PROJECTIONS: CINEMA HYSTERIA

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What does it mean to be a woman?" "What does a woman want?" An exploration of female desire provides dynamically elusive answers to these eternal questions. Originating in ancient Greek notions of the 'wandering womb', hysteria was Sigmund Freud's 'splendid child', defined in his landmark Dora case study. The hysteric's body is a theatre where irrepressible ghosts of past trauma are disguised in blindness, deafness, seizures and convulsions — she unconsciously shape-shifts into a medium of warped communication, her symptoms do all the talking for her. At the core of hysteria is a twisted fascination with beauty, so closely bound up with femininity that it runs the risk of replacing it. Through her identification with the male gaze, the hysteric becomes a tragic seductress, desiring the desire of the other. Exagge