ABSTRACT
Foucault (1976) suggests that sexuality in the nineteenth century was a product of disciplinary power that regulated women’s bodies, subjecting them to a hysterisation that qualified and then disqualified them. This hysterisation saturated women’s bodies with sexuality, integrating and pathologising them within a medical discourse. At the same time, the hysterical female body was placed in relation to the social regulation of reproduction and as the guarantor (in the guise of the nervous mother) of the spiritual sanctity of the family. The hysteric was both the embodiment of sexuality and the personification of its lack. As the movement of sex, hysteria was both ‘whole and part’, one and the other, angel and whore (Foucault 1976:153).
