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The body came to be taken seriously as a topic of cultural history during the "corporeal" or "bodily" turn in the 1980s and 1990s. Soon, however, critique was raised against these studies' conceptualization of the body as discursively shaped and socially disciplined: individual bodily agency and feeling were felt to be absent in the idea of the material body. This article critically analyzes new approaches in the field of body history, particularly the so-called "material turn". It argues that the material turn, especially in the guise of praxiography, has a lot to offer historians of the body, such as more attention to material practices, to different kinds of actors and a more open eye to encounters. Potential problems of praxiographical analyses of the body in history include the complicated relationship between discourses and practices and the neglect of the political and feminist potential of deconstructive discourse analyses. However, a focus on the relationship between practices of knowledge production and the representation of the body may also provide new ways of opening up historical power relations.

AbstractBased on criminal court cases found in archives and newspapers, this article traces how the diagnosis of hysteria functioned in trials and Dutch forensic psychiatric practice c. 1885–1960. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and praxiography, hysteria is studied as a 'fire object'. It can make multiple relations with gender, which can be absent or present. This approach asks whether and how gender is important regarding hysteria. Gender only 'stuck' to hysteria in certain situations. In rape cases, hysteria took the form of lying and was connected to women. Although a woman's hysteria could be used as a reason to exonerate the male perpetrator's crime of murder, a man's hysteria never served to exculpate a female perpetrator of a crime. Signs on the body appeared to be very significant but did not suffice for a clear diagnosis. Inconsistencies during the psychiatric examination of the body therefore needed to be coordinated by pointing to other bodily symptoms, personal life stories, academic literature or logical reasoning. To analyse the ways hysteria functioned as a versatile fire object in the courtroom and pre‐trial investigation alerts us to hysteria's shapeshifting potential that might explain the power of the hysteria label in twentieth‐century medicine and culture.