The Body before Sex

Bascom, Ben; Bascom, Ben

This collaborative panel (unguaranteed) organized by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association brings forward trans, queer, and postcolonial methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We offer a capacious historic frame (spanning the eighteenth century to the contemporary) in order to broaden the scope of analysis. This panel draws upon papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. We do this in a way to disrupt the usually tidy categories that separate particular fields of study from one another. As such, we have a scholar in sexology studies, early American literature, twentieth-century British literature, and contemporary Brazilian performance studies. This variety of areas represented offers an important critical practice that will help build new connections for these ongoing conversations.

Our panelists draw upon the spatial and temporal dimensions of sexuality. Thinking with edited collections by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (Sex, or The Unbearable), Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (After Sex?: On Writing since Queer Theory), and James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England), and wondering alongside the work of Elizabeth Freeman on sense methods and Kadji Amin on problematic attachments, this panel hosts a vibrant conversation that speaks to and with many disciplines. For instance, building from the oceanic studies of Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, and New Left work by Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz, the critical conversations these panelists enter will foster set the stage for important ongoing investigations into the relationship between the body and sex. .

The panelists will share 15-minute papers that emphasize their key arguments and then the commentator will synthesize the papers in a brief response, allowing for a robust discussion afterward. As a brief overview of the arguments and archive, Alexis A. Ferguson in “Phrenological Transitions: Transvestigation and the Body Before Biological Sex” endeavors to provide a cultural history of what gets called “transvestigations”--a portmanteau that situates a great deal of political and cultural discourse; Ketan Jain in “Skin Shocked: The Body After Empire” traces how the body comes to supersede and surpass the imperial powers that seek to contain it; in “Before Feeling: Lost Sensations, Archival Gaps, and the Pre-Sexual Sensorium at Sea,” Matthew Knip offers a reading of sex that predates twentieth-century terminology, reopening the relational, sensory, and erotic possibilities that exceed later sexual categories; and concluding the panel, Bruna Kalil Othero in “The Thinking Butt: Writing The Brazilian National Identity On All Fours” provides a campy return to political discourse through a historical debate spanning colonization, nation-building, and military dictatorship to trace how the butt emerges as both a fetishized image and a political allegory, simultaneously commodified, racialized, censored, and celebrated. This wide variety of presentations will intervene in comparative sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and pre-identitarian histories of embodiment.

This panel actively brings forward emerging scholars and places their work within new and ongoing conversations in the field of sexuality studies. We believe that bringing forward some of the newest scholarship in the field into conversation together will create interesting and unusual juxtapositions that may provide useful friction for future insights.

51 The Body before Sex: Calls for Papers