programme ‘Calle Vosté, Parle Vosté’ in 1996. During her intervention, which lasted only a few minutes, Trasobares, a multifaceted artist and queer icon – who would later become Spain’s first trans councillor – challenged established conventions with her unhinged argument. “What do I have to dress up as now? Can’t you see they’ve marginalised us?” she shouted as she threw a glass to the floor in an enervated gesture that would go down in history. Now this gesture has been reinterpreted by Nebulossa in the video clip for ‘Zorra’ [Bitch], the song chosen to represent Spain at the next Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Malmö, Sweden, in May.
Hysteria, madness, and other methods of control
“We have to be strong, and we all have to unite,” Trasobares told the trans people in the audience. “Throw the glass!” the artist encouraged another panellist, who joined in the explosive catharsis. After the intervention, the set descended into a kind of collective delirium. “Nobody showed any kind of crazy behaviour until that lady went crazy,” says one of the collaborators, a clinical psychologist, “she went crazy […] she is an example of histrionic disorder,” he adds.
The psychiatrization of female behaviour dates back to the Middle Ages, when hysteria was developed as a pathological and criminal concept for any kind of deviance. Anyone who displayed symptoms such as irritability, uncontrollable crying, nervous breakdowns or a feeling of tightness in the chest was considered to have hysteria. It was thought to be caused by a dislocation of the uterus, the remedy for which, in addition to aromatherapy and methods linked to spirituality and religion, was to be found in sexual intercourse. The instrumentalization of sexuality is a major stronghold of psychiatry as a means of gender control.
At the end of the 19th century, in the puritanical Victorian era, Sigmund Freud pointed out that the root of female hysteria lay in sexual repression and traumatic childhood events also related to sexuality, all lodged in the unconscious. The shadow of the Middle Ages continued to linger, and again sexual activity was suggested to “stabilise” the uterus. Cultural taboos – masturbation, for example, was attributed to deviant behaviour and pathologies such as hysteria – are actually the shapers of mental illness.
“Why can’t women dress in all their lust, why not talk about sex, why not? Why do we have to repress ourselves? For so many years the repression, the mask? What do I have to disguise myself as now?”, Manuela Trasobares lashed out in her plea that would become subversive pop history.
“I’d rather die than do yoga”
Dissident lifestyles, behaviour outside the strict conventions, are all thrown into the sack of diagnosis and psychiatry, which reinforce social norms and create a category of differentiation for all those sheep who have gone astray. They are mentally ill. They are crazy, they are out of their minds, they are histrionic because they want to attract attention in a bad way. Philosopher Judith Butler argues that notions of gender and mental illness are intertwined in the social formation of the body and identity. The feminist theorist reflects on the role of hysteria in reinforcing gender norms and female control and promotes an appreciation of the political and defiant potential of hysteria as a tool of resistance to restrictive gender norms.
Losing the roles, the forms. Throwing the glass was, is and always will be a political act. Because Manuela Trasobares is not a madwoman, nor does she have a histrionic disorder, nor is she hysterical: Manuela Trasobares threw the glass because she was fed up – and probably still is. In reality, it is always the same people who have to throw the glass. As Virginie Despentes writes in Querido Capullo [Dear Dickhead]: “I want to ruin watches. Good manners make me tired. In any case, I’d rather die than do yoga.
