Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld (.PDF)
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Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema by Maggie Hennefeld
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Overview: Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, & what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?
Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized & demonized, suppressed & exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine & culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social & political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure & its violent repression.
Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of 19th-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, & screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films & an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, & feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
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