Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film
In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as "the Papin affair," the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the...
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How "the insane lesbian" became a popular stereotype.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Marking the Limits of the Social Writing the Papin Affair Surrealism's Lesbian Doubles"What insane passion": Djuna Barnes's Nightwood"Prophetess Faced Prophetess": Madness and H.D.'s Prose The Late Twentieth Century: Filming the Psychotic Queer Woman Notes Works Cited Index
