Personhood

Thursday December 3, 2015

Godwin-Ternbach Museum
Klapper Hall

2:00–3:30pm: Faculty Roundtable

3:30–4:00: Break

4:00–5:30: Keynote and Discussion

5:30–6:00: Reception 6th Floor Klapper

 

illustration by Seo-Young Chu

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Building on our faculty conference last year and our ongoing faculty seminar, the English Department will hold two “mini-conferences” this year, and we invite your participation. The theme for the fall semester conference is Personhood, and the topic for the spring– with a specific title TBA– is Digital Humanities. Talia Schaffer is organizing the fall conference, and Kevin Ferguson is organizing in the spring.

The Personhood conference will be held in the first week of December, engaging faculty who work on the theme to circulate papers in advance and participate in a roundtable discussion. We hope to attend particularly to the cases that challenge the limits and definitions of personhood, and we plan to post full-length conference papers on a website before the conference. That would enable participants to read short (2-page) summaries to lay the groundwork for a roundtable, with plenty of discussion. This roundtable will be followed by a keynote speaker, yet to be determined.

We’re looking to choose representative speakers who will showcase the wide range of our department, both in terms of periods, genres, media, and national traditions, and also in terms of the populations who make up our department, including junior and senior scholars, GTAs, adjuncts. Some questions you might consider:

• What happens when we conceptualize personhood in relation to various opposites: the animal; the citizen; the state; the post-human?
• How might we theorize entities that challenge personhood – corporations, nations, groups?
• What kind of ideas might arise from work that interrogates the notion of the person as an autonomous and natural/biological being – disability studies, transgender studies, digital studies, object ontologies, network theory, neuroscience?
• What are the political stakes of changing the boundaries of personhood, redefining certain acts or identities as ‘natural’ or ‘human’?
• How has the idea of the subject altered over time; what political, religious, scientific, or other theories have been used to grant personhood to certain models?
• How might personhood relate to literary character – how might the slippage between these terms prove productive for literary scholars?
• Is there, or should there, be such a category as personhood, and if not, what should we use instead?

If you’d like to participate, send a brief and informal proposal (250 words) describing how you plan to approach the theme to Talia (Talia.Schaffer@qc.cuny.edu) and Glori (gloria.fisk@qc.cuny.edu) by October 1.

[/tab_item][tab_item title=”Speakers and Respondents”] [column col=”1/2″] Speakers:
Ala Alryyes
Hugh English
Bill Orchard
Jason Tougaw
Karen Weingarten

[/column][column col=”1/2″] Respondent:
Livia Woods

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Speakers

The Self and the Bullet
Ala Alryyes
[pdf link to paper]

Relentlessly attempting to relive and describe the groin injury he suffered during King William’s Wars, Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby studies Galileo and others to discover the path of the projectile that has caused the crushing of his pubic bone at the Siege of Namur, and “by certain geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a PARABOLA.” Yet such knowledge does nothing to assuage his pain nor to hasten his ravaged body’s protracted recovery, a body to which Sterne, in Tristram Shandy (1756-63), so wisely denies the consolation of a life of the mind or in the mind. What can bullets tell us about our conceptions of selfhood, the cosmos, and disciplinary boundaries, our separation of science from ethics and literature, of physics from biology, the story of motion from the story of wounded flesh? To write a critical biography of the bullet is to catch a glimpse of the birth of the intertwined conceptions of the modern subject, modern science and philosophy, and the modern European state, I propose. In my presentation for the Personhood conference, I’d like to argue that various discourses—ballistics, surgical treatises—in which the bullet stars, so to speak, mirror dualism’s division of the human subject into mind and body.

Gender Monsters Finally Speak Back: From Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen Gordon to Susan Stryker’s Alliance with Victor Frankenstein’s Creature
Hugh English
[pdf link to paper]

Since at least the late 19th-century, non-normatively gendered identities and bodies have challenged the fantasy of the natural, biologically sexed body. Sexology and law worked to pathologize and to criminalize those who refused the regulation of their bodies and desires by a binary sex system, but early 20th-century gender inverts invented representations of possible and significant lives, such as Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (1928); Hall ‘s protagonist sacrifices her own desire with the aim of protecting her beloved from hatred and social ostracism, but she does so with the claim that nature made her whom she is, together with an almost supernatural vision of legions of gender inverts throughout human history for whom she will advocate. With developments in endocrinology and surgical possibilities, mid-20th century transsexuals worked within what Sandy Stone, in her 1991 “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” calls “the dubious achievement of a diagnostic category”; in doing so they attempted to avoid the assault on them as unnatural by cooperating with an articulation of a normative transsexuality that reinforced both binary sex/gender and compulsory heterosexuality. Since the 1990s, however, transgender and gender queer articulations have explored and asserted an awareness of their own artificially constructed bodies, together with a claim on common human experience. My paper will explore this doubled articulation that, on the one hand, emphasizes the fabricated gendered body, and, on the other, asserts that such fabrication is our common human experience. For example, in Read My Lips Rikki Ann Wilchins connects her own gender transition to the experience of all human bodies who are “seized by the culture machine,” and, in Body Alchemy, Loren Cameron describes puberty as that “slightly insane time in all our lives” (emphasis added) and wonders if he (and by implication many other humans) will “ever feel safe in this body.” And, especially with Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” we can begin to see a confident assertion that all humans “achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process”; in this multigeneric tour-de-force Stryker embraces monstrosity and challenges all those who claim the privilege of their own supposedly naturally gendered bodies: “I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”

