Thursday, April 12, 2007

Something I want to research on...........anyone want to fund me?

I want to start at the psychiatric space. The psychiatric clinic in Sunflower Hospital, Juhu Scheme, Mumbai. In the basement of the hospital, hidden underneath the superstructure of our lives, I want to visit the countless upper middle class families who come to this clinic to discuss their “private” problems in private. Each space leads to a smaller cell to hide and the more you’re hidden the more comfortable you are. Outside in the waiting room, everyone is a partner in an imperfect ideal.


Starting at the healing or remedial space, where families come to unite their fragments, usually the fragments in their mother’s, wife’s bodies, I want to explore the construct of the hysterical, irrational wife in the psychiatric space where these treatments take place. The body to be "treated" is usually her body. The domestic space, hidden from the world, through the psychiatric space, further gets enclosed, gets undiscovered and mystified into the darkness of the human mind.


Why?
Where hysteria has been perceived as an "illness", I want to understand hysteria as a form agency for bourgeois women in India. Families usually go to the psychiatric space when there is a break down in the family, in the domestic sphere, when the patriarchal household is consumed by the hysteria of the wife, mother. Her agency takes the most painful form here, for that moment in time; she claims subjectivity through pain, through the avowal of her pain. (The psychiatric space is the space of disavowal of her agency, where patriarchy regains control, sometimes at her wish, sometimes not). At that point, pain is her only self, it is the pain of expression of subjugation, domination, powerlessness, unrealised, unfulfilled desires, that is avowed...What kind of opening does it create? I dont know yet...

6 comments:

pappu poppins said...

never was aware of the basement space...
but these dark, hidden spaces for expression become of the most clear ways through which sopme woman express their insecurities. makes these spaces sort of taboo.. as there is a certain fear of being discovered or identified with these spaces

spacemistress said...

These spaces are definitely taboo but I think there is a disavowal of the woman because the aim of the medical space is to treat the biological symptoms of a social, patriarchal phenomenon. And usually it is the woman's body that then gets "treated" here.

Urban Floop said...

when u say "bourgeois women in India", are you talking about a particuilar section, or belonging to a certain city, or a state, or of a particuilar community, or is it class based, or...is it ALL the bourgeois women in entire india !!!

spacemistress said...

Honestly I don't know yet. I say bourgeois to leave the field open because I don't know if its region, (specific) class based or caste based. And true that there is a certain class of people who can afford to go to a psychiatric clinic but I have seen varied forms of hysteria, outbursts, manifested either by intense suspicion, or the belief that they embodied God. And that too both in India and USA. Though I must say that they were women in their 40s at least.

However I'm thinking if more than the specificity of "the" woman, it is a condition of a certain kind of marriage, post independence, joint family, "unequal" (not using the right word) marriage relations in terms of their own perceptions of themselves, education etc, also a relationship where the wife was considered "outsider" to the (joint) family.... there are more conditions that could be added..

Urban Floop said...

by any chance have you read Elaine Showalter?

spacemistress said...

No not yet, but am reading Veena Das. She has written on the language of pain especially in cases of women victims of prolonged violence like rape, during Partition. Analyzing three literary texts, she has explored how "ordinary" language is fractured by the acknowledgment of pain and how the pain is avowed as well. She borrows form Lacan on how we may need to create imaginaries or fictitious something.. cant find word... to live to filter/reinterpret/transplace certain very painful moments, in reality. It is not simple as repression. We may create metaphors, representational objects, instances rather than partake in the confessional mode of acknowledgment or (spoken) speech, which psychoanalysis attempted (and which to me might also constitute ordinary language?)