Science of the Seance: Transnational Networks and the Gendered Bodies in the Study of Psychic Phenomena, 1918-40

Beth A. . Robertson is historian of gender, sexuality, and the body who teaches in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University

Her findings cast new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in the 1920s and '30s. She reveals a world inhabited, on one side, by psychical researchers who represented themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body and, on the other, by mediums and ghostly subjects who could and did challenge the researchers' exclusive claims to scientific expertise and authority.. Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a group of men and women who sought to transform the séance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project

In this provocative book, Robertson contends that the study of mediumship impacted both empirical methods and gender studies … A major contribution of this work is its description of how women, both as participants and researchers, debunked the stereotype that had linked femininity with “intellectual ineptitude.” Robertson’s work can serve as a model for further inquiries on the contributions psychical research can make to scholarship, methodology, and philosophy. Science of the Seance resurrects the story of a select transnational group and their quest for objective knowledge of the supernatural world, casting new light on empiricism and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and the body in this era.Drawing on publications, correspondence, seance notes, and photographs from Canada, the UK, and the US, Beth A. Kr