Clipmarks | Aribeth's 'feminism' clips

"Mad, Bad and Sad"

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:04:54 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.”

While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<<

"Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Diagnosis: Female

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline.

It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her.

“Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering.

Tags: psychiatry, feminism, books, review

The story of Sartre and de Beauvoir as never told before

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:37:21 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'.

...

Sartre had always said the best way to learn about a country was to sleep with its women.

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Their legendary love pact - they never married but swore mutual devotion to each other with the freedom to have affairs - was an attempt to overthrow the stifling hypocrisy that, for so long, had dictated most people's lives.

Yet a fascinating new book paints this supposedly high-minded duo as serial seducers bent on their own gratification and as a couple who used their apparently lofty philosophy as a springboard to excuse their multiple liaisons, often with under-age teenagers who were broken by the experience.

And while Simone de Beauvoir preached her ideal of feminist independence and equality, eschewing such 'bourgeois' concepts as marriage and children, and claiming women should behave just like men, the truth is such a lifestyle made her bitterly unhappy and she became obsessively jealous over Sartre's countless conquests.

In this sordid relationship of supposed equals, he was always one step ahead of her - though it didn't start that way.

Tags: philosophy, feminism

Anaïs Nin

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:51:22 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: From being a cult figure of the early feminist movement, Anais later rose to international prominence with her writing. She is best known for her diaries but also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception.

In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.<<

Clip Source: www.anais-nin.de

Anaïs Nin (1903 - 1977)

Biographical notes

born in Neuilly

outside Paris

spent her childhood in various parts of Europe until, when she was eleven, her father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, abandoned his family

same year, her French-Danish mother, Rosa Culmell, took Anais and her two sons to New York.

On the boat

began to write her journals

In 1923 she married Hugo Guiler

The couple moved to Paris in 1924

supported various avant-garde artists, among them Henry Miller with whom Anais started an affair and exchanged hundreds of letters

back to New York just before the outbreak of World War II

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness.
For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. -Anais Nin

Clip Source: www.anais-nin.de

Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller

Henry on March 4, 1932
Three minutes after you have gone. No, I can't restrain it. I tell you what you already know - I love you.

Clip Source: www.anais-nin.de

Anaïs Nin and June Mansfield

Clip Source: www.anais-nin.de

Photographs of Anaïs Nin

as a Spanish dancer

1934

Tags: biography, bio, feminism

I fight like a girl

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:07:02 GMT

clipped by: isabel
clipper's remarks: With a message like this, it's a shame the author is anonymous.

Clip Source: www-rohan.sdsu.edu

I Fight Like A Girl

I fight like a girl who refuses to be a victim.
I fight like a girl who is tired of being
IGNORED and HUMORED and BEATEN and RAPED.
I fight like a girl who's sick
of not being taken seriously.
I fight like a girl who's been pushed too far.
I fight like a girl who OFFERS and
DEMANDS RESPECT.
I fight like a girl who has a lifetime of
ANGER and STRENGTH and PRIDE
pent up in her girly body.
I fight like a girl who doesn't believe in
FEAR and SUBMISSION.
I fight like a girl who knows that
THIS BODY and THIS MIND are mine.
I fight like a girl who knows that

YOU ONLY HAVE AS MUCH POWER
AS I GRANT YOU.

I fight like a girl who will never allow you
to take more than I offer.
I fight like a girl who FIGHTS BACK.

So next time you think you can distract
yourself
from your insecurities by victimizing a girl,
THINK AGAIN.
She may be ME and

I FIGHT LIKE A GIRL.

Tags: poem, empowerment, inspiration, motivation, feminism