Hysteria Narratives | Pleun Gremmen

In the center of my flank lies my womb, an internal organ closely resembling an animal; as she moves back and forth on its own between my flanks, also upwards ins a straight line below my cartilage of my thorax, and also obliquely to the right or left, to the liver or spleen. My womb is sling down and, in other words, completely erratic.

 Hysteria Narratives is an 8-minute video, part of an ongoing research, on the history of Western medicine that has focused on the study of women bodies, especially on the “theory of the wandering uterus” already discussed in the Corpus hippocraticum, the collection of essays about medicine attributed to Hippocrates.

Almost pretending to be a film for scientific use, the video is an immersion inside a dreamlike female human body, punctuated by the words of a hypothetical patient who complains of the symptoms of the disease described as hysteria. Four video reconstructions of explorations of female intestines with a tube retrace the history of hysteria and its exploitation to define the intellectual, physical and moral inferiority of women.

With Hysteria Narratives, Gremmen retraces the attempts of the scientific tradition to trace female biology to the notorious instability of her uterus, of her hormones. Defining a “hysterical” woman has always meant that her way of being in relation to the world is necessarily conditioned by her gender, unpredictability, and irrationality.

Hysteria Narratives is also in this way an alarm bell against sexist simplifications, the medical prejudices of gender that have their roots in classical medicine, but which still contribute today to the inexperience towards the specificities of the woman’s body.

The project was born in the context of Pandora’s Box at the Internationales Frauen * Theater-Festival 2020 in Frankfurt in collaboration with the director Edith van den Elzen.
@Pleun Gremmen, Hysteria Narratives, 2021
Video, 8’33

16/07/2021