on bodies

thank you & democracy conference

2006-12-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Debbie, U of I grad students, and IU grad students,
As we head into finals, I just want to thank all of you for sharing this blog. This was my first and--although it wasn't as active as I thought it might be--I enjoyed sharing ideas, images, and discussions across cyberspace. I've been told by many a lurker that they wish they could have posted because they have enjoyed our discussions (--and thank you to everyone who has shared feedback). I also have been told by a senior colleague that he and another colleague at Northwestern are thinking of doing a joint blog this spring for their seminars as a result of this idea. So, hopefully, beyond helping us re-imagine and re-articulate body rhetorics and rhetorics of the body, this blog will help foster more cross-university discussions in the future.

I'm looking forward to catching up with many of you in January. In case the word isn't out, the 2007 second annual IU/UofI invitation-only Colloquium will be Sat., Jan. 13, at Indiana University, focusing on democracy. The very, very, unofficial and definitely subject to change schedule might look something like this:
10:30-12:00--Opening faculty panel "Democracy and ..."; featuring Ron Greene, Barb Biesecker, Bob Hariman, & John Lucaites
12-1--Catered lunch and discussion about the "Democracy and ..." panel
1-2--Four simultaneous faculty panels related to the theme "Democracy and ..."
DEMOCRACY AND THE BODY: Hosted by Debbie Hawhee, Phaedra Pezzullo, and Jeff Bennett
DEMOCRACY AND MEDIA/AESTHETICS: Hosted by Michael Kaplan, Jon Simons, Bruce Gronbeck, and more
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE: Hosted by Bob Ivie, Robert Terrill, Ned O'Gorman and more
DEMOCRACY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: James Hay, Ted Striphas, and Gil Rodman
2:30-6:30--Student workshops.
6:30--Potluck hosted by IU students at the home of Phaedra Pezzullo and Ted Striphas
Whatever the final schedule is, many faculty and many more graduate students are committed to what promises to be a great day of discussion. Last year was much smaller and that's how Debbie and I first met; so, clearly, this is a very smart and much-desired graduate student-led initiative;)

Thanks again to everyone for this semester,
Phaedra.

more than words

2006-11-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

cross posted at blogos

Today marked the first of two days in which students in the UI seminar give brief sketches in the history of rhetoric, taking up the question "what happens to those histories when we attend to matters of the body?" The answers are as various as they are interesting. I appreciated some of the threads that got going--the discussion of what happens to theories of voice as rhetoric's material changes e.g. (esp. the Cicero and Blair presentations). The focus on materiality is striking too--from Margery Kemp's fashion style to Gilbert Austin's notation system. Lots of references to the expressiveness of the eyes: who's up for writing a dissertation or book on eyes in the history of rhetoric? I was also excited to learn about the possibilities Vico holds for a critical body rhetoric.

Pregnancy and Birth on Film

2006-11-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Please come to Underground's Experimental Film Series December 1st program on Women and Childbearing Choices Night. The three films deal with the pregnant, birthing, and maternal body. This series is hosted by the Department of Communication and Culture.

December 1: Women and Childbearing Choices Night

Radio/Television Building, Room 251, Friday at 7:00 PM.

Tonight we have three films dealing with birth, the choice to bear, and the challenges of parenthood. Claudia Weill’s and Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (1975, 28 min.) follows Chopra’s first year of motherhood as she juggles the conflicting demands of infant, husband, and career. Marjorie Keller’s Misconception (1977, 42 min.) is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. Its structure lends the film a rhythm that has less to do with traditional documentary or film journalism than with the pacing of poetry. Mother Load (1994, 15 min.), by Betsy Weiss, offers an alternative approach to the traditional documentary and combines live action with stock footage to illuminate the irony implicit in the life choices women today must face when considering whether or not to bear life.

Underground Experimental Film Series
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University
http://www.indiana.edu/~uground/

delicious words

2006-11-23T17:32:00.000-08:00

cross posted at blogos

Two psychologists in Edinburg have just published findings from a study they've conducted on people who experience "lexical-gustatory synaesthesia," which is to say that these people taste their words. It's a rare condition--the researchers have only been able to find a small number of people in Europe and US who have it--but man, is it fascinating.

