Female body-corporeal as both the aetiological site and the site of resistance: Conceptualizing manic depression in Jerry Pinto's Em and the BigHoom

Abstract

The hegemonic discourse of normalcy perpetuates unfavourable portrayals of mental illness; it distorts our understanding of the sufferer's existential and affective experiences. However, mental illness is a multifaceted phenomenon; it necessitates a holistic understanding of how an individual's identity and personhood are emplaced at the intersection of the diverse sociocultural conditions. The article conceptualizes manic depression as a complex interplay of the corporeal, cognitive, and cultural factors in Jerry Pinto's critically acclaimed contemporary novel Em and the Big Hoom (2012). Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based Goanese Indian author who embarks on exploring the intricacies of psychological vulnerabilities and draws heavily from his personal experiences to write poignant, humane and empathetic stories. Em and the Big Hoom documents the narrator's reminiscences of his late mother, Em or Imelda's experiences of mood swings, paranoid delusions, freakish breakdowns, and psychiatric treatments. It scrutinizes extracts of Em's diary notes, letters, and past conversations to exhibit how a woman succumbs to abjection due to socio-cultural expectations of sex, pregnancy, and childbirth and eventually resorts to self-harm. The article projects the female body-corporeal as both the aetiological site and the site of resistance; while phallocentric cartography of the female body engenders abjection, manifestations of abjection at the corporeal level formulate tropes of resistance. The article challenges the phallocentric tendency to pathologize deviant body-behaviour motifs in women, contributing to the expanding corpus of phenomenological knowledge on pathologized female subjectivities.