The Society for the Humanities & CNY Humanities Corridor, in partnership with Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium, present: The Annual Digital Humanities Lecture
“Matrix, Environment, Atmosphere: How Mother Became a Medium”
Hannah Zeavin
Department of History, UC Berkeley
October 22, 2024
5:00-6:30pm
A.D. White House
From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.”
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of History. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left.
Zeavin will also present the talk "The Distance Cure / The Far Voice" at the October 23rd Media Studies Colloquium, from 12:00-1:30 p.m. in Uris Library 311. Lunch provided. Grad students welcome. To obtain pre-circulated materials, please write to mediastudies@cornell.edu.
