L’imaginaire thérapeutique des chocs à l’insuline
The article examines insulin shock therapy in French psychiatry through the lens of feminist philosophy. In order to highlight the therapeutic logic of this type of treatment, used massively from the 1930s through the end of the 1950s, it shows how gender informs the conception of what heals. Femini...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Association Genres, sexualités, langage
2022-07-01
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| Series: | Glad! |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/glad/4437 |
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| Summary: | The article examines insulin shock therapy in French psychiatry through the lens of feminist philosophy. In order to highlight the therapeutic logic of this type of treatment, used massively from the 1930s through the end of the 1950s, it shows how gender informs the conception of what heals. Feminist philosophy generally focuses on the pathologizing of women or gender minorities, as well as on the material and symbolic production of sexual deviance, i.e. on the inscription of psychiatric patients in social gender relations. My perspective is slightly different, in that I am questioning, on a theoretical level, the way in which gender is used as an essential category of the therapeutic process. I thus propose to explore the epistemological imaginary of insulin shock therapy through two crucial discursive tropes of this imaginary, mothering and regression, and the image of reproduction that they mobilize. Insulin shock therapy appears not only as a gendered device, importing gender relations within the hospital, but also as a gendering device, i.e. producing the gender norm both materially and discursively. In the wake of feminist works on the gender of science, I attempt to open up some lines of reflection about the definition of the therapeutic in feminist philosophy, and to contribute to an ongoing reflection on how feminist scholars could use psychiatry and its history. |
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| ISSN: | 2551-0819 |