Executive producer for the Saturday morning show on France Culture, Pauline Chanu has more than one trick up her sleeve as a radio documentary filmmaker. She still shows it today with her series "The Ghosts of Hysteria." History of a confiscated word”. In four rich and edifying episodes, it tells the long (since it begins in Antiquity) and violent history of the persistence of hysteria, which "continues to nourish misogyny and to haunt medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, politics, justice and our representations".
Episode 1: "The Matrix of Evil". This is the story of an ill-defined term. It is the story of all the violent treatments and remedies that, under cover of this word, have been imposed on women, ranging from marriage assignment to confinement to interventions on the clitoris and ovaries. . This is the story of all those whose pains have not been heard. It is also the story of this woman who testifies and tells that this term earned her seven years of diagnostic wandering before finally being recognized as epileptic.
In the following episode, Pauline Chanu returns to the care of "hysterics" by psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the 19th century (by Professor Charcot and Freud) then in the 20th century, and it is as fascinating as it is edifying. Episode 3 recalls how the stigmatization of women as "hysterical" is a constant in anti-feminist rhetoric. And to replay an extract from the debate of the second round of the presidential election in 2007 between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal to which the right-wing candidate launches: "Calm down. »
Speech and censorship
In the last episode, when Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Camille Claudel are summoned, the writer Hélène Frappat dissects the film Gaslight, directed by George Cukor in 1944, in which a man accuses his wife of losing her head and arrives at the to doubt it. Because, and this is the question that Pauline Chanu then asks: how to stop believing in these fictions and get out of the haunted house?
For this series, on which she began to work a little over a year ago, Pauline Chanu called on many doctors, historians Nicole Edelman (author of Metamorphoses of the hysterical. From the beginning of the 19th century to the Great War, La Découverte, 2003) and Yannick Ripa (author in particular of La Ronde des Folies. Woman, madness and confinement in the 19th century, Aubier, 1985) or even in the words of doctor of sociology Pierre-Guillaume Prigent.
“I think what interests me is the question of speaking out, the conditions for this speaking to be heard and believed, censorship and self-censorship. And hysteria is precisely the question of censorship, of confiscated speech, "adds Pauline Chanu who recently signed a documentary on Olympe de Gouges and is one of the co-authors of the series Let women speak.
Finally, let's say that this documentary is particularly well put on the air by Annabelle Brouard, that the weaving between the testimonies, interviews and readings (in particular of the text by Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, éd. de Minuit, 1969) is very successful.