Transnational Persons and the U.S. Minority Experience
William Orchard
[pdf link to paper]

The paradigmatic transnational subjects are migrants who traverse the borders of nations, often circulating between two or more national spaces. In this figuration of the transnational subject, we detect two types: the privileged knowledge worker who rides the waves of flexible capital toward greater wealth, and the undocumented worker whose travels result in his or her denationalization. In contrast to these two types of transnational subject, which require physical circulation between at least two sites and which distance them from privileges, like citizenship, that flow from the nation form, there is another kind of transnational subject that Ramón Saldívar and Paula Moya, in a recent special of Modern Fictions Studies devoted to “Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary,” term “transnational persons.” The concept of the transnational person recognizes how transnational subjects include many more than those who move in migrant circuits: they also include those anchored in locales who cannot be understood only in terms of the experiences, social formations, and politics that are based within the nation. For Moya and Saldívar, the transnational person par excellence is the U.S. minority subject, who, whether settled in the United States for years or for generations, is better understood in a larger sphere of transnational interactions and connections. In this short paper, I will explore two aspects transnational personhood: 1) the way in which the transnational optic shifts the U.S minority subject from marginal, oppositional figure within the U.S. to a central protagonist in understanding transnational flows of information, capital, and culture; and 2) the way in which transnational persons help us understand these exchanges as not only polycentric, involving many locations, but also centrifugal, involving distinct locations like the borderlands or the Pacific Rim, that draw in numerous threads of transnational encounter.

Beyond Brainhood
Jason Tougaw
In his article “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” historian Fernando Vidal coins the term “cerebral subject” to describe accounts of the self that suggest “the brain is the only part of the body we need in order to be ourselves.” Vidal traces a history of neuroscience’s influence on popular culture and the emergence of a vigorous—and I would argue, false—debate about whether or not brainhood equals personhood. The inflammatory titles of two controversial books illustrate this debate: Dick Swaab’s We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer’s (2010) and Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (2011). The “you are your brain” / “you are not your brain” debate is possible because of the paradox created by rapid advances in the neurosciences that raise more questions than answers. In this presentation, I will argue that brain memoirs—and autism memoirs, in particular—demonstrate an urgent need to move beyond this debate. I will examine the representation of the brain in three autism memoirs: Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, Tito Mukhopadhyay’s How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move, and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump. These writers are insistent that their brains are central to their identities, but that embodiment, environment, and social relations are crucial for understanding the roles their own brains play in the making of identity. Their call for conceptions of personhood as embodied, social organisms has both theoretical and practical implications for the future of neuroscience, medicine, social policy, and education.

Can We Call It Eugenics? The Biopolitics of Disability Rights and Reproductive Justice
Karen Weingarten
[pdf link to paper]

My current research project focuses on the intersections between disability rights and reproductive justice. Recently, a number of prominent disability studies scholars (Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Rachel Adams, Alison Piepmeier) have argued that when women abort fetuses with potential disabilities they’re engaging in eugenic practices. Piepmeier, in particular, has rallied feminist scholars working on reproductive justice to reflect more on how their positions—and lack of discussion about disability—impact disability rights. In response to her call, which I agree needs to be addressed, I argue that calling the abortion of fetuses with potential disabilities eugenic only works to shame women seeking abortion, and ultimately distracts from how current conceptions of disability and reproduction are guided by a biopolitical logic that privileges an understanding of personhood as autonomous and individuated. My presentation will work through the implications of this argument, which, I’m hoping, will form the theoretical foundation for my new research project.

Respondent

Livia Woods

My dissertation on pregnancy in the Victorian novel, particularly its final chapter on novels of the British fin-de-siecle, addresses the challenge that pregnancy poses to modern notions of the individual. I ask questions about the ways that late-Victorian novels trouble discrete understandings of bodily and mental personhood and argue that the prevalence of anxieties about “impressions” on fetal life during pregnancy speak to rising anxieties about the permeability of persons. I connect these concerns to contemporary critical reading practices and our anxieties about whether to engage (textual) surfaces or plumb (imaginary) depths.

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Dana Luciano

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches sexuality and gender studies, 19th century US literatures, environmental humanities, and queer film. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), which won the MLA’s First Book Prize in 2008. Recent publications include “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (vol. 22 no. 2-3, spring/summer 2015) and Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson. Luciano is currently at work on two book projects. How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century US considers how the new science of geology, with its emphasis on the earth’s antiquity and on the agency of inorganic matter, influenced the American cultural imagination. Time and Again: The Circuits of Spirit Photography uses responses to Spiritualist photography to explore how the photograph has been understood to frame time. Luciano serves on the Executive Committee for the MLA’s Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature. She is the Humanities Review editor for GLQ and a member of the advisory board for C19: The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Love and Death in the Anthropocene: Geologic Time, Genre, Moby-Dick

In this talk, I consider how the Anthropocene concept has been employed in humanist cultural criticism. One of the most persistent objections to the term “Anthropocene” has been that in naming and hence blaming the entire species—Anthropos–for climate change, it lets the subset of the species that has done most of the damage, the modernized “western” world, off the hook. I argue that the problem is not only misnaming but also generic misframing; the tendency to narrate the Anthropocene as a tragedy of human finitude limits both what the concept encompasses and what it might accomplish. Reading with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, I explore alternative approaches to telling the story of the Anthropocene. Moby-Dick’s generic hybridity, counterbalancing cataclysm with tragicomedy and camp, replacing the anticipatory gloom of the extinction narrative with a temporally diffuse attention to the complicated textures of sustaining life.

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