240061 PS Elective Subjects in Master's Programme Gender Studies (2022S)

‘Madness’ is a gendered phenomenon, including different diagnostic categories for men and women (cf. nineteenth-century discourses of hysteria) as well as gendered types of treatment. The predominance of female patients in mental institutions, a phenomenon that can be observed from the seventeenth up to the twentieth century, led critics to argue that ‘madness’ is in fact a “female malady” (see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady). Since ‘madness’ is a discursive construct that has frequently been used to contain deviance (see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization), women have been more prone to being labelled ‘mad’ than men. After all, as Judith Bardwick has noted, “The insistence that femininity evolves from necessarily frustrated masculinity makes femininity a sort of ‘normal pathology’” .

Literary representations of ‘madwomen’ will be the focus of this proseminar. In order to show students how conceptions of ‘madness’ have changed over the course of history, the course material will be organised in a diachronic fashion. All of the primary texts will be situated in their respective historical and discursive context to demonstrate how literature has shown itself receptive to discursive shifts and how it in turn contributed to the discursive construction of ‘madness’. Apart from literary texts, students will also be familiarised with a wide variety of non-literary texts from various disciplines that deal with ‘madness’, e.g. historical medical texts and key theoretical texts.

Methods:
Student-centred expert sessions incl. classroom (or online) discussions
Direct instruction (partly via Moodle) incl. interactive elements like group or independent tasks