Hysterical laughter on the brink of enjoyment -- Female death by laughter (beyond enjoyment) -- An all too brief history of laughter and death -- Gaslighting the libido : feminist politics of madness, laughter, and power -- Laughter : the forgotten symptom -- Mass hysteria, collective laughter, and affective contagion -- Laughter unleashed : hysterical women at the movies -- The visual cure? Moving pictures as neurotic trigger and therapeutic instrument -- From mouth to screen : laughing heads in the history of film -- Conclusion: Laughter, hysteria, power : then and now.
Summary:
"Death by Laughter reveals the untold history of female "hysterical laughter" (as both a light-hearted colloquialism and as a mirthless psychiatric symptom) from the mid-19th century through the rise of early cinema. Maggie Hennefeld argues that cinema made it possible for women to laugh hysterically as never before, but with irreversible social and political consequences. Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, "hysterical laughter" was the last thing you would ever want to experience with your body. It was primarily something that afflicted emotional, ambitious, and/or frustrated women on the cusp of a nervous breakdown. Above all, it arose from the sudden, simultaneous eruption of unresolvable mixed feelings. But all that began to change around the turn of the century when, at last, hysterical laughter was let loose upon the masses. Female enjoyment quickly became a gold standard for commercial profitability amid the popular explosion of cinematic modernity. At the same time, as always, there was intense cultural backlash and moral panic in response to the voluble escalation of women's euphoric sensation. Hennefeld traces the social politics of female enjoyment from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective carnival of early film spectatorship. Drawing on film historiography, critical comedy studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, Hennefeld considers a wide range of subjects from obituaries of women "killed by a joke," to theories and performances of female hysteria, to the institutional deployment of movies as a recreational cure for madness"--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.