hysteric

Sometimes, when we put ourselves in the hands of others, we either experience tender mercies or brutal assaults. Perhaps this is related in some ways to the human capacity for mercy and cruelty, both sides of the same coin (a cliche nonetheless).

When women, who are often typecasted as emotional, hysterical, and insane, fall prey to the straitjacketing of institutions and society bound on forcing them into unmitigating docility, they become easy targets for abuse and maltreatment, just because they have been labelled as unstable or unreliable, hence their voices ignored.

Below is a link to website on how women who seek or are forced into psychiatric treatment have been abused and patronized. You have hear of a various famous women creative types who finally descended into the final abyss of mental darkness, thrust into that role by societal's iron fists. Freud, the pioner of psychoanalysts, could not understand why his female patients complained of sexual abuse, had labelled them as hysterics, thus turning back the clock on psychology.

Here is an account of legendary, beautiful and volatile movie star, Frances Farmer. I am sure the world over would have similar stories to share.
http://www.cchr.org/art/eng/page34.htm

The setting up of institutions to hide away society's unpresentable and outcast, and treating them as less than savages highlights our fear of what Kristeva will call the abject. Frances's case became well known because of her fame and beauty. But what if similar circumstances happened to an uknown person? Women, in the words of the philosopher-semiotician, are abject beings, as are all associated with them.

Tennessee Williams have vowed a dark and horrific vengeance on Blanche in The Streetcar Named Desire when he had her institutionalised for insanity, after being raped by her brother-in-law.

pertinence of cultural studies

Here is something that might be of interest to some of you. It is about cultural studies at a crossroad, and I paste a quote here that is pertinent to as many fields as it is to cultural studies

"But there is another question regarding the "where" of cultural studies. Where might it be found? That is, in one sense, a where (what) is our object of study, our project, that which we want to elucidate or engage and, secondly, where might we find cultural studies being done (and maybe a third question of when ). On what terrain or plateau might we look?ot dig? From many accounts the "where" is a bit of a worn out place. Someplace we've certainly been before and someplace from which bombs have been lofted our direction for years. It's the economy stupid. In this conjuncture junction, where the function is to hook up logics, and peoples, and products, and politics, we're not clear how it is that this time, via an understanding of the new conjuncture, cultural studies will be able to make a difference in a way that it hasn't in the past."

http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=04/10/02/2021233

Could it be that we are now suffering from the overlapping of fields? Many new-fangled undergraduate and posgraduate courses that have sprung up from the growth of various new fields has led me to think of Hannah Arendt's essays on "Crisis in Education" and "Crisis in Culture" found in her book "Between the past and future", how we often miss the woods for the trees. More on those two later as I will need to revisit them before I can comment further. (:

As I look back...

Dear readers,
I am now a year older. Much has happened, some for the worse some for the better. Each and every experience that comes knocking at my door, and turning my life upside down, have a sweet and bitter aftertastes. I learn to see myself and to know myself better, to question everything that I have let slide or take for granted. Sometimes I bemoan the dullness of my life, yet when excitement comes, I collapse too easily in exhaustion. A bottle of contradiction, I am.

On a different note, I have updated this page with more links from friends (you can check it under Links of Interest, and have decided to link a published poem of mine. Yes, I am pathetic. Only have one measly piece published. I haven't have time to think and write creatively, though I have notes and jottings here and there that could be turned into poetry, given time. I am still new, and a rather unpolished writer. There is too much that I still need to learn and I will need to apprentice myself to a great poet/writer, as what other great poets/writers have done (though I am not considering myself great). While I am sometimes too tired to write, I can't give it up, as it is my life, part of what constitutes me. To not write, is to be crippled. I have a number of unpublished drafts that I will be working on as and when time permits. I have even tried writing in Malay, and I will continue to do so.

This is a busy week, so I shall stop here. Feel free to drop me words of inspiration. (:

Love,
Clarissa.