Deconstructing the rhetorical framework of equating gender with reproductive role and capability, this panel examines the hysterectomy as a rhetorical tool that challenges reproductive oppression and traditional narrations of the body that view a hysterectomy as a "loss" or "castration." Utilizing autotheory as defined by Audre Lorde (1976), Maggie Nelson (2015), and Lauren Fournier (2022), each presenter examines how narration, rhetoric, humor, horror, and language are tools for deconstructing the androcentric medicalized logic of the gendered body and how a hysterectomy can reframe bodily autonomy, joy, and radical self-love.
Ortiz engages with theories of feminist humor 'fumerism' (Kate Clinton 1982) to illustrate how her memoir-in-progress grapples with navigating the patriarchal-capitalist medical system while suffering from a female-coded illness. Using humor as a subversive method of narration rather than a strategy to make difficult content “more palatable,” Ortiz engages with the topic of bodily trauma by “being funny and wanting to burn the house down all at once” (Regina Barreca 1991). Ortiz bonds fellow ‘endometriosis-siblings’ and allies through the revolutionary power of laughter.
Houle-Eichel explores the relationship between memory, pain, and identity in the context of living with endometriosis. Reflecting on how past pain is recalled, reconstituted, and shared with loved ones while navigating the blurred boundaries of chronic illness, she grapples with the murkiness of remembering. Through creative non-fiction, Houle-Eichel uses fragmented narrative to express pain through a lens of love, care, and hope, acknowledging that some answers to these painful memories remain elusive, just as the illness itself is not easily defined.
Rovito argues for a crip-joy reimagining of autotheory, utilizing the power of language to center the disabled female experience of narration over the androcentric, clinical rhetoric of medicalized knowledge. Using the monstrous-feminine (Creed 1993), cyborg feminism (Haraway 1985), abjection (Kristeva 1980), and crip kinship (Kafer 2015, Price 2015), Rovito examines the act of a hysterectomy as a refusal of engaging with generational trauma and a turn toward a world-making of care and kindness through shared storytelling of bodily experiences and politics. Language can serve as a tool for community building and opening portals to new worlds and possibilities through the rhetorical freedom of being able to define oneself outside of gendered norms of parenthood, reproduction, and autonomy.
Scholars of all literary texts, periods, and genres will be interested in attending a panel on autotheory, the body, corporeality, and language. Ranging from the Medieval examination of female warriors within oral literature, to the Victorian portrayal of the female body as "pure" and submissive, to the 21st-century literary narration of the body as a site of institutional violence, attendees of all backgrounds will be interested in learning about and engaging with new directions in theories of the body, gender, and kinship.
No other academic conference, session, or committee has hosted a panel in which all presenters research and write about reproductive violence and community kinship through autotheory and bodily rhetoric. This panel will fill an overlooked gap in rhetoric studies and respond to the MLA's Presidential Theme of Family Resemblances. Kinship beyond the bloodline is particularly stigmatized in literature, academia, and Western society, as many view motherhood as the true marker of femininity and womanhood. Hysterectomies and personal illness narratives are still seen as disgraceful topics within the realm of literary studies and higher education. This panel brings kinship, the uterus, the power of language, and bodily agency to the forefront and asks participants to celebrate and create a kinship with us.
We hope that the audience will leave this panel with a new understanding of how freeing a hysterectomy and new definitions of the family can be, as well as explore why life writing is the preferred medium to investigate the body's relationship to the lived experience of trauma. We are anticipating that the audience will engage with our discussions about crip kinship, the joy and sorrow of removing a uterus, and the extraordinary abilities that life writing offers those who are liberated from pain.