A prominent feminist scholar dismissed Gulf War syndrome as media-induced hysteria

Evidence

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the forces of epidemiological disavowal gained an ally from an unexpected quarter: Princeton literary scholar Elaine Showalter. Showalter, best known for her brilliant, pathbreaking work on the cultural production of gendered madness, adjudged in her book Hystories that Gulf War syndrome was the result of a media-stoked millennial hysteria. Showalter maintained that with the millennium’s approach, Americans were especially susceptible to social panics, hence the rise of alien abduction, Satanic ritual abuse, multiple-personality syndrome, the recovered-memory movement, and Gulf War syndrome—all of them, in her view, millennial epidemics of hysterical disorders and imaginary illnesses, and all virally transmitted through the media. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 615

Categorization

• XREF: The irony Showalter (who theorized gendered madness) dismisses veterans’ illness as hysteria parallels ch. 29’s account of Carson attacked as female hysteria — a gendered-disavowal thread across authors.
• SEED: ‘Who gets to be hysterical’: how the hysteria label shifts between women scientists and male veterans is a provocative essay angle tying ecofeminism to war-toxics studies.