May 2011
1 post
Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)
There was a theft. That much I am told. I was abandoned. That much I know. I was forced backward. I was forced forward. I was passed hand to hand like a bowl of fruit. Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am.
April 2011
1 post
“Charcot: Let us press again on the hysterogenic point. Here we go again....”
– TUESDAY 7TH FEBRUARY, 1888
February 2011
5 posts
“Our chang’d and mingled souls are grown
To such acquaintance now,...”
– from ‘To Mrs. M. A. at Parting’, Katherine Philips (1631-64)
“there’s no me without you!”
– Marina to Holly, in the garden. Me Without You, Sandra Goldbacher (2001)
had to break it to myself recently that 6000 words is nowhere near enough space to do justice to all the thinkin’ I’ve put into this hysterical woman business over the past five (eek) years. also maybe I’m...
January 2011
5 posts
tulletulle:
“Teenage girls curl up together like newborn puppies, painting one another’s toes as if they were licking one another’s ears. If you sit long enough in any Starbucks, or loiter outside any high school, you will see girls climbing onto one another’s laps, kissing on the lips. They aren’t hitting on each other, not precisely, though they are in a constant state of arousal that borders...
“It’s not my job to make you a better man, and I don’t give a shit if I’ve made...”
– Jenny, The L Word
“one is surprised at times to admire the craft, the sagacity, and the unyielding...”
– Jean-Martin Charcot
“this great neurosis”
ameliedesbiens:
“Male hysteria is not at all rare, and, just among us, gentlemen, if I can judge from what I see each day, these cases are often unrecognized even by very distinguished doctors. One will concede that a young and effeminate man might develop hysterical findings after experiencing significant stress, sorrow, or deep emotions. But that a vigorous and strong worker...
November 2010
2 posts
The vibrator was a Victorian gift to women, new... →
The film, in which the Oscar-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal will appear alongside a British cast including Jonathan Pryce, Sheridan Smith, Ashley Jensen, Rupert Everett and Gemma Jones, is to tell the story of the accidental discovery of motorised sex aids in Victorian England. The film will support the contentious claim that, around 1880, a Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville, played by Hugh Dancy, was...
October 2010
5 posts
1 tag
1 tag
one;
at Charcot’s “famous Tuesday lectures” the behaviours of his patients were induced, displayed, and commentated to an amphitheatre of medical professionals and students. one of the things that first interested me in his method was this idea of giving the hysteric an audience to play to: placing them on the literal stage for this expected, demanded, “performance of...
“I have a problem with muse-ship. I feel like throughout history, it’s been men...”
– Natalie Portman
“In the middle of a large room stood an oak tub, four or five feet in diameter...”
– Joseph Philippe François Deleuze on the process of Franz Mesmer, developer of medical hypnosis and the primary theorist of animal magnetism (emphasis mine)
September 2010
1 post
what was "female hysteria", really? →
Question: What was the relationship between so-called hysteria and sexual frustration?
Rachel Maines: Well, hysteria was diagnosed by Hippocrates, as I mentioned, that’s 450 B.C., so that’s really quite a long time. It didn’t really go out of fashion as a diagnosis, well, it was legislated out of existence in 1957 by the American, I think it’s the American...
March 2010
1 post
Persephone's Return (Barbara Young) →
Persephone’s Return
Mama, mama look at me. I’m still you daughter: nothing’s changed. I love him, mama, I can’t help it. All the others, they just saw all your connections. Little girl with her mother’s strings to pull. But mama, he saw me. Not just that girl, that little virgin. Someone’s daughter.
Do you ever wonder what I think and feel? What I have to say?
He does, mama. And he...
February 2010
18 posts
“In camera (Latin: “in a chamber”) is a legal term meaning “in private”. It is...”
– Wikipedia
“Freud was the disoriented witness of the immensity of hysteria in camera and the...”
– Georges Didi-Huberman
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking....”
– Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin
“What still remains with us is the series of images of the Iconographie...”
– Georges Didi-Huberman
“Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would...”
– Wikipedia
“Sing now of the tribe of women, sweet-voiced Olympian Muses, / daughters of...”
– Hesiod, Eoiai
@sugarwife: "the word 'cabaret' is derived from the Latin 'camera', meaning a small room"
@yrmomschesthair: I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
“I once had a really old lover. I love to say ‘lover.’ It sounds so old-fashioned. Better than ‘fucker.’ He was many, many years older than me. I learned a lot from him. He wanted me to experience everything about male sexuality so that in the future no man could ever pull one over on me. Now I supposedly know a lot about male sexuality, but I don’t know whether all of what I have learned...
“Classical authors also attributed to Hesiod a lengthy genealogical poem known as...”
– Wikipedia
As I hold you to my bed, Like a cancer or a...
“The streets of Paris at the time were full of beggars, and the Sun King could...”
– Ivan Berlin, The Salpêtrière Hospital: From Confining the Poor to Freeing the Insane
“In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière was what it...”
– Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria