engleski

Meaning, experience, and silence: discourse on possible female homosexuality in the Croatian psychiatric text

The presentation will introduce discourse and cultural analysis of the medical (psychiatric) record dating from the first half of the 20th century. It brings data of the girl who was twice inmate of the Royal National Institute for the Insane in Stenjevec, near the capital of Croatia, Zagreb. Starting from the perspective that experience is the basis for the construction of meaning, we shall sketch the analysis around four utterers that appear in the medical record as relevant actors: psychiatrists, physician, the patient’s mother and the inmate herself. We intend to show how they spoke on her socially inappropriate behaviour, how they argued for her imprisonment in the Institute for the Insane, how was her traumatic experience of rape constructed in the text, and, finally, how they constructed her sexuality as socially troubled behaviour. Special attention will be given to the silence as one of the relevant discursive strategies in the medical record, showing that silence cannot be viewed as the absence of language, but contrary, the place where language of unnamed female homosexuality was articulated using different meanings, utterances and strategies.

text linguistics, gender identity, 19th century, Croatia, psychiatric discourse

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