Reducing Creativity to a Psychiatric Syndrome: On the Pathologization of Female Poets

October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.

Self-Care and Healthism

Brynn Fitzsimmons // “The feminist ideal of women as self-empowered caretakers of their own health and as experts in knowing and defining health has given way to a form of women-centered healthism that shares some features with feminism, but lacks its structural critique and politicized edge” (341). As health humanities scholars, particularly in feminist health humanities, what are we doing to “loosen (the) foundations” (Banner 47) of structural racism within health discourses?

Medicine in the Archive: Exploring Feminism and Nursing

John A. Carranza // Being a historian comes with no better rite of passage than to enter the archive. Regardless of the time period or topic chosen by the researcher, sorting through the documents is exciting for me because I am able to engage in an imaginative and interpretative exercise where I consider why a…