Naturally Crazy: Agency and Affect in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted

Abstract

Girl, Interrupted is pop-culturally thought of as the poor-woman’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The devaluation of female protagonists, women-centric media and bodily emotions form two similarly themed films into separate and distinct realm of artworks. Each film takes up specific gendered mental illnesses – Susanna is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, seven times more likely in women than men, and McMurphy with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, three times more likely in men than women. Both diagnoses use gendered rhetoric to categorize the individual’s affects. The diagnoses are done through the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a tool for categorization and pathologization of behaviours which dichotomizes “normal” and “healthy” to “crazy” and “ill”. The films portray the naturalizing discourses used to create, diagnose and disseminate these illnesses. Avoiding Freudian psychoanalysis and opting for a feminist affect theory based approach, this paper will examine the construction and propagation of the normal/ill dichotomy, as well as how those narratives flow into other aspects of society such as the Men’s Rights Movement and New Age women’s body and health.