In the keyword “Body” by Eva Cherniavsky, “Critical attention to forms of material and abstract embodiment...has been fostered through its interface with feminism, race and ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. The latter critical projects enable a turn to those human subjects who have been historically associated with the discredited life of the material body and so constituted as marginal to the arenas of cultural production and political representation: women, Africans and their New World descendants, indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Asians, among other categories of ‘overembodied’ ethnic, sexual, and classed identity.” It is this “overembodiment,” this “descredited life” that often renders marginalized peoples less than human, monstrous, freakish, or even non- or inhuman. However, how might we theorize those overembodied--whose skin or shape or prostheses or performativities render them simultaneously abject, object, visible, and invisible--as being more human, posthuman, even excessively human? How might we reimagine the normative and exclusionary logics that define and subordinate these identities and bodies as a function of their lived, material, and messy humanity? In other words, women, people of color, queer people, people with disabilities function as constant, ubiquitous, citational (to borrow Judith Butler’s term) reminders of the fantasy of the “normal” and “ideal” and “unmarked” human.

Stevi Costa will present on the excessive sexuality of conjoined twins, tracing Daisy and Violet Hilton’s legal battles regarding marriage rights alongside fictional conjoined sex workers in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Building on scholarship by Allison Pingree, Alice Domurat Dreger, and Yunte Huang, this presentation explores how the excessive embodiment of female conjoined twins functions as narrative synecdoche for female sexual agency, which in turn colors the legal imaginary. Next, Angela Rovak will present on the excessive embodiment of Lauren Olamina’s “hyperempathy” in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series as a challenge to the immutable human and while evoking the stereotype of the Black female superbody. As Lauren’s hyperempathy results from unforeseen pharmaceutical complications during her gestation, this presentation will consider hyperempathy as a consequence of reproductive and race medicine by drawing on the scholarship of Dorothy Roberts and Ruha Benjamin. Finally, Edmond Y. Chang will present on queer pleasure and queer embodiment in the independent games of Asian American video game designer Robert Yang to unpack the ways Yang’s games use camp, parody, and hypersexual play as critique of the straight, white, male fantasies of gaming cultures.

In a sense, the three presentations are engaging what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “reparative reading” to reconsider the above identities, embodiments, and intersections in alternative, radical, even eutopian ways, to extract “sustenance from the objects of culture--even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” The panel will allow for 15-20 minutes per panelist to give their presentation. Panelists are encouraged to include multimodal evidence (i.e. images, video, sound). Once the panel has presented their talks, the remaining 15-20 minutes will be allow for Q&A and discussion with the members of the audience.