Journals an der JLU Gießen (Justus-Liebig Universität)
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“Untenanted by any tangible form”: Illness, Minorities, and Narrative Masquerades in Contemporary Pandemic Fiction
No full textIn the current Covid-19 crisis, masks have become a ubiquitous sight in social situations. As visual signifiers of both protection and containment, they emblematize the very risk which they serve to prevent. Departing from the multiple functions of the mask in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” — a story published decades before the emergence of modern virology — this paper reads recent fictionalizations of pandemics as diagnostic tools of larger social, political, and cultural shifts. Taking Poe’s story as a programmatic blueprint, my interest is particularly in the correlation between (narrative) representation and political power in contexts of illness. Given that minorities are often disproportionally affected by, and blamed for, epidemics, my analysis targets not only the discursive and semantic strategies of “outbreak narratives” (Priscilla Wald), but the complicity of these strategies in notions of cultural difference. Through the trope of the mask, I argue, the nexus of “the visible and invisible” that Foucault sees at the heart of modern medicine can be reconceptualized along narratological lines. In addition to more detailed analyses of Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (2020), my reading also relies on novels by other contemporary authors
Through the Eyes of Peter Pan: Internalizing Mental Illness via Animation in the Documentary Life, animated
No full textThis article discusses to what extent the documentary film, through its aesthetic strategies and narrative style, spotlights the topic of mental illness, contributing to society’s acceptance of this taboo topic. The 2016 documentary Life, Animated, which integrates animations into its presentation, gives insights into the concrete possibilities of negotiating the topic of mental disorders. A discourse-analytical examination embeds the film in a larger context and focuses on the crisis of the documentary film under the sign of hybrid forms combining fact and fiction. The article shows how these hybrid formats both question the documentary film’s claim to reality and offer the opportunity to find images conveying inner states, and highlights that an extension of the possibilities of representation, such as the integration of animation in documentaries, allows conditions that are completely unknown to the viewers to be immersively experienced, thereby contributing to their de-stigmatization
The Madwoman in the Cellar: Trauma and Gender After Both World Wars — A Field Study of Psychiatric Files
No full textBy utilizing practical examples from the Abteilung für Psychatrie [psychiatric ward] at the Landeskrankenanstalt [province hospital] in Carinthia, Austria, in the wake of the two World Wars, this article seeks to explore the stories of hospitalized women and girls after armistices and peace treaties. Whereas the dialectics of conflict and resulting post-conflict traumas became increasingly accepted by medics for combatants during that time frame, this was not necessarily the case for comparable traumatic experiences of female civilians. Instead, for these patients, the Freudian definition of hysteria prevailed as a stereotypical ‘feminine’ symptom. Accordingly, post-war transitions from 1918 and 1945 onwards, with critical, sometimes even unstable, material and political infrastructures, consolidated a decidedly gender-related notion of trauma. This monopoly of trauma diagnoses, reserved for male patients, hence even resulted in misogyny towards institutionalized women, especially when they were refugees or displaced persons. As this study attempts to show, the mapping of mental illness or normality was heavily determined by sex, class, or ethnic background and in most instances served as an administrative tool for socio-political ends. The research for this contribution is based on archival work conducted for an ERC Advanced Grant, entitled “EIRENE — Post-War Transitions in Gendered Perspective: The Case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Region.
