CAMINERO-SANTANGELO, Marta, The Madwoman Can't Speak

« Resisting the ever-widening reach of psychiatry a host of new "radical" theories of madness emerged in the 1960s. The antipsychiatry movement was characterized by the work of R.D Laing, who argued that madness was not the result of an inherited weakness (as the evolutionists had claimed) or of faulty or incomplete development (as Freud had suggested), but rather a "special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation". (Politics of Experience, 115) » (8)

CAMINERO-SANTANGELO, Marta, The Madwoman Can't Speak

«In order to use madness as a metaphor for the liberatory potentials of language, feminist critics must utterly unmoor it from its associations with mental illness as understood and constructed by discourses ans practices both medical and popular. But if the connotation carried by the notion of madness must be completely suppressed in order for such a metaphor to work - if the word must be emptied of its meanings and provided with a entirely set of significations (in fact, an impossibility) - then why use it at all? » (2)

CAMINERO-SANTANGELO, Marta, The Madwoman Can't Speak

«Women are resigning themselves to silence, and to nonspeech. The speech of the other will then swallow them up, will speak for them, and instead of them.» (Makward 100, cité p. 2)