Mass Hysteria

Rebecca Kukla is an associate professor of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, as well as an affiliated associate professor at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. From 2003-2005, she was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the editor of Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (2006), as well as the author of numerous articles and book chapters.

With sly wit, impressive historical scope and deep moral conviction, Rebecca Kukla brilliantly illuminates modern cultural beliefs and practices about motherhood as an embodied experience. Taking us back into seventeenth century Europe and through the Enlightenment, Kukla deftly and vividly interprets texts and pictures to uncover the historical foundations of the mutually constitutive relationship between maternal bodies and the body politic and to illustrate how this history, no less than contemporarytechnologies, shapes and constrains the lived experience of pregnancy and mothering today. With insights that transcend liberalism and postmodernism, Kukla re-interprets the usual dichotomies?private/public, nature/culture, inner/outer, self/other?and offers a profoundly feminist reading of the fluid, permeable boundaries of maternal bodies. The ?fix? she proposes is one that promises to restore women?s integrity, agency and identity both within and without motherhood. <|>Mass Hysteria<|> is a tour deforce of feminist scholarship.

• 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 Chapt