Melancólicas y emancipadas. La transformación de los mitos de la feminidad patológica en discursos de empoderamiento feminista

Abstract

The figure of the melancholic has been used historically to neutralize and discredit women’s discourses of emancipation, understanding the deviations of the norm as pathologies that needed to undergo a "social orthopedics".

However, as represented by the characters of Britney Spears and Madame Bovary, it would be possible to resignify this kind of discourses. We could appropriate these figures of the “pathological femininity”, addressing them as figures of resistance that indicate the only place where women can locate themselves to disrupt the hegemonic discourse: the critical, eccentric and marginal place of the pathological.