![]() My research thus redeploys female madness as a research category. ![]() Employing theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, I argue that the madness discourse represents a key site where writers negotiate the ongoing hegemony of societal ideologies defining the special status of the female psyche, body, and sexuality as entities which need to be monitored, shaped or optimized. Since the late 19th century, female authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have been appropriating discourses of madness in order to critique the contradictory ramifications of mandatory adherence to the construct of femininity. While scholars have studied the madwoman of the previous centuries extensively, my dissertation presents the first comprehensive study of representations of female madness from 1894 onward. ![]() ![]() Using an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation examines the intersection of womanhood and madness in German-language literature and culture. ![]()
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