Time: 7 pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE
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During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the female bodies of hysterics and psychic mediums were understood as being untethered from the known laws of physiology, capable of extraordinary physical and mental feats. Male scientists investigated these inexplicable bodies by conducting elaborate experiments in hypnosis, telepathy, telekinesis and clairvoyance in hospitals and laboratories, and attended séances in private living rooms. This work led some eminent scientists-- previously skeptics--to accept a paranormal explanation, while others concluded that these women suffered from pathological altered states of consciousness, including multiple personality disorder. Whether their baffling abilities were the result of supernatural interventions, pathology or fraud, these witchy women were exceptionally talented, and managed to at once embrace and subvert traditional gender roles.
Tonight’s talk, by Asti Hustvedt, author of Medical Muses and editor of Zone's Decadent Reader, will trace this fascinating history and tease out its puzzling paradoxes.
Asti Hustvedt, Ph.D., is an independent scholar who has written extensively on hysteria and literature. She is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris and the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. Currently, she is working on a book about female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.
Image: A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, 1887