Mass Hysteria

Mass Hysteria examines the medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. Late eighteenth century transformations in these practices reshaped mothers' bodies, and contemporary norms and routines of prenatal care and early motherhood have inherited the legacy of that era. As a result, mothers are socially positioned in ways that can make it difficult for them to establish and maintain healthy and safe boundaries and appropriate divisions between public and private space.

In Mass Hysteria, Rebecca Kukla examines the present-day medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. In the late-eighteenth century, the configuration of the maternal body underwent a radical transformation and the two maternal bodies that emerged out of this transformation still govern our imagination and rituals surrounding pregnancy and lactation. Exploring the history and the current life of these two maternal bodies within medical institutions, popular culture, and politics, Kukla offers a critical assessment of the lived repercussions of these ideological figures and practices for contemporary women's and infants' health and well-being.

Chapter 1 Acknowledgments
Chapter 2 Figures
Part 3 Part One
Part 4 Introduction - Impressionable Bodies
Chapter 5 A "Private Looking-Glasse"
Chapter 6 Permeable and Perambulating Wombs
Chapter 7 The Maternal Imagination
Chapter 8 Governing and Ordering Maternal Bodies
Chapter 9 Preserving Nature
Part 10 Imbibing the Love of the Fatherland
Chapter 11 "Begin with Mothers"
Chapter 12 Nature, Contingency and Freedom
Chapter 13 Imbibing the Love of the Fatherland
Chapter 14 The Meaning of Milk in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Chapter 15 Literal and Figurative Lactating Bodies
Chapter 16 First and Second Nature
Part 17 Splitting the Maternal Body
Chapter 18 Rousseau's Hysterical Diagnosis
Chapter 19 Monitoring and Mapping Maternal Space
Chapter 20 "The Truth Was Thereby Well Authenticated"
Chapter 21 The Fetish Mother and the Unruly Mother
Chapter 22 Dissecting Monsters
Chapter 23 Bodies Bordering on the Pathological
Part 24 Part Two
Part 25 The Uterus as Public Theater
Chapter 26 Setting the Stage
Chapter 27 The "Sonographic Voyeur" and the Rituals of Fetal Recognition
Chapter 28 The "What To Expect Pregnancy Universe"
Chapter 29 Transparency, Anonymity and Maternal Identity
Chapter 30 Civic Responsibility, Maternal Agency, and the Technic of Pregnancy
Chapter 31 Maternal Duties, and the Constitutive Power of Ideology
Part 32 Separation Anxiety
Chapter 33 Principles of Proximity
Chapter 34 Monstrous Separations
Chapter 35 Embodied Mothering
Chapter 36 Denaturing the Breast
Chapter 37 The Myth of the Infinitely Bountiful Breast and its Magic Milk
Chapter 38 The Lactating Body as Scientific Object
Chapter 39 The Reemergence of the Unruly Mother
Chapter 40 Ideology and the Constitution of Desire
Chapter 41 Mother-Love and the Politics of Proximity
Part 42 Intimacy, Vulnerability, and the Politics of Discomfort
Chapter 43 Who Wouldn't Want to Breastfeed?
Chapter 44 Private Places
Chapter 45 Intimacy, Vulnerability, and Maternal Sexuality
Chapter 46 Making Space
Part 47 Fixing the Boundaries of Mothers' Bodies
Chapter 48 The Dark But Firm Web of Experience
Chapter 49 Decentered Mothers - Unfixed Boundaries
Chapter 50 Solidifying the Maternal Self