World Engaging with Decolonial Feminist Praxis within Academia: Narratives from Colombia Profunda
Get PDFRodríguez Castros Werk verwebt drei Bewegungen, die aus ihrer dekolonialen Praxis hervorgehen. Erstens beschäftigt sie sich mit dekolonialen Feminismen, um koloniale Feminismen in Lateinamerika aufzubrechen. Zweitens reflektiert sie ihr sentipensante Engagement, das sie nutzt, um ländliche Orte als Weiße Mestize zu erkunden. Drittens führt sie Dialoge mit Landfrauen und sozialen Anführerinnen, um eine Politik des Ortes mit Aufständen von Landfrauen zu verbinden, und um deren Teilnahme an den von andauernder Gewalt begleiteten Post-Konflikt-Verhandlungen zu fördern.This study weaves together three movements of a Colombian feminist’s decolonial praxis. First, Rodríguez Castro engages with decolonial feminisms to dismantle colonial feminisms in Latin America. Second, the author reflects on the sentipensante commitment she uses to delve into rural places as a White-mestiza. Third, she forges dialogues with rural women and social leaders to intertwine politics of place with insurgencies spawned by rural women’s experiences and to advocate their participation in post-conflict negotiations embedded in persistent violence
The Illness of Narrative: Reframing the Question of Limits
No full textThis paper uses Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground as the starting point for a critique of the assumption that engaging with narratives enhances well-being. While the ‘limits of narrative’ have long been an object of critique by scholars in the medical humanities, the question of limits has been posed primarily in terms of whether narrativity can be considered an anthropological universal, and in terms of what (or whom) a privileging of narrativity might exclude. Through Dostoevsky, we reframe this problem by asking whether the construction of selves through narrative can and should be regarded as a ‘healthy’ norm, even for those in whom this activity appears to come naturally. Dostoevsky identified a dark side to the ‘heightened consciousness’ associated with supposedly enlightened modern individuals. He critiques a tendency towards ever increasing abstraction from concrete existence and embodies this critique in the character of the “underground man,” a man plagued by sickness and distress, partly because he can only conduct his life on the basis of what he has read. The paper urges those working in the medical humanities today to formulate an adequate response to the paradoxes exhibited in Dostoevsky’s great novel
Infectious Diseases in Historical Perspective: French Pox versus Venereal Syphilis
No full textMedical historiography has tended to almost automatically identify the disease that entered European medical and lay writings at the end of the 15th century as morbus gallicus with the present-day condition known as “venereal syphilis.” This identification, which goes back to the invention, in 1530, of the term syphilis as a synonym for morbus gallicus by Girolamo Fracastoro, has been retained by many 19th- and 20th-century medical historians, and there are many still today who, in looking at past medical and lay descriptions of that condition, have systematically practiced retrospective diagnosis of syphilis. In this work, I will claim that identifying today’s “venereal syphilis” with the morbus gallicus of the past is problematic because these labels involve diseases related to radically different medical frameworks — namely, the Hippocratic Galenic humoral paradigm and the bacteriological one — that are incommensurable with each other. Subsequently, I claim that, because of the lack of use of the term syphilis until the 19th century, Fracastoro cannot be considered but a historiographic artifact in the history of “venereal syphilis.
Watch Your Back, Girl! The story behind The Dress for the Hunchbacked Girl by poetic designer Kamila Iżykowicz
No full textFemale Agency in an Invented Middle Ages: Women’s Power in Westeros from an Interdisciplinary Point of View
Get PDFDie weltweit rezipierte Buchserie A Song of Ice and Fire des Fantasyautors George R. R. Martin sowie die Adaption als Serie Game of Thrones durch den amerikanischen Fernsehsender HBO dient auch als Forschungsobjekt der historischen Kulturwissenschaften. Im Sammelband wird der Frage nach weiblichen Handlungsräumen in einem erfundenen Mittelalter mit interdisziplinären Beiträgen nachgegangen. Vor dem Hintergrund des erdachten Mittelalters – oder auch Frühen Neuzeit – dient es als Handreichung, um in die Hof- und Geschlechtergeschichte einzuführen. The internationally released book series A Song of Ice and Fire by fantasy author George R. R. Martin and the TV-series adaption Game of Thrones by the US-American broadcast channel HBO serve as objects of investigation for historical cultural studies. In this edited volume, the question of queenship and female agency is raised by investigating these invented Middle Ages from an interdisciplinary focus. This study of female rulers acting in an imaginary Middle Ages – and early modern history – can serve as a recommendation to introduce courtly and gender studies. 
