mcconnell and judd: what it means when we talk about gender and mental health

[niyad]

McConnell and Judd: What It Means When We Talk About Gender and Mental Health

. . . . .

A McConnell aide says:

She described having children as selfish, and she thinks it’s unconscionable to breed. So you put that with what we’ll talk to you later about her sort of pro-choice stance and it’s sort of a, you know, pretty extreme posture to take. She also is critical of, of fathers giving away their daughters in marriage ceremonies. She says it’s a common vestige of male dominion over a women’s reproductive status when her father gives her away at a wedding. And then she’s clearly for pro-abortion.
The room moves next to Judd’s religious beliefs (the aide describes it as “oddly syncretic approach to Christianity”) and to her mental health. The aide says:
Ah, and again. She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.

As Mother Jones points out, Judd has been open about her mental health maintenance and wrote about it in her autobiography. But what is perhaps more disturbing is that rather quick and seamless elision between Judd’s reproductive choices (“it’s unconscionable to breed”) to her mental health (“emotionally unbalanced”). Though some have dismissed the recordings as little more than the inner workings of the Washington machine and employed a rather willful blindness about the slippage of language, the discussion had by McConnell and his aides is by no means neutral. Rather, it is near Freudian, bound by a messy and gendered history of sanity. Childlessness here seems as an indictment, and sexuality as a sign of hysteria.

I use Sigmund Freud here not for the sake of glibness but because his work is the apex of centuries of hand-wringing over women’s sexuality and the long-held belief that a woman’s mental health is deeply tied to that sexuality. Perhaps Freud’s case study of a woman called “Dora” is the most familiar, in which the psychoanalyst attempted to diagnosis and subsequently treat feminine “hysteria.” For Freud, Dora’s mental distress stemmed from her sexuality—or rather what he perceived as female sexuality—and thus treatment was pre-determined by a set of cultural mores that determined how and what women should desire. For Freud, that was bound to motherhood.
Though Freud, like his teacher, the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot, was seeking a clinical/scientific diagnosis of hysteria, the disease itself was still bound to gender, sexuality and a kind of morality. As the literary scholar Janet Beizer has written, “The womb [is] a metaphoric agent of hysteria.” Indeed, the ties between women’s sexuality and sanity were so embedded in scientific and culture discourses that Victorian doctors often prescribed clitoral stimulation has a cure for feminine madness. That women’s sexuality was long tied to the construction of sanity is no surprise, since those at the margins of society have long been the victims of the processes of creating the normative. Indeed, the very idea of hysteria is inherently feminine and, like so many mental disorders, is both formed and inscribed on the bodies of women.

. . . .

McConnell’s discussion of Judd reminded me of the epic slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke during the last election cycle. In case you’ve forgotten, Fluke dared to advocate for insurance-covered birth control. But for some reason her advocacy drove right-leaning pundits to their own paroxysms: from Rush Limbaugh calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” to Ann Coulter spelling it out quite clearly by calling Fluke “a hysterical drama queen.” Certainly it seems that the twinning of sexuality and mental fitness is still a political tool deployed regularly to discredit women and their ability to make rational decisions.
. . . .

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/04/11/mcconnell-and-judd-what-it-means-when-we-talk-about-gender-and-mental-health/

[enough]

1. Thanks, haven't seen anything from Ms. mag in a long time. This is an interesting

approach.

[mindwalker_i]

2. The response to McConnell

Too bad being an asshole isn't considered a mental illness or he could have gotten help.

[Gormy Cuss]

3. Very good analysis. n/t