Based in London, Hysterical Women is an international art collective.

The mediums range from Photography to Sculpture, Drawing, Painting, Installation, Sewing Works, Collage, Video, Animation and Performance.

The name Hysterical Women was chosen for the many complex connotations it has. Working on the subject has thrilled us. 

 

The history of the term Hysteria is astonishingly revealing of the different stereotypes and the general ignorance around Women’s sexuality,

Hysteria is often defined as a psychosis related to dissatisfied women’s sexual appetite, which has disappeared with the invention of the vibrator. This is a very superficial explanation. 

“The Invention of Hysteria“ by Gorge Didi-Huberman is a collection of photographs of the first hysterics, diagnosed by Charcot, Freud’s tutor at the Salpêtrière hospital, in which 5000 women lived!

These outcasts women who refused to follow the imposed female norm, found a new identity is this mostly female world and were posing in staged dramatic photographs collected by Mr.Charcot to prove his theories.

According to Elaine Showalter, author of “The Female Malady”, hysterics were often traumatized women who found in fainting, hallucination and hypochondria escapisms from incest, violence, forced marriages or simply their under-stimulated and suffocating lives. 

“Their nervous disorders expressed the insoluble conflict between their desires to act as individuals and their internalized obligations to submit to the needs of the family, and to conform to the model of self-sacrificing ‘womanly’ behavior.” 

 

The Art group Hysterical Women ironically takes its name to explore what is supposedly feminine or not, to play with taboos, provoke and appeal.