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.

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.

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