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From “Private Theatres Onstage” to Anti-Hysterical Performances: Reclaiming the Feminist Interest in Hysterical Performances Since the 1990s

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Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts

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Abstract

This chapter reconsiders the feminist interest in hysteria as performance from the 1990s to 2018. The author makes the case that anti-hysterical performances such as Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 U.S. Congressional testimony need to be considered as part of the legacy of hysterical performances. Since the 1990s, feminist theater and performance have coincided with innovative feminist scholarship. The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed feminist collectives reclaiming the term “hysteria.” While stigmas around feminist anger have subsided since 2018, ambivalences about hysterical performances linger despite recent significant scholarship and work by contemporary artists. The author concludes by asserting that questions regarding the legacies of hysterical performances, ranging from the “obviously” hysterical to the intentionally “anti-hysterical,” remain open to debate and would benefit immensely from further consideration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jonathan Erlen (2020) “rediscovered” the dissertation abstract, publishing it in History of Psychiatry without my knowledge.

  2. 2.

    Christina Wald (2007) notes that Morrissey’s play premiered in London in 1993, but Kate Morrissey’s (2000) biography on the University of Toronto Library’s website that is copyrighted to the author notes that it was first staged in Canada in 1987, as does Döring (1996) in a footnote (p. 44n7).

  3. 3.

    Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman’s ([1982] 2003) study of the photographs of the Iconographie with its reproduction of many of the photographs, was extremely important for those of us considering hysteria as performance during the 1990s as the Three Volumes of the Iconographie were not readily accessible to view before the advent of the Internet. Didi-Huberman’s study was not translated into English until 2003.

  4. 4.

    See also Elin Diamond’s subsequent book-length study, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997).

  5. 5.

    I drew from, and at the time believed, that I somewhat extended Sander L. Gilman’s (1976, 1982) work on visual stereotypes of “seeing the insane.”

  6. 6.

    Sulkowicz has subsequently identified as queer and gender non-conforming (Small 2018).

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  1. San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Tanya Augsburg

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Correspondence to Tanya Augsburg .

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  1. University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Johanna Braun

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Augsburg, T. (2021). From “Private Theatres Onstage” to Anti-Hysterical Performances: Reclaiming the Feminist Interest in Hysterical Performances Since the 1990s. In: Braun, J. (eds) Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_4

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