Resumen de Discourses on the Borderline: Women, Madness, and Identity
This paper examines two contemporary North-American memoirs that address borderline personality disorder: Rachel Reiland’s Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder (2004) and Merri Lisa Johnson’s Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality (2010). The analysis is framed within the feminist approach to the historical revision of madness and its treatment, which emphasises the gender bias of psychiatry (Ussher 2011). One of the modern diagnoses that pathologise women’s distress is borderline personality disorder. In order to understand the meanings given to the borderline experience by these diagnosed women, three discursive features have been studied: narrative linearity, idiosyncratic imagery, and assimilation of external discourses.
The analysis shows that the use of linearity and stereotypical tropes accompany the assimilation of the mental illness/recovery model, while non-linearity and innovative tropes are explored to reject master narratives and address different frames of understanding madness.