The New York Times ran an article on it, but I think the science writer, in an attempt to play up the connections to Thanksgiving, gets it kind of wrong. The NYT article punningly places taste "in the ear of the beholder," but from the description of the study in Nature, the phenomenon under consideration is not about tasting words one hears, but tasting words one is about to utter: i.e. the sense of taste is activated in the process of conjuring a word. The researchers call this the tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT for short), and the upshot has to do with meaning-making on the sensory level--perhaps, the researchers tantalizingly suggest, for all of us.

Woman kicked off plane for breastfeeding!

2006-11-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

...from MomsRising.org...

Can you believe a woman was recently kicked off a Delta Airlines flight for discreetly breastfeeding her child!?

Here's an article on it: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15720339/?from=ET

*SIGN THE PETITION TO SUPPORT BREASTFEEDING: http://www.momsrising.org/breastfeeding-petition

Join me in telling Delta Airlines to get a clue and be supportive of breastfeeding mothers; and also in telling Congress it's time to pass the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding mothers. Clearly this law is needed now!

And, I hope you'll also join me and tens of thousands of others in one of the most exciting grassroots movement on the Internet: MomsRising.org.

SIGN ON WITH MOMSRISING AT: http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/momsrising/signUp.jsp?key=1682&t=longsignup.dwt

MomsRising.org (http://www.momsrising.org) is working to build a massive grassroots movement big enough to impact the outcome of the 2008 elections and beyond. The time has come to break the logjam that's been holding back family-friendly legislation for decades. It's going to take all of us--and then some--working together to get there.

CFP: Boundaries of the Body; Literature on the Body; Not Your Mother's Feminism

2006-11-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

All three of these listings are from https://webmail.iu.edu/horde/services/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcfp.english.upenn.edu

Reel Bodies:The Boundaries of the Body in Visual Cultures
A School of English Postgraduate Symposium
Newcastle University30th March 2007

Keynote Speaker:Andrew Shail (University of Oxford)
“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at bestother beings encapsulated by skin?” (Donna Haraway).

Visual culture is traditionally associated with conventionally gendered,white, western models of health, youth, and beauty. This symposium willfocus on the areas where the representations of the body in film break with or subvert these dominant models, with a particular emphasis on four kinds of bodies: the Queer Body, the Posthuman Body, the Unnatural Body,and the Bisexual Body.Topics for discussion include but are not limited to:

• Ownership of Bodies
• Bodies in Cyberspace
• Gendered/Sexualised Bodies
• Hybrid Bodies
• Body Modification
• Body in Postmodernity
• Bad Taste and Bodies
• Corporeality/Intangibility
• Public/Private Body
• Genre and the Body
• Diseased Body
• The Grotesque Body

We welcome papers from current or recent postgraduates that engage withthe body in visual cultures. This symposium will provide a supportiveenvironment for presentation and discussion.Please send 250-300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers toreelbodies@ncl.ac.uk by 15 December 2006. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 January 2007, followed by a full programme for the symposiumon 1 February 2007.

Symposium Committee: Katherine Farrimond, Helen Fenwick, Fiona McNally & Bob Stoate (University of Newcastle)

Helen Fenwick
Doctoral Candidate
School of English
Percy Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon TyneNE1 7RU.

LITERATURE ON THE BODY
PCA/ACA national conference organizers have indicated a strong interest in my proposed panel, titled "The Story on the Body: Textual Tattoos and the Corporeal Canvas".

Panel Description:
Whereas Melville's Queequeg is one of American literature's earliest fictional tattooed characters, it is Hawthorne's Hester who upends one of the conventions of the body in literature: Her scarlet "A" reminds us of the role of her body in the novel, but it is the adulterous story told on her body that positions Hester herself as a text to be read.This panel focuses not on the human form in literature, but on literature inscribed upon the human form. Papers should address such questions as: How does the body--a sexed and gendered object--in turn "gender" its words? How does text rewrite the body? For whom do we write when we write on and with our bodies?

