Session 7: Madness and Gender
2nd Global Conference
Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Sexing up the Psychiatric Record: A Pilot Study of the Documentation of Women’s Sexuality in Psychiatric In-Patient Charts
Lucy Costa and Andrea Daley
Empowerment Council, Toronto and School of Social Work, York University, Toronto, Canada
Theoretical and research literature in critical disability studies as well as in psychiatry and mental health is beginning to focus on sexuality as a quality of life and rights issue. Theoretical literature on sexuality and mental disorder/distress has postulated the importance of the expression of sexuality as an integral part of the whole person and overall health and well-being, and has underscored people’s need for intimacy – sexual intercourse, love, closeness, caring and support – as a fundamental component contributing to quality of life. In this regard, while the research and theoretical literature is beginning to document the significance of sexuality as a quality of life and recovery issue little is known about how sexuality is approached and documented by mental health service providers in actual clinical practice. The purpose of this pilot study is to explore the nature and extent of mental health service providers’ chart documentation related to women’s sexuality. The study utilizes a retrospective chart review design and individual semi-structured interviews with mental health service providers to explore the phenomenon of chart documentation of information related to women’s sexuality by mental health service providers. The presentation will explore how women’s sexuality is ‘taken up’ within a psychiatric and mental health service setting as reflected in chart documentation practices on a women’s in-patient unit with a particular focus on: 1) Whether women’s sexuality is documented in psychiatric in-patient charts; 2) what aspects of women’s sexuality is documented; 3) how women’s sexuality is documented; and 4) the intersection between sexuality and other social identities and locations based on, for example, race, gender, class, age, and trauma survivor.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Anorexia as Parody: Body, Femininity and Culture
Analu Verbin
Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the Psychiatric Department, Hadassah Medical Centre, Ein Kerem
As early as 1986 did feminist scholar and therapist Susie Orbach name Anorexia as “a metaphor for our age”. Yet it seems that today this catchy title encompasses a wealth of meanings never predicted by Orbach. While Anorexia captures the imagination and passion of many scholars from a variety of disciplines, we still lack an explanation that can account for the many contradictions that are found in anorexia. Is it an extreme acceptance and internalization of the cultural dictate of thinness, or rather a rebel against femininity and feminine gender roles, consisting of erasing the feminine body all together? Is it a grandiose display of self-control or a total loss of it? Is the anorectic woman a victim or an autonomous agent?
Instead of trying to explain these contradictions, I would like to suggest that they are at the heart of the anorectic existence and the key to understanding it. Not only that we cannot (and should not) solve these contradictions, they shed a light on the nature of anorexia, both as a mental illness and a cultural phenomenon. While they clearly have therapeutic implications, in this paper I focus on their cultural reading; namely, what can they tell us about the culture in which anorexia thrives.
Following Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender I propose looking at anorexia as a parody: by taking the feminine model to the extreme, the anorectic shows us that there is nothing “natural” or “authentic” about femininity. Rather, it is a performance, a fiction requiring endless efforts to maintain. At the same time, the anorectic impedes her ability to undertake feminine gender roles, showing us once again that our gender norms and expectations may be anything but natural. In a reality of contradicting expectations, then, anorexia turns out to be the ultimate answer to society’s dictates.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Mathematics <> Masculinity <>Madness
Angela Woods
School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia
According to phenomenological psychologist Louis Sass, conventional psychiatric, psychoanalytic and avant-garde accounts of schizophrenia “share the assumption that schizophrenic pathology must involve a loss of what, in the West, has long been assumed to be the most essential characteristics of mind or subjectivity: the capacities for logic and abstract thinking, for self-reflection, and for the exercise of free will.” (Sass, Madness and Modernism, 1992, 23) Against these models, Sass advances an original account of schizophrenia as exigent introspection, a compulsive hyper-reflexivity that is “an alienation not from reason but from the emotions, instincts and the body” (4). On this view, rationality itself becomes the site of madness.
This paper uses Sass’s account of schizophrenia to critically interrogate one of cinema’s enduring tropes – the figure of the mad mathematician. Looking beyond clichéd images of the endearing eccentric, I offer a close reading of two films where mathematical genius is associated with a psychic disturbance that is anything but benign.
Despite significant aesthetic and political differences, the portraits of schizophrenia presented in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) at first glance appear to be the apotheosis of Sass’s model. In both films, a crisis in knowing precipitates a crisis of being; schizophrenia is coextensive with a breakdown in the coherence of mathematical language. It is, however, the affective male body that registers and responds to this breakdown. To what extent, then, do Pi and A Beautiful Mind consolidate or unsettle Western culture’s association of rationality, masculinity, logic and the mind, as distinct from a madness located in the body, passion and the feminine? Analysing the way in which gender figures in these films’ portrayals of schizophrenia and mathematical genius, we can see the limitations, but also the future possibilities, of Sass’s account of a quintessentially modern madness.
The Reconfiguration of Lesbian/Queer Sexualityby Mental Health Service Provider Responses to Self-Disclosures
Andrea Daley
School of Social Work, York University, Toronto, Canada
Research is increasingly exploring the self-disclosure experiences of lesbian/queer women during their interactions with health care professionals. However, the majority of literature has been conducted in relation to primary health care settings with less attention to self-disclosure within the context psychiatric and mental health service spaces. In this regard, the majority of literature has focused on the benefits and risks associated with self-disclosure such as increased comfort and better communication and the likelihood of homophobic victimization and discrimination, respectively. Less attention has focused on the productive effect of mental health service providers’ responses to women’s self-disclosures of lesbian/queer sexuality. The purpose of this study was to explore the intersection between sex, gender, sexuality and madness with regards to how lesbian/queer bodies become visible – seen – or not within the spaces of psychiatric and mental health service spaces. Women’s experiences and insights suggest that mental health service provider responses to women’s self-disclosures construct and reconfigure their lesbian/queer sexuality in conformity with recognizable standards and discourses of psychiatric and mental health spaces. Using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity I explore how mental health service provider responses contest and reconfigure women’s performances of lesbian/queer vis-à-vis their self-disclosure narratives as: 1) illness or symptom of illness; 2) cause of illness; and/or 3) caused by trauma. I will also explore how women resist being (re)contained by the productive effects of service provider responses through performances of agency.
Entries (RSS)