness were present in media coverage of the case affecting the extent to which Ashley is framed as a person whose life and death are of consequence. The terms, images, and frames used by the media to describe Smith have the capacity to participate in infantilizing, Othering, and discounting the validity of Smith’s suffering within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) (Wahl 343). Conversely, the media also has the capacity to emphasize the systemic devaluation of criminalized and incarcerated people, thereby calling not only on state actors, but also on readers to consider how we are implicated in the categorization of some lives as worthy of care during life and grievable in death, and others as threatening and dangerous being in life, and ungrievable in death (Cohen Visions 5-6; Baun 31).

This work examines the main female archetypes present in Victorian literature and art, and the social atmosphere that gave them birth in regards to women’s autonomy and freedom. To this extent, the study focuses on a neo-Victorian text, Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). These archetypes are explored from a feminist perspective, analyzing the ways in which the two main female characters represent them, and rebel against them. 

Keywords: Angel in the house, archetype, fallen woman, neo-Victorian, Victorian

The focus of this article will be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s thoroughly anthologized story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Beyond the patriarchal perception of the narrator as progressively falling into madness, this study aims to prove that, in line with some feminist readings of the story (e.g. Haney-Peritz, 1986), the unnamed female protagonist consciously elaborates a mad language and discourse as part of her strategy to fight patriarchy from within. A careful study of this language will break the reader’s initial illusion that the protagonist is mad and will show how she finally embraces the rational discourse of medicine to perpetrate her revenge.

Um dos gestos políticos mais notáveis na escrita de Adília Lopes, é o assumir publicamente que tem uma doença mental. Trata-se de um dos principais leitmotiv da sua obra, com o qual denuncia os discursos da psiquiatrização e medicalização, do heterossexismo ou das categorias de classe e da divisão sexual do trabalho, como estratégias de controlo social e de normalização. As suas descrições das alterações morfológicas e imagísticas do seu corpo e sua doença mental, são uma forma irónica mas também dolorosa de resistência e subversão das normas, mas também uma estratégia poética de politização da vida privada.  A doença mental e a medicalização tornam-na “gorda e lenta. De corpo e de espírito”, atiram-na para fora do mercado de trabalho. Mas também a integram, simultaneamente, na esfera artística, onde a discriminação social e o isolamento não têm os mesmos efeitos que em outras ocupações. Ao incorporar a doença mental na poesia, Adília Lopes lida com o preconceito, e partilhá-lo representa tanto um processo de auto-ajuda como a procura de um reconhecimento pelos sistemas social e literário instituídos. Contudo, o caso Adília Lopes também demonstra que existe uma clara diferença entre as ideias romântica e modernista do artista louco, como mito canonizado de transgressão da normalidade burguesa, e o artista com uma doença mental. A doença mental real e concreta continua a estar sujeita ao silenciamento e à discriminação, e a sua exposição desinibida é ainda causa de desconforto ou, até, de rejeição. Em Adília Lopes podemos observar, no entanto, como uma não conformidade com esta suposta normalidade é transformada em poética política, como a exposição da vulnerabilidade abre espaços para a acção micropolítica e para discursos não essencialistas. Adília Lopes constrói a sua corporeidade e a sua identidade como amálgama de sensações queer, loucura e deslocamentos de imagens e imaginários. Como em Cindy Sherman, na sua obra a mente e o corpo inadaptados não aparecem apenas como representação ou simulacro, mas como aquilo que ainda subsiste do carnal, do disforme, do abjecto e do trauma.
Palavras-chave: Adília Lopes; poesia e política; representação poética de loucura, doença e corpo; identidade queer.

There is growing international resistance to the oppressiveness of psychiatry. While previous books have critiqued psychiatry, Psychiatry Disrupted goes beyond theorizing what is wrong with it to theorizing how we might stop it. With chapters by Robert Menzies and Peter Beresford, Ian Parker, AJ Withers, China Mills, Tina Minkowitz, Chris Chapman, amongst others - See more at: http://www.mqup.ca/psychiatry-disrupted-products-9780773543300.php?page_id=46&#sthash.YR95EJhU.dpuf