The opening paper, Karen Weingarten’s “Abortion, Personification, and the Politics of the Undecidable,” reminds us that Johnson’s politics aren’t simply about polemics. Johnson reads Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother” and resists interpretations that label it anti-abortion or pro-abortion. Instead, as Weingarten notes, Johnson suggests the rhetoric of “the mother”—its use of apostrophe—asks us to exist in a space of undecidability. Weingarten follows Johnson’s strategy by examining personification in William Carlos Williams’ “A Cold Front” (1939). Like the poems addressed in Johnson’s essay, Williams’ portrayal of abortion is undecidable, as are the narrator’s actions. Does the doctor in the poem offer the woman an abortion? Is he sympathetic to her request? And, what might these questions help us see not only about Williams’ poem, but also about Johnson’s essay, and the abortion debate more broadly? Weingarten concludes by suggesting that Johnson’s politics of undecidability overlap with the reproductive justice movement, founded by Black feminists in the 1990s. She questions if these politics might offer us a way forward in this intractable moment, or if they are a way to stay apolitical, despite Johnson’s belief otherwise.

The second paper, Christine Varnado’s “Spectrality, Sympathy, Selfhood: the Poetics of Animacy in Early Modern Poetry and Pamphlet Literature, Post-Dobbs,” draws on Varnado’s experiences teaching “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” to students at SUNY-Buffalo. Varnado uses Johnson’s treatment of apostrophe to examine the dramatic and affective dynamics of address in early modern literature’s scenes of reproductivity and death, including in Macbeth, Hester Putler’s postpartum poetry, and sensationalistic true-crime pamphlets like The Bloudy Mother (1610) and The Penetent Murthress (1673). Varnado argues that Johnson’s theorizations allow her students to notice dynamics of spectral animacy in these texts that complicate the definition of life and the category of the human. She also situates Johnson’s argument within the history of various weaponized personifications of embryos and fetuses, including the conjuration of fantasmatic forms of embryonic organization, responsivity, and animacy in the language of U.S. state statutes banning abortion. Crucially, Vernado’s essay deploys Johnson’s thought to read both backwards and forwards in time.

The final presentation, Abby Lacelle’s “‘What has she truly lost’: Motherhood, Metaphor, Materialization,” revisits Johnson’s work in light of developments in queer and trans studies. Considering the rise of both anti-trans and anti-abortion sentiment in the US, Lacelle draws out connections and tensions that complicate Johnson’s logics of animation to address and invoke trans relationalities and to encourage communication across different forms of gender and motherhood. Citing Andrea Long Chu, Lauren Berlant, and Gayle Salamon, Lacelle explores articulations of gender, genre and motherhood in Torrey Peters’ 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, by examining the rhetorical strategies whereby womanness materializes (via proximity to maternity) and maternal-fetal relations are animated (via apostrophe and other speech acts). Lacelle questions how women, babies, and mothers come to exist, through their body/bodies and also discursively, ideologically, and textually. Lacelle asks: what linguistic techniques confer or rescind the realness of gender and maternal-fetal relationality, and how, in turn, are these bodies and relations terminated and mourned in and through language?

The presentations (each fifteen minutes), will be followed by a short response from Naomi Morgenstern (ten minutes), whose work on reproductive ethics and American literature makes her ideally suited to draw on different approaches to Johnson's essay and its legacy.

Presenters will offer a diversity of voices by tackling different genres and times periods, examining different approaches to teaching and/or researching Johnson, and by presenting from different professional perspectives, from graduate student to full professor. A common focus on the present moment will tie these diverse voices together.