ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Receptive mothers, enchanted children, and the parascientific mind

• In Event: Possessed, “Crippled”, Uncombustible: Bodies at the Limit of Technologies and Genders

English Abstract

Notions of feminine intuition and maternal instinct have long played a role in Western conceptions of mediumship, whether these operate as socially-sanctioned conduits for spiritual forces or as modes of derangement, excess, and hysterical deception. The figure of the innocent child, whether possessed by spirits or appearing as a spirit after death, stands alongside the maternal/hysterical woman in Spiritualism’s arcana. Scientific investigators of psychical phenomena often ascribed to the woman and the child an overdetermined set of class, gender, race, and age-based attributes that they took as explanatory constants amid the mercurial manifestations of the séance. However, as active agents in the production of phenomena, women and children exceeded or exploited these ascriptions quite frequently.
Parapsychology, a descendent of early-twentieth-century psychical research that continues to seek experimental proofs of supernormal forces, today enjoys resurgent popularity in combination with New Age spirituality and conspiratorial rejections of institutional scientific expertise. At the heart of this configuration, once again, are the woman and the child: the “warrior mom” fending off toxic intrusions such as vaccines, and the nonspeaking autistic child, whose disability is a superpower that grants them access to higher dimensions of reality. This paper traces resonances across the long history of women and children as mediums whose credibility or incredibility is defined by their situated relations. Adopting disability as an analytic and reading it back into earlier encounters between science and spiritual phenomena, I propose a new approach to the mother/child configuration of what Dereck Lee terms “the parascientific mind.”

Author

• Alicia Puglionesi, Johns Hopkins University