engleski

Female Madness and the Feminine Monstrous: Genre as Confinement and Genre as Affective Repository

This text addresses the period of the second half of 19th century in which the genre of belief legends plays a key role in understanding the mechanisms of ideology and its repercussions on the interconnectedness of madness, the monstrous and the feminine within the social and cultural context, in which different types of female transgressions are more often and more severely sanctioned, thus also affecting the psychiatric discourse. Using archival material from the first psychiatric institution in Croatia, the Institute for the Insane Stenjevec in Zagreb, the paper interrogates the role of a specific type of female patients’ narratives featuring demonological beings, termed belief legends by folklore studies, and their fundamental discursive incompatibility with psychiatric, scientific, rational and male discourse, which interprets belief legends simply as a symptom of madness.

belief legends ; madness ; feminine madness ; Archive ; Stenjevec asylum ; Croatia

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