Hysteria, Race, and Masculinity

Sander L. Gilman has extensively researched and published on the intersection of Hysteria, Race, Sexuality and Gender. In this guest lecture Gilman will discuss his influential work and how the term hysteria has been useful until the present day to understand sexist and racist representations of people in protest. The term hysteria is still today very much associate with fin-de-siècle fantasies about ill, hyperventilating women. Gilman addresses in his lecture, however, that the debates about hysteria at the close of the nineteenth century are rooted as much in stereotypes about race and mental illness as they are in the pseudo-scientific claims of its origin in the ‘wandering womb’. What race and hysteria come to mean, moreover, changes its valence when European concepts are re-read in the United States. Who is hysteretic and why they have become hysteric comes to be a medical puzzle with a surprising twist in the course of the twentieth century.

The talk will be followed by an open conversation with Sander L. Gilman and moderated by Johanna Braun.

This guest lecture is part of the UCLA event series #masshysteria. Hysteria, Politics, and Performance Strategies. For more information please visit www.performing-hysteria.com

 Download Podcast

Duration: 1:10:22

 Download Podcast

Duration: 1:10:22