No 4: HER REMOVED

PHOTO PROVIDED BY KATIE KERN

KATIE KERN

I walked my grandmother down the steps of the movie theater on a warm dusk night with a baby blue sky sitting above us in the summertime. After watching a comedy, my grandmother commented on how hysterical the movie was. “Katie, that was hysterical!” My grandmother and I attended many movies together, and something about that word cemented with her. Every funny movie was hysterical for my grandmother. I would continue to hear her laugh or whisper as she told herself jokes in Spanish to herself till we walked back into our car. I’d gaze at how she clapped her hands together whenever she immersed herself in a hefty laugh. She’d say it one more time. Then we would journey back home in her beige short Volvo. I’d hear her enter our home and begin to say the same words to my family… “That movie was hysterical!”

I recently read my grandmother a journal entry I wrote about her. I’d write in extensive detail, excessive detail, on the flowers printed on her rusty couch. I’d written about her wrinkly hands, her uncontrollable laugh, her perfectly cut and colored bob. I would just keep writing down what I observed from her and around her. We sat on her rusty floral couch as I read to her, and she clapped her soft wrinkly hands together and told me, “Katie, that was hysterical!”

I asked myself if my grandma saw my writing as comical or that when I wrote in this journal, my view of the world was not concrete, it was excessive, and paid attention to every detail I felt and saw. Was my obsessive attention to detail hysterical? The extra words I included in each sentence as I described her and what she did… Excessive? I asked myself if my grandmother’s definition of the word connected to what it actually meant to exist as hysterical. 

I was not the first to ask these questions about excess. In the past, hysteria defined the mysteries of women and our unmanageable behavior. In “The History of Hysteria,” McGill University writes, “Hysteria was basically the medical explanation for ‘everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable in women.’” One word described the over-dramatics of women. Hysteria. 

Once in Kindergarten, in front of my whole class my teacher, Ms. Shretzel, characterized my excessive crying as hysterical. She asked, “why do you have to cry?” I didn’t have those answers. I had no control over myself and the tears that fell down my cheek while I perched criss-crossed on the floor. 

As I heard my grandma’s laughter and the voice of my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Shretzel, in my head, I wondered if they knew that the word originates from the clarification of the “unmanageability” of women. Hysteria behaved as excess that couldn’t be understood. But, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that feminine hysteria could be presumed. McGill University’s paper on Freud argues that he believed women experienced hysteria because of their inability to reconcile the loss of their (metaphoric) penis. Did I start to cry as a child because I had to reconcile the absence of metaphorical masculinity? Reading what Freud said reminded me of what Ms. Shatzel told me, was I hysterical because of my inability to feel comfortable with my own femininity? No, but what made me hysterical? In Ancient Greece and Egypt, they illustrated women’s health as hysterical and troublesome. The root of the word hysteria comes from hystera, the Ancient Greek translation of “womb.” Planned Parenthood’s, “The History of Hysteria and How it Impacts You,” states, “Hysteria was focused on the belief that the very presence of a uterus must cause these symptoms.” The very presence of femininity alluded to the unmanageable hysterics of women. Freud and ancient civilizations desperately looked to define the uncontrollable behavior they saw in women. Where women lost control, men wanted to define it. Take away their freedom. Control them.

I associate hysteria with blue. I associate hysteria with the blue that 

comes from the tears of the

 comedic cartoon characters 

I watched when I was small. 

Ancient Greece and Freud don’t represent the most recent examples of the erasure of femininity from women. In 2020 while the United States vigorously detained illegal immigrants, stories of women came out who were forced to undergo hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures. In NPR’s, “ICE Almost Deported Immigrant Woman Who Says She Got Unwanted Surgery While Detained,” they focused on the Sterilization Procedures of Young Central American Women Immigrants at Border, stating that “ICE’s dismissive response shows it is also apparent that there are many young women that have experienced this violence whose stories are not being told.” Due to a loss of humanity, these women lost parts of the femininity and agency they deserved to obtain. These women lost control of their bodies. They lost control. 

How does agency continuously get taken away from women? Writer Rebecca Solnit investigates how the stories of women get seized. In her essay, “Grandmother Spider,” she comments on the eradication of female agency, “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear.” In these detention camps, officers medically take away the parts that connect to the identity of the female body. When I think of a uterus, I think of the possibilities of life and beginnings. The ability to generate life with the service of a body part shows the powerfulness of the female body. That power gets purposefully taken away from these women being taken away from their homes. Who is the hysterical one here? The taker or the taken from?

The blue-sky blue animates onto the screen  when a cartoon character gets upset.

What I mean by hysteria is loss 

of control. When a Kindergartener can’t control her tears. When the 

words from a journal exceed what you want to know. When a birthday 

balloon escapes your hands. 

In Ancient Greece, they would take away from women because they believed the uterus caused their hysteria. In Greece, the uterus caused the unmanageable excess that they couldn’t understand about the women in their society. But, why did these current detention centers take more away from these women? Taking femininity from women aids unnecessary cruelty. Excess. Surplus malice. Why did they take their womanhood away? How did the exploitation of these women occur?  What was the need for this unnecessary inhumanity? 

The act of taking something so integral to my understanding of a body and femininity is  hysterical. That act embodies hysterical. Absurd. Excessive. Not the uterus or the actions of these women. 

I look to my grandmother when I can’t understand something. Or I’ll go to my journal. With hesitation, when I found out about what occurred in these detention centers I asked my Mexican grandmother about what she thought. She didn’t say much. She sat in her chair with a cup of grapes and some saltines. She read about these young women at the border and she simply speechlessly nodded her head no; it rested completely within her eyes. 

The balloons find themselves

 in the hands of the clouds and the same 

blue I associate with hysteria. A complete 

loss of control. The baby blue in

 the sky lies in  the background of the 

sparkly balloons that escape. 

I inspected my grandmother’s brown watery eyes. I acknowledged her stories, her history, her children, her immigration, her femininity. I comprehend taking that away from her. Taking her away from her. 

I ask myself why I detach when I lose control. Maybe it's the inhumanity I observe while I picture the women my age with my grandma and I’s same chestnut brown eyes at the detention centers. The unmanageable atrocities accompany my hysteria. The young women who come out and tell their stories of getting stolen from with no control over their robbery. Her removed.

Works Cited

“The History of Hysteria.” Office for Science and Society, 31 July 2019, https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-hysteria. 

Parenthood, Planned. “The History of Hysteria and How It Impacts You.” Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-south-east-north-florida/blog/the-history-of-hysteria-and-how-it-impacts-you. 

Rose, Joel. “Ice Almost Deported Immigrant Woman Who Says She Got Unwanted Surgery While Detained.” NPR, NPR, 17 Sept. 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913698689/ice-almost-deported-immigrant-woman-who-says-she-got-unwanted-surgery-while-deta. 

Solnit, Rebecca. Men Explain Things to Me. Haymarket Books, 2014.