Possible paper topics include:
> Textual tattoos> Engraved or lettered jewelry
> Buttons, badges, and patches
> Wearable technology (ex. the scrolling marquis LED belt buckle)
> Literature on clothing
> Representations of body-as-written-text (ex. Greenaway's *Pillow Book,* Shelley Jackson's *Skin,* Hawthorne's *Scarlet Letter*)

Please send a brief abstract (250 words) and a note about your
field and institutional affiliation by November 17, 2006. Email
submissions and inquiries to Molly at this address:

For more information on the conference, see http:// www.popularculture.org

Not Your Mother's Feminism

Seeking contributors for a collection on feminist generations, tentatively entitled, “Not Your Mother’s Feminism.” I am specifically interested in hearing from those women who feel under represented within the struggle(s) for definitional control over the terms of feminist debate taking place in both academic and popular discourse. Contributors will likely be women who are too young to be Second Wave, too old to be Third Wave, and perhaps too theoretically (and academically) oriented to feel entirely “post-feminist.”

The collection will aim for an audience both academic and popular and will explore how generational representations of feminism/feminists in both venues have influenced—enhanced? augmented? ruined?—discussions of the women’s movement. For example, Third Wave feminists often argue that the work of the Second Wave is done and that women’s sexuality is the natural next ideological frontier. Such pronouncements have given rise to sub-categories of feminist scholarship/ideology labeled, for example, “sex-positive,” “girlie-,” and “lipstick”-feminism. This collection will consider the implications of generational developments like these and ask, among other questions, whether an evolution into sexual politics constitutes an historical or generational inevitability.

The collection will also consider other questions, like:

Are there women trained in feminism as yet unheard from?
Where are the scholars/activists who do not fit the historical parentheses between First and Second, or Second and Third and who do not appear in—or trace their political roots to—collections like to be real, Listen Up!, Manifesta, or Catching a Wave? And what does their feminism look like?
Must feminism embrace the generational metaphor? Has the metaphor served a purpose, perhaps momentarily, and run its course?
How might we explain the changes, developments in feminist thinking without notions of historical linearity and generational conflict?

Of course, this list is representative, not proscriptive. The editor seeks essays addressing these and any other questions concerning contemporary feminist politics and the manner(s) in which the movement and its terms are defined.

Seeking abstracts by 15 January; will request complete essays at later date. Please send abstracts through email: bean@marshall.edu, or through regular mail: Kellie Bean, English Department, One John Marshall Way, Huntington, WV, 25755. Feel free to email inquiries.

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” Rebecca West

CFP: Body Politics in the Americas

2006-11-12T15:02:00.000-08:00

The Hemispheric Institute and the Centro Cultural Recoleta are pleased to announce the upcoming

6th Encuentro
Corpolíticas / Body Politics in the Americas:
Formations of Race, Class and Gender
at the Centro Cultural Recoleta and the Teatro Empire
with the collaboration of Instituto Torcuato Di Tella
June 8-17, 2007
in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Encuentro 2007 Online Call and Application Form:
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/seminar/2007/
Application Deadline: 15 December 2006

Our upcoming Encuentro in Buenos Aires will focus on body politics: the politics of the body, political bodies, bodies politic, and the relations between them. We are particularly interested in the formations of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender articulated through body politics in different eras, geographies and imaginaries in the Americas. We understand the body as a site of negotiation, discipline, and a means of expression and meaning. These issues will be clustered under four large umbrella topics that will be the point of departure for a range of performances, installations, exhibitions, roundtable discussions, workshops, lectures, and work groups: 1) Corpografías: bodies and the making of place (how have the politics of the body been enlisted in the production of political bodies?), 2) Corpodinamias: bodies and movement(s) (how does attention to the performing body help us understand political movements, the staging of power, the body politics of migration?), 3) Corpusterrorificus: bodies and terror (how can we understand the production of terror and the ways in which it produces terrifying/terrified, fearful/fearless bodies?), and 4) Corpoéticas: poetics and politics (what is the relation between aesthetic and ethical performance; what practices, theories, or models allow us to explore the politics and poetics of the body?). We invite a range of proposals, both individual and collective, that focus on issues that are contemporary and historical, local and translocal.

