In addition to being rooted in new directions in the study of embodiment, our inspiration for this panel is the 2022 film Bodies Bodies Bodies. In this film, itself a retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), a group of Gen Zers are trapped in a house; chronically usage of social media combines with paranoia, which leads them to gradually murder each other. Key elements of the film include death, trauma, and body dysmorphia–the three themes which our panelists discuss in relation to embodiment.
Our panelists are all committed to an intersectional approach, and thus our panel will deal with race, disability, class, gender, sexuality, amongst other social concerns that are often written into and upon the body itself. Put together, our panelists will all engage with bodies in literature - and aim to provide new insight into how we can understand our own embodiment. To accomplish this, our scholars will engage with a variety of theoretical approaches: from foundational texts of trauma theory, like Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score, to Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s theory of extraordinary bodies in disability studies, and medical humanities scholarship from the likes of Ruth Richardson and Michael Sappol.
Our first paper will be “Embodying a Possible Death: Arthur Mervyn and Ailing and Dying Alone” by Rebecca Haddaway, and will speak to the local history of Philadelphia, as we move back further towards the eighteenth century with the 1793 Philly yellow fever epidemic. Haddaway uses Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799) as her primary locus of study to contemplate this new relationship with our material bodies that emerge from the witnessing and fearing of ailing and dying alone during an epidemic. Mervyn dreams that he is buried alive, erasing the boundary between his living, ailing body and his possible future contagious, dead body. Haddaway explores this state of embodiment and traces relationships between how the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic both reshape experiences of living with death.
For our second paper, Christian Lewis will present “Dysembodied: Disability and Body Dysmorphia in Olive” and will move us backwards to the Victorian age. In this paper, Lewis examines Dinah Craik’s 1850 novel Olive to propose a new theory of dysembodiment–a negative affect wherein a person has a different conception of their own body than the general public. In the novel, Olive is born with a spinal deformity, but does not realize this until she is mocked as a teenager, upon which she develops severe body dysmorphia. Lewis argues that highlights the constructedness of disability, the violence of beauty standards, and the resulting effects of body dysmorphia. By examining embodiment as dysmorphic, dysphoric, and dysfunctional, Lewis offers a new way to think about our imperfect bodies and our imperfect relationship with them.
Our third and final paper will be entitled,“Your Body Knows”: Reconsidering and Representing the Traumatized Body by Rebecca Boyd. Boyd turns to Anna Burns’s 2007 novel Little Constructions to help us imagine new ways that those living in and with trauma can intervene in the tradition of structuring healing narratives according to medical practitioner’s terms. Though Burns ironizes the discourses that have developed to refer to traumatized bodies through invented conditions like “Former Personality Gone and Never Coming Back Disorder,” these strategies only serve to further disconnect the characters from their bodily experience. Ultimately, Boyd argues that the novel’s characters develop a non-dissociative relationship to their bodies that entails radical new revision and expansion; in turn, they create the necessary imaginative space to re-relate to their bodies and their presence in the world.
Each panelist will present for approximately 15 minutes, leaving the remaining time for a rigorous question and answer portion that explores the various intersections among the papers.