The question of hysteria in Madagascar as a colonial invention stems from clinical observations made in a Malagasy hospital in the 2000s.

Résumé 0

Using the archives of Malagasy and French doctors, missionaries and ethnologists before and during colonization, we present a reappraisal calling on the concepts of the feminist philosophers Camille Froidevaux-Metterie and Elsa Dorlin. The hypotheses are that women’s bodies were the seat of a power struggle, and that the colonizers used hysteria to inferiorise and pathologise collective and individual expression, removing their dimension of resistance. Women, seen as “inferior” were particularly stigmatized. Hysteria conceptualised as medical and psychological is derived from Charcot’s research, which was contemporary with the colonization of the late 19th and early 20th century. The “hysterisation” of others far away is based on a visual reading of very disparate manifestations. The term hysteria is still in common use especially in the form of collective hysteria.