Trance Speakers

"Trance Speakers explores the religious and creative practices of trance among female mediums from 1850 to the 1930s. Acknowledging mediumship's popularity among women, it argues that trance speaking participated in the growth of feminist perspectives by providing women with a disguised means to explore and discuss their relation to femininity and authorship. While the study of spiritualism is a burgeoning field, Trance Speakers constitutes the first scholarly work to retrace the history of female mediums in Canada. As such, it sheds new light on women's religious practices in the country, while also providing a greater understanding of the history of spiritualist traditions and travels across North America and Europe. Because most of the mediums travelled to or from the United States and England, their stories also illuminate transnational exchanges of ideas concerning femininity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to presenting many hitherto unexplored archival documents and photographs from Canadian séances, this book of feminist cultural history formulates a new approach to the phenomenon of mediumship that reveals how trance discourses permitted women to resist their marginalization in medical, literary, political, and scientific discourses more broadly. Through feminist and psychoanalytic theories, Trance Speakers proposes a new reading of spiritual mediumship as a response to conflictual interpretations of authorship, agency, and gender."--