Guest lecture by Sander L. Gilman, Emory University
This guest lecture is part of the UCLA event series #masshysteria. Hysteria, Politics, and Performance Strategies organized by the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies.
Date: Friday, November 16, 2018
Time: 2:00 – 3:00 PM
Location: UCLA Bunche Hall 10383
Free admission. RSVP Here.
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.
Co-sponsored by:
- Center for the Study of Women
- Center for European and Russian Studies
- Department of English
- Department of Germanic Languages
- Department of Theater
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
- Center for Performance Studies
