The subject of pain is the business I am in. Louise Bourgeois and the Iconography of hysteria: reclaiming the visibility of pain

The paper presents Louise Bourgeois’s production on the theme of hysteria by analysing the artist’s writings and works, and through a reconstruction of her fundamental iconographic and historical sources.The essay argues how Bourgeois’ oeuvre elaborates on the one hand a critical stance towards the gendered construction of the history of hysteria as a female malady, and, on the other, it makes male hysteria visible, namely the unspoken in the history of the disease; a silence that influenced not only the understanding of a stereotyped version of femininity but also of a normative masculinity.