BECOMING POST-HYSTERIC

Abstract

This article considers American writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus’s genre-bending, parodic book I Love Dick (1997) as a way to deconstruct divisions that persist between the female “hysteric” and the male “schizophrenic” in contemporary theory. Even after the feminist movements in France, the UK, and America in the 1970s, there remained a gender divide lying dormant within even the more experimental contemporary theory: the male schizophrenic is given more agency to occupy the roles of theorist, author, and philosopher of living while the female hysteric is rendered non-intellectual, unintelligible, and suppressed, seen in the popularization of metaphors of schizophrenia to describe the postmodern condition, for example. This is a dilemma Kraus confronts head-on, and which this article takes up at length, with the author making the case that Kraus’s work marks the beginning of a nuanced theory that encompasses both the hysteric and the schizo in tandem. The article argues that frameworks of becoming-hysteric and becoming-schizo are feminist ways through the post-structuralist terrains that Kraus deterritorializes, including but not limited to the theoretical realms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.