We invite artists, performers, academics and activists to propose performances, papers, performance-based scholarship (scholarship that attempts to enact what it describes), videos, installations, visual art exhibits, work group topics, activist projects, hacktivist or virtual actions, and other forms that bring together performance and politics in the Americas to participate in our upcoming Encuentro.

We are seeking groups or solo artists (theater / music / dance / installation / performance art / etc.) for all areas of our performance program, for both indoor and outdoor spaces: Feature-length (2 hours or less), Short (30 minutes or less), and Cabaret/Bar interventions ("after-hours"). We're calling for a wide range of performances, from traditional representations to hybrid and contestatory practices.

In terms of visual arts, this year we have wonderful spaces for exhibits and installations at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, which is a prime venue for modern arts in Buenos Aires. The Centro also has a small movie theater, which will give us the opportunity to screen films and videos by filmmakers throughout the event. These film and exhibit spaces will be open to the public, so we encourage artists to submit proposals to present their work during the Encuentro.

We are also calling for Work Group papers/projects related to the theme of Corpolíticas/Body Politics in the Americas: Performing Race, Class and Gender. Papers/Projects should be a maximum of 8-10 pages in length and must relate to the Encuentro's Work Group topics. Projects may include descriptions of artists'/activists' work. Successful applicants will receive acceptance letters by the end of January, and will appear in the official Encuentro program.

Participants will be chosen by application . Please go to the Online Encuentro Call to find out more details and to apply through our web form.

Application Deadline: 15 December 2006

From Human to Billboard

2006-11-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

Are people familiar with Dove's 'campaign for real beauty' project?

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/home_films_evolution_v2.swf

(Dove's Evolution commercial by Reginald Pike's Yael Staav and Ogilvy's Tim Piper, 60 seconds)

Victimless Leather Jacket

2006-11-02T20:06:00.000-08:00

Wow! Shira's post on the "body bread" reminded me of an art project I encountered a year or so ago. Produced by the Tissue Culture & Art Project, the little tan colored blob in the round-bottom lab flask is a "victimless leather jacket." They have grown a layer of immortalized cell lines on top of a polymer matrix (to give it a fetching jacket shape). The layer of tissue is alive. Their intent is not to create a new kind of leather for us to make adorable little bags and shoes out of - rather, the project creators want us to think about our use of flesh (specifically animal flesh) for consumer products and how we might exploit other living beings.

At the risk of sounding irreverent - I must admit - when I first saw this image, I thought it was a little piece of fried chicken!

Edible Body Bread

2006-10-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

Kittiwat Unarom (Thai artist) Bakes Edible 'Body Parts' Bread

"He hopes his realistic artwork will make people ponder whether they are consuming food, or food is consuming them."

"Along with edible human heads crafted from dough, chocolate, raisins and cashews, Kittiwat makes human arms, feet, and chicken and pig parts. He uses anatomy books and his vivid memories of visiting a forensics museum to create the human parts."

More excellent photos: http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=920

Quotes and photos:
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/strange/news-article.aspx?storyid=43707
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2005/09/05/2003270488

The bodily limits of ethnography

2006-10-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

To follow up the conversation we had yesterday on ethnography and embodiment, and specifically, the concerns about sexual activity between investigator and informant, I wanted to pass along the citation for the article I brought up:

Goode, Erich (2002). Sexual Involvement and Social Research in a Fat Civil Rights Organization. Qualitative Sociology, 25(4), 501-534.

There were multiple responses to Goode's article in the same issue; I think the critiques by Abigail C. Saguy and Susan E. Bell might be the most relevant to our course.

