Time: 7 PM EST
Admission: FREE! RSVP HERE
This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5 pm EDT the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.
Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 5:30 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.
PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.
The fantasy of replacing natural women with new and improved artificial versions has been around ever since Ovid’s Pygmalion fell in love with his “ivory girl.” Masculine knowledge constructs the female body as particularly unhinged, vulnerable to a rupture between its outside, idealized as sublimely beautiful, and its inside, viewed as dark and destructive. This supposed imbalance has led to the desire to fabricate submissive artificial replacements that preserve feminine exteriors but eradicate their threatening interiors: wax figures, automata, statues, anatomical Venuses, female androids and sex dolls.
Tonight’s lecture will focus on the interlaced articulations of this fantasy in a decadent novel called The Future Eve by Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and in the actual hysteria ward of Jean-Martin Charcot. In Villiers’ novel, a fictional Thomas Edison creates the perfect woman, an android designed to reflect male desire, while at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, the non-fictional Charcot used hypnosis to create what he called “artificial hysterics,” real patients programmed to become perfect medical specimens. While these 19th century fictionalized and medicalized Galeteas might be thought of as quaint relics of a bygone era, they continue to populate the bizarre cultures of 21st century sex dolls and AI androids.
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: Ed Emshwiller’s cover for the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, illustration for