How do we understand the Mad Woman's Speech? Women's Novels (50s-60s) and their Cinematic Re-Creation in South India

Dr P. Radhika (Charles Wallace Indian Fellow2010-11)

Cohosted event with the Centre of South Asian Studies

Abstract

The presentation will examine the 'mad woman's speech in Kannada women's writing and popular cinema in relation to her production in the clinical discourse. It is an attempt to both understand the historical production of the 'mad woman' in the post-colonial Indian context as well as a conceptual thinking through of the 'mad woman' as the subject of enunciation.

Biography

P. Radhika is currently employed as Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. She is working on the construction of the 'mad woman' in the realms of psychiatry and popular culture and is involved in assembling a digital data-base of the National  Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience cases-archive going back to the early twentieth century. As part of the Culture Subjectivity and Psyche (CUSP) Research Programme at CSCS, she is involved in a study on "The Experience of Gendered Violence: Developing Psychobiographies." Her doctoral work examined the construction of subjectivity in post-independence regional women’s writing in the context of an emerging Indian state’s scientific-developmental discourse.

Organiser: Centre for Gender Studies, Centre of South Asian Studies, Centres & Programmes Office