ABSTRACT
Much as “the woman question” preoccupied social and political theorists of the late nineteenth century when the emancipation of women and the feminine in general was identified as a threat to bourgeois stability, “the question of woman” has become a motif in the discourse of postmodernism. The question has returned like a glitch in the record, causing a “repeat” in the discursive practice. The “repeat” centers around the discussion of hysteria which has returned, not as the subject of a medical discourse, but, appropriately for postmodernism, as a question of representation. Hysteria, an invisible pathology which gained “presence” through the work of Charcot, has now become a simulacrum. Fashion models, dressed in Comme Des Garçons clothing which provides for atrophied appendages, adopt Charcot's attitudes passionelles. Anorexia, bulimia, and cosmetic body cutting have lent new meaning to the term “fashion victim.” Tina Turner, with disheveled hair and shredded clothing, goes through all the unmotivated gyrations of the grande attaque hystérique—posing the question “what's love got to do with it?”
