Vapors!
You’re a woman seeking treatment in 19th century Europe. What could possibly go wrong?
cw: references to sexual violence, misogyny, and queerphobia
Vapors!
AKA melancholia of virgins and widows, uterine strangulation, uterine suffocation, hysteria, frigidity, & nymphomania.
A slightly unconventional romp through the historical evolution of female hysteria as a medical diagnosis.
Meet a hungry ghoul, tricky ghosts, a resourceful witch, and some truly ghastly figures of institutional authority: physicians, psychoanalysts, and priests, ready with diagnoses and gruesome, historically accurate courses of treatment.
Vapors! places institutional oppression at the center of the development of Western medicine rather than relegating it to the position of the occasional unfortunate mishap. The fictional “Wunderkammer Asylum” houses women pathologized for their refusal or inability to conform to the moral strictures and feminine ideals imposed upon them. Though the game narrative follows hysteria as a diagnosis specifically, a diagnosis which was reserved for white European and European-American women, the development of Western medicine on a grand-scale can be understood to have been developed through and been dependent upon scientific racism, eugenics, and exploitation of marginalized subjects along the axes of race, gender, class, and ability. By highlighting institutional medical misogyny and heteronormativity, Vapors! unsettles contemporary perceptions of Western medicine and the medical industrial complex as politically neutral. Hysteria as a medical concept is itself a construction of misogyny, lacking clear definition or specific symptoms and serving rather as a catch-all diagnosis used by patriarchal institutions to exert control over incorrigible women. It was invented to provide anxious men with the illusion of control over what could only be considered the strange and unknowable terrain of womanhood within a Western Liberal Humanist framework, which is rooted in masculinity, rationality, and a teleological, progress oriented model of history, used to justify imperialism and other atrocities.
