Excerpts from Theatres of Madness

A series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations are combined to explore the conceptual interdependence of sexuality, reproduction, family life, and “female disorders.”  The subjects of Theatres of Madness are white, Anglo-European women who are diagnosed and treated for their “insanity,” based on the interrelations of their class and gender. Definitions of “female disorders” are revealed discursively: described within documented case histories, medical treatises, pharmaceutical advertising, “found” photographs (that I have sometimes manipulated), and fictional and diaristic texts.

By pairing and layering these various source materials I have attempted to allow for a reading that dislocates and questions the “scientific” nature of observation. The juxtapositions also serve to address complex sets of relations between individuals and institutions, relations that overdetermine the internalization of oppression and, in turn, the degrees of complicity and resistance to that oppression.

Theatres of Madness contains images and texts that have appeared as visual essays in the Yale Journal of Criticism (1996), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (1995), Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies (1995) and as an installation in galleries. Some of the texts are based on the texts for Family Pictures (1985).

Link to Susan Jahoda “Theatres of Madness,” Deviant Bodies, eds. J. Terry and J. Urla, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), PDF