Scholarship on technologies for reading the body—such as AI-driven facial recognition systems that encode racial and gendered biases (Crawford 2021)—has shown how such systems inherit and reanimate older practices of physiognomy and phrenology. These continuities invite reconsideration of the relationship between the face, the head (as scanned object), and the brain (as organ of cognition). Scholars have explicitly engaged physiognomy in a return to the face not only as a site of expressivity and control, but also of ambiguity and mediation (Rives 2024; Parvulescu 2025). Rives, a panelist, emphasizes the face’s instability as a locus of aesthetic and cultural recognition, while Parvulescu explores its historically contingent legibility.

This panel extends these debates by rethinking cognition, judgment, and taste at the intersection of embodiment and cultural evaluation. It explores how the face, head, and brain are inscribed with meaning, contested as sites of identity and power, and mobilized within literary and cultural networks. Moderated by Maria Farland—whose work on modernism and brain science speaks to the panel’s concerns—this session features three twenty-minute papers examining the face-head-brain nexus as a literary-cultural form. Together, the papers explore how embodied features become legible—or hover at the edge of legibility—across historical moments, genres, and reading practices.

In her paper “The Face Without an Image: Taste and Identification in Madame Bovary,” Rochelle Rives argues that the tension between heads and faces in Flaubert’s novel anticipates contemporary concerns about the embodied image and what Conall Cash (2021) terms the “practice of identity”—the gap between who one thinks one is and how one lives, and whether identity can survive the collapse of evaluative structures that sustain it. Rives focuses on a phrenological head—a gift from Emma’s future lover, Léon, to her husband Charles. Though of little exchange value, the head functions as a “tool of his profession,” satirizing Charles’s lack of insight, as he “was not the type to go to the bottom of things.” While the head is preserved as utility, Emma’s face is not. After death, her once-beautiful face emits black vomit and, imageless beneath her veil, arouses horror. Rives argues that the collapse of beauty without taste—and the transformation of Emma’s dresses into faceless “corpses”—contributes to Flaubert’s ironic, caricatural aesthetic, which depends on the reader’s judgment.

What is at stake in the face, head, and brain as aesthetic, political, and affective forms? How do they function in acts of self-making and unmaking, particularly in relation to identity politics—race, gender, sexuality, and trans embodiment—where they become central to recognition, negotiation, and transformation? In his paper, “Marianne Moore’s Trans Poetics: A Refacement,” Benjamin Kahan asks what trans modernist studies might gain from poetics, a field often overlooked in favor of fiction and autobiography. Kahan reads Moore’s poetic self-refacements—especially depictions of her face in late poems—as resonant with her life practices of male embodiment: using male pronouns, performing George Washington, and theorizing syllabic verse as a trans form.

In her paper, “The Brain of Andrea Long Chu,” Monique Rooney examines Chu’s “China Brain” (2021), a personal essay published in n+1 that incorporates elements of lived experience. The essay opens with a woman noticing a phrenology bust in a clinic where she is undergoing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for depression. When asked by a technician if she’ll write about the experience, she replies “probably,” adding it will be “a little fictionalized,” with “some first person stuff,” narrated by “my brain.” Rooney explores the significance of this narrating brain—an affective presence that contrasts with the brain’s usual invisibility. While the phrenology bust signals a discredited science, the narrating brain helps differentiate Chu’s female TMS patient—and her specific tastes—from the automated forms of evaluation considered throughout her essay.