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.
Tag: hysteria
The Performance of Pain
You cannot breathe; the world slows down around you; your chest tightens as you walk to your car. Once again, you feel as though you have failed to convince a doctor of your pain, and once again, you must face it alone. This is, unfortunately, the experience of far too many female patients, but the…
(Un)fashionable Illness
Lesley Thulin // When VICE Magazine published a fashion spread that depicted reenactments of famous women writers’ suicides in its 2013 Women in Fiction issue, it was met with outrage. Some critics described “Last Words” as “almost breathtakingly tasteless,” while others chalked it up to “slouching indifference and sloppiness.” VICE’s own last words on the…