
Why was a laughing woman seen as lethal, not least to herself?
When early cinema weaponised the sight of women’s laughter, it borrowed from flawed psychiatric ideas about female hysteria
by Maggie Hennefeld
Maggie Hennefeld is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of the award-winning book, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), a curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray collection Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique, and co-editor of two volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). Her new book, Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024) reveals the untold history of women who allegedly died from laughing too hard.