SOURCE: "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France," in Representations, Vol. 34, Spring, 1991, pp. 134-65.
In the excerpt that follows, Goldstein argues that during the nineteenth century the phenomenon of male hysteria was developed through opposing interpretations: the medical community used it to reinscribe conventional gender definitions, while writers subverted such norms by associating hysteria with the desire for androgyny.
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