Histories of madness: The abject perspective of Italian women in Australia

Abstract

In this article it is my intention to present some of the findings of my PhD research,1 in which I have considered Italian migrants' material and discursive practices about the body, through the analysis of a corpus of more than 1,000 original letters written by Italian migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns in the Italian Australian-language newspaper La Fiamma. The specific focus of this article is on letters written by Italian migrant women in which a psychological discomfort or a psychiatric disorder was expressed. Many of these women wrote more than one letter over a span of two or more years. Despite important events in their lives, such as pregnancy and divorce, or admission to or release from a psychiatric hospital, they essentially continued to repeat the same discourse in every letter, as if they were trapped in a situation from which it was impossible to escape - as if nobody was actually listening to what they were trying to say. This paper is an attempt to give back a voice to some of these women through my own personal and theoretical approach to their histories of madness and abjection.