Throughout my relationships, platonic, romantic, and familial, I have had many, minor and major, bouts of intense self and extra-self reflection. Often against my own will, I strive to be as acutely aware of myself as is humanly possible. To some I may sound like a deeply introspective person, to others I may sound paranoid and obsessed with intellectualising my emotions. In my head I am both, especially when the word introspective has negative connotations.
To my dismay, I am a product of society. I am a woman living under the patriarchy, navigating her everyday life with the panoptical, penetrative male gaze. And from my experience I believe being acutely aware of your place in society as a woman, acknowledging society’s perpetual subjugation of women, is enough to make any woman feel hysterical. I say this because this subjugation is inescapable. If it’s not capitalism plotting against your liberation, which it always is, it will be the people in your life. Your dad, grandma, boyfriend, best friend, are also products of society, and will inevitably view you through the lens of the patriarchy. This acute awareness of how you are viewed by your counterparts, often the male ones, ignites a unique frustration within women that can arguably never be quelled. At least, not while the patriarchy, with the help of its comrade capitalism, continues to disenfranchise women.
As a woman, you’re talked over, you’re not taken seriously, you’re a constant victim of a certain kind of hyper-surveillance that non-women aren’t. Once you start noticing the panopticon you live in and calling people out for being in the watchtower, they grow more intolerant of you and your uniquely womanly “sass” or “irrationality”. I know this is stuff you’ve both heard and experienced before, but I reiterate this phenomenon to make my point. Many are quick to say “Women always overthink everything!” without thinking ever why. Ironically, I think the most logical way to go about your life is to possess an astute level of awareness about everything, at everytime, everywhere.
Society expects women to be often docile, sometimes a bit sassy, and always inclined to react more than what is deemed ‘necessary’. Logically, this leads us products of society to perceive a reaction that is normal as an overreaction to satisfy the goblin in your brain otherwise known as cognitive bias. As a result of setting boundaries for yourself, for example, you’re seen as too emotional, aggressive, angry. When we say that we don’t like being spoken to a certain way by our peers, or that we don’t want our personal space being invaded by strangers that approach us in public, we are met with declarations that we “aren’t seeing things for what they are”, “are taking this out of context”, or my personal favourite, “need to chill.” Our anger is never valid. And the perpetrators sometimes do not even realise what they are doing. Society does not like a woman who actually respects herself - a broad statement to make, I’m aware - some people on some level will respect her for it, but its unexpectedness often takes people by shock. It’s easy to believe that once we gain awareness of the little jail of submissiveness and docility we are forced into by societal expectations, we can escape it. The flaw lies in assuming that elevating your consciousness frees you from that cell, a cell which is hardly in a prison as much as it is in a panopticon. Society will still view us through the criteria we struggle so hard to remove ourselves from. They’ll view us, what we say, what we do, in the context of cages we’ve already broken ourselves out of.
It is important to remember it has only been about 40 years years since psychology officially abandoned the diagnosis of “Female Hysteria”, which - for those who don’t know - was a DSM-II, and III, diagnosis for women which categorised any mild-intense emotion as neuroses. It encompassed symptoms such as: anxiety, insomnia, depression, and irritability, sexual desire and ‘sexually forward’ behaviour. And what this diagnosis does is decontextualise emotions and states of mind that are either normal and healthy, like sexual desire, or a cause for concern, like depression. As a result, this leads to the demonisation of healthy feelings, and inadequate treatment for pressing issues. I believe the tendency to diagnose women with hysterics still plagues our society, especially when race is thrown into the equation. As women of colour, we are situated at the intersection of being a person of colour and being a woman, genuine allies and supporters of our struggle are much more scarce. We often find ourselves estranged from white women and men of colour alike when it comes to our struggle, as they experience privileges that we are actively denied, despite also being marginalised members of society. When white women cry, they are dainty, fragile, and need to be coddled - and they will be. Women of colour, who have been historically masculinised as a method of dehumanisation by our white, often male, societal counterparts, do not always have the same privileges. Instead, what arises is the stereotype of the ‘angry black woman’, the ‘BIPOC social justice warrior’: in other words, the hysteria diagnosis repackaged. And, yes, these terms are not official psychoanalytic diagnoses but they exist for the same reason; to discard womens’ emotional response to facing subjugation at every front of society as unreasonable, exaggerated, and mere hysteria.
It is an interesting paradox, how women are dissected from every angle - torn apart intensely, and put back together lazily - by society and themselves, yet are also reduced to being hysterical. At this point, I don’t know if I despise this extreme level of surveillance women are constantly under as much as I should. I sometimes feel like if my body were placed on a surgical table, the way a frog is in biology class, and was dissected, studied, and cross-checked against a labelled image in the textbook, I would feel somewhat at ease. Endless overthinking and surveilling is not enough for me, I need to have my deductions externally confirmed (or disconfirmed). I do not know how long I can go analysing every aspect of myself, the internal and external, in an endless chain of determinism. The thesis of causal inevitability is not my gateway to peace of mind either. And I am not sure what is. What I am sure about, to my dismay, is that I will not abandon thinking deeply so long as my cerebra is capable of it.
I think that being revolutionary in any degree, by which I mean positioning oneself against the status quo in any meaningful way, is enough to drive a person a bit crazy. I think about the feminists in the 80s reclaiming the label of ‘hysteria’. How apt a label that is for people whose opinions, struggles, and feelings are constantly tossed aside in the best case scenario, and ruthlessly invalidated in the worst case scenario. For me, this hysteria is an impetus; one which (paradoxically) compels me to criticise society while criticising myself for being but a product of that very same society.