Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of "hysterical laughter," exploring how women's amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Death by Laughter
1. Hysterical Laughter on the Brink of Enjoyment
2. Female Death by Laughter (Beyond Enjoyment)
3. An All Too Brief History of Laughter and Death
Part 2: Female Hysteria
4. Gaslighting the Libido: Feminist Politics of Madness, Laughter, and Power
5. Laughter: The Forgotten Symptom
6. Mass Hysteria, Collective Laughter, and Affective Contagion
Part 3: Early Cinema
7. Laughter Unleashed: Hysterical Women at the Movies
8. The Visual Cure? Moving Pictures as Neurotic Trigger and Therapeutic Instrument
9. From Mouth to Screen: Laughing Heads in the History of Film
Conclusion: Laughter, Hysteria, Power-Then and Now
Notes
Index

Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018), co-curator of the silent film collection Cinema's First Nasty Women (2022), and coeditor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).