The Hysterical Alphabet: A Multi-Media History
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum 600 South Gregory Street Urbana
Hysteria’s four-thousand-year history deeply inflects our ideas about gender and illness. The ancient Greek myth of the traveling uterus, Freud's Dora, and the French-Victorian vibrator all reveal hysteria as a cultural symptom. This multi-media production offers a history of hysteria with humor, playfulness, and critical insight. Terri Kapsalis reports episodes from medical lore in a "hysterical" version of the alphabet backed by Danny Thompson's disquieting film collages and John Corbett's musical manipulations.
Hosted by: Department of History and School of Art and Design
In conjunction with: Art Graduate Student Organization, Community Informatics Initiative, Department of Dance, Department of English, Department of Psychiatry, Gender and Women's Studies Program, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Institute of Communications Research, I-Space Gallery, Medical Humanities and Social Sciences Program, Spurlock Museum, Women’s Resource Center
Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago