#anna souter

[makingsenseofwhathappened]

Timeless gut punch, from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

If you're not familiar: Free Download

Also stumbled on this wonderful essay & exhibition in my research, which I love: Anonymous Was A Woman

Enjoy, my lone woolfs! 🐺💗

[zurich-snows]

The Dark Side of Surrealism That Exploited Women’s “Hysteria”

The now discredited diagnosis inspired Surrealist artists, based on the sexualized photographs of hospitalized women by a prominent neurologist.

[inceend]

The Dark Side of Surrealism That Exploited Women’s “Hysteria”

The now discredited diagnosis inspired Surrealist artists, based on the sexualized photographs of hospitalized women by a prominent neurologist.

In a photograph depicting the arc de cercle, or the “arch of hysteria,” which was believed to show the anguish of the condition—and which Louise Bourgeois would later famously subvert in bronze with a masculine form—the woman contorts her body so that she is resting on her feet and shoulders. Her head is hidden, but her shapely legs and feet are almost completely revealed. The relative distance of the camera and the profiling of the subject suggest that this photograph is taken to give the impression of scientific “truth,” but also simultaneously to place the viewer at a voyeuristic remove, for both scientific study and visual titillation.