In a cultural climate that habitually strips bodily autonomy and safety from marginalized communities, ongoing scholarship must address dynamic exchanges between body and bonds in order to implement meaningful interventions. Although our essays often dissect metaphoric or meta-aesthetic examples of bodies in jeopardizing relationships, our inquiries also reveal forward-looking, practical reimaginings of family, love, agency, and access. To envision these possibilities, we consider questions like: “How do bodies transform to accommodate the material and psychological conditions of the relationships they occupy?” “Can a turn to monstrosity enable the body to heal broken bonds?” “How might we reconceive embodiment within and outside of normative couplings or familial structures?” “What can a broken body teach us about broken systems?” “What can ruptures reveal about what it means to be whole?”
Our panel draws conceptually from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, and Jenny Diplacidi’s Gothic Incest, among other works. We will each present for 12-14 mins, leaving ample time for audience-driven discussion.
Chen’s essay “Show Time: Plotting Pleasure and Reading Revolution in Angela Carter” argues that pleasure is not egalitarian, as what is pleasurable reveals the inequities inherent to existing social structures. Her project probes at the practical potential of connecting structural aesthetic to affective experience—of the role the reader embodies in complying with or resisting the words on the page. Analyzing work by Angela Carter, the “avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism,” Chen explores the trajectory of Carter’s textual and intertextual tactics, from the patriarchy-shattering climax of The Magic Toyshop to the all-inclusive Shakespearean orgies of Wise Children. Using these two novels to consider alternative models of readerly pleasure, this paper examines how Carter’s narrative intertextuality reminds audiences that reading is an embodied experience.
McEvoy’s “Phantom Limbs, Phantom Love: Interbodily Queer Caring in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood” examines how Barnes’ body-focused synecdoches expose generative possibilities in multiplicitous, partial, and rent identities. Considering images of amputated limbs and ecstatic longing, this paper argues that Barnes’ dismembered parts act as proxies for ‘whole’ people to achieve two major outcomes: First, these proxies unify beings, human and non-human, through their mutual participation in abjective, boundary-less existence. Second, they usher in unique forms of caring between Barnes’ queer and often disabled characters, including an interbodily romantic love that approximates phantom limb syndrome. These embodied reconfigurations, in turn, emphasize Nightwood’s multivalent challenges to normalized ideologies, including heteronormativity, white supremacy, and anthropocentrism.
Warczak’s essay “Animating Animality: Modernism’s Transspecies Challenge to the White Ableist Cisheteropatriarchy” argues that transspecies bonds in Kay Boyle’s “The Crazy Hunter” (1940) and Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933) challenge rather than reify discriminatory social hierarchies. Embodiments stereotypically linked to animality – including those of women, non-whites, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people with disabilities – usually endure decreases in social agency or animacy. However, Boyle’s Nancy Lombe and Woolf’s fictionalized Elizabeth Barrett Browning have intense transspecies connections with a blind horse and a dog respectively, allowing both women to carve out social space for themselves and their companion creatures. Because protagonists claim their humanity through transspecies communion, this literature highlights how interdependent, species-crossing embodiments have the power to destabilize the white ableist cisheteropatriarchy.
J. Blackwood’s essay centers the father of modern science fiction, Samuel Delany, who penned a modernist masterpiece so heinous—it cannot be sold on bookstore shelves. Hogg (1995) is at its core a gothic novel, drawing on anxieties concerning ethnicity, rape, sexuality, gender, and class. This tour-de-force takes the premise of Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1904) and places discussions of sexual assault, pedophilia, and incest at the core of male-bonding and family building in America. “Raping Sister-Selves: Gothic Incest as Practice in Samuel Delany’s Hogg” examines the gothic impulse to represent incest as a form of intimacy and bonding for monstrous men, disturbing the boundaries between non-consensual bondage and consensual love-making, and as a result, informs exogamous hetero-normative sexual relations with women.