To clarify: I'm someone that believes that sex is not inherently harmful, and that there is the possibility that sex can happen between researcher and subject without true harm (also, as Bell notes in her critique, there are certain research projects made better through the sexual involvement of the researcher)-- but Goode does a really shitty job of justifying what I see as manipulative and predatory sexual conduct.

What do you all think? Does embodiment in the field, as Conquergood promotes, stop at the border of sexuality and sexual behavior? Why or why not?

FDR Memorial: rubbing, disabilities, & water

2006-10-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I was in Washington, D.C., doing research and visited the national mall for the first time in over a decade. I'm uploading some images from the FDR Memorial for several reasons. I'll mention only a few of the more obvious ones here.
First, to touch on previous posts, there were rubbings. More than any other memorial on the mall, the metal statues at this memorial belie contact: with FDR's shoulders, hands, etc., in and out of his wheelchair, with his dog's ears, with symbolic statues of people standing in line during the Depression, and so forth. I've included two pictures of the rubbings evident from the space dedicated to people with disabilities, which leads to a second reason to share these images for discussion.
This week in the IU seminar, we're discussing a series of essays and chapters on embodiment and technology. One is a chapter from Susan Wendell on how movements (like ours?) to embrace bodies and embodiment is a privilege of those of us who are more able-bodied; in a sense, she is attempting to recover the desire to escape one's body for those who live with disabilities, if it is desired. I think her challenge is an interesting one to consider coming out of readings about torture and bodies in physical pain. Do any of you feel we/you/I are in danger of romanticizing bodies in our pursuit of studying them/us?
Finally, I'm also uploading an image of a waterfall; throughout the FDR memorial (and the WWII memorial), in addition to stone and metal, water plays an integral role in the rhetorical experience constructed for visitors...hearing water fall...seeing water reflect images...why is water such an essential element to so many of our more tender, daily, essential, and valued embodied experiences? Why do so many of us love to vacation near (and in) oceans and lakes and bays? What rhetorical role does water have for our embodied relationship to mourning?

Jonathon Schell on torture

2006-10-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

"The Torture Election," in The Nation.

asian american performance conference - uiuc

2006-10-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

Bodies and Spectacles: A Conference on Asian American Performance
October 26-27, 2006
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Free and open to the public
Conference Website: http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/performanceconference/index.html

The conference will explore the relationship between Asian American bodies and the production of spectacles in the performing arts (theatre, music, and dance) and everyday life. Topics range from ethnohistorical imaginings of early 20th century Bharata Natyam to the politics of disseminating contemporary Asian pop soundscapes. Each nationally and internationally recognized scholar/artist on the panel will address the centrality of creative practice and performative discourse in the production of Asian American identities on local, national, and global stages.
Keynote: Josephine Lee, University of Minnesota
"New Directions in Asian American Performance"
Thursday, October 26 at 4:00 pm

Co-organizers: Yutian Wong & Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Co-sponsors:
College of Fine and Applied Arts (Lorado Taft Lectureship), Department of Theatre, Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Center for Advanced Study, Department of History, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Sociology, Native American House/American Indian Studies Program
Questions, email aasp@uiuc.edu or visit http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/performanceconference/index.html

Drag Performance Workshop at UIUC, 10/27

2006-10-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

I just got the following notice from UIUC's LGBT News Listserv:

Drag Performance Workshop

Friday, October 27, 2- 4pm
Office for LGBT Resources
Rm 323 Illini Union.

Everyone is welcome to join us for a workshop to explore the dynamics of gender and performance. Come pick up tips and practice their costume! Explore your masculine and/or feminine side or blur the boundaries in a safe, and fun setting. This interactive workshop will be led by Rene Chadwick, makeup artist for the Krannert Center for Performing Arts.

You will have an opportunity to see your friends be transformed into a different gender or defy gender altogether right before your eyes! We will also provide a handout list of items you may need for your costume and where to get them!

This workshop is right in time for Halloween but also will help you get started on your costume for the Colors Of Pride First Annual Drag Ball, Nov 4 at the Grand Ballroom of the Illini Union from 8 pm - midnight. The Drag Ball is open to all and will feature a dance, performances, prizes, and a drag competition! All are welcome to come in drag of whatever gender they desire.

Sponsored by the Office for LGBT Resources. For more information, contact kkempdel@uiuc.edu

occupational hazards

2006-10-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

cross posted at blogos

I have always had a weak stomach. I am quite prone to motion sickness, and one of my strongest childhood memories is peering through the family car's rear windshield to watch my favorite zebra-striped blanket tumble down the highway because my parents tossed it out the window after I hurled all over it. When my coaches decided to run the players 'until they puked,' I was never the first to visit a trash can, but upon hearing--or worse, smelling--the first, I was unfailingly the second. I am also easily repulsed by detailed descriptions of certain bodily maladies. Both my parents seem to find in such description a pleasure that rivals the intensity of my repulsion. This makes for strained conversations, not to mention ruined appetites.

And so it's at least a little ironic that I am even working on bodies and have been for years now. Perhaps, you think, it's easier to do historical work on bodies than to encounter real-time accounts of people's gastrointestinal issues. Maybe that's partly true and could definitely apply to my first book, which focused on bodies made of bronze, or bodies discussed in texts. But this does not apply to my teaching this semester, which veers wildly into some of the most stomach twisting, appetite squelching discussions of bodies: the sick, the ailing, the tortured.

It's been quite a nauseating ride. My reading-induced stomach knot started with the unit on torture and Elaine Scarry's Body in Pain and was revived this week (figural studies week) in two of our readings in particular, one about Darwin's gastrointestinal difficulties, and the other about Kant's. The latter quotes heavily from Kant's descriptions of his own feces. The former article reports on how Darwin once gave a short talk and then retched for 23 hours afterward. Incredulous, I shared this tidbit with John, who replied that he's heard certain talks and then retched for 23 hours afterward.

One of the key links between these two weeks, however--the torture week and the ailment week--has to do with moral repulsion and physical repulsion and the fine, fine line between the two. This perhaps accounts for why disgusted responses are inevitably wrapped in moral judgments, or at least the two share both formal and affective qualities. Otherwise why would my parents always close their narratives with apologies? But it's certainly an issue I hope we can talk about further in class. And this class might be a good time for people to try to unload stashes of Halloween candy: I likely won't be partaking.

RE: The Sexual Politics of Pets

2006-10-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

From the site Stuff On My Cat: Stuff + Cats = Awesome. The caption for this photo reads "Giving the fruit industry some much needed sex appeal." You can read user comments (several of which express a desire for a big, fat tabby cat or their love for similar cat's bodies) here.

I tend to find this site hilarious, although I've consequently been accused of sadism. The pictures range in extremity/ridiculousness, but they all share a common desire on the part of pet owners to use their pet's bodies for their own narrative (and perhaps other) purposes. This picture I think is the most overtly sexual I've seen.

Also, a similar site, at least in terms of its semiotic construction. Both of these sites appear to be extremely popular.

CFP Travel Writing & The Body

2006-10-12T14:41:00.000-07:00

Another CFP from http://cfp.english.upenn.edu:

“Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge of Bodies: Depictions of theBody in American Travel Writing.”

The Society for American Travel Writing. American Literature AssociationAnnual Conference, 24-27 May 2007, Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA.

The Society for American Travel Writing, a member society of the AmericanLiterature Association, issues a call for papers for two sessions at the ALA2007 conference in Boston, MA. Entitled “Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge ofBodies: Depictions of the Body in American Travel Writing,” the sessionswill explore depictions of the body in travel writings by “American” authorsor about “America” or “Americans.”

Approaches may include (but are not limited to):

· Relationships between the body and knowledge
· Effects of travel on the body, including illness, discomfort, etc.
· Travel and bodily processes, including consumption, digestion,evacuation, etc.
· Travel and bodily concerns, including appearance, physical danger,sexuality, disability, gastronomy, etc.
· Historical perceptions of the body in American travel writing

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Abstracts of no more than two pagesmay be