School of Social and Political Science

Description

In Puerto Rico, ‘madness’ named a moral and social problem. It was a pejorative term used to castigate women and ‘women-not-women’ who failed to adhere to gendered and racialised notions of appropriate behaviour and dress, which were grounded in Christian colonial conceptions of ‘decency’. Drawn from multiple years of ‘assemblage ethnography’ that began in 2019, this paper traces the socially emergent category of the ‘madwoman’ through three portraits of deviant femininity. Together, they demonstrate cost of going mad and the social and political possibilities that madness affords.