My life's Adventure

Where I am getting some of these wild new academic ideas from....

I am reading this book on mad bad women, which is giving me some of the critical ideas I used in today's posts. The article I talked about in the last post was the third article in this book. I want to read the whole book by Saturday for the criminology conference but will have to settle for reading as much as I can before Saturday. Here is the bibliographic information for this book.

Chan, Wendy & Chunn, Dorthy E. & Menzies, Robert. eds. Women, Madness and the Law: a feminist reader (London: The GlassHouse, 2005)

In this book I have read the introduction and the first two papers and started the third. These are:

Ussher, Jane M. Unravelling Women's Madness: Beyond Positivism and Constructivism and Towards a Material-Discursive-Interpsychic Approach

I just read this last night and understood it. I find the hope for better more humane treatment, fewer medications for women, and the idea of not seeing everything as mental illness, to be enlightening.

Kendall, Kathleen, Beyond Reason: Social Constructions of Mentally Disordered Female Offenders

It covers the history of criminal lunacy as social construction of this type of person.

Labrum, Bronwyn, The Boundries of Femininity: Madness and Gender in New Zealand, 1870-1910.

See the previous post for comments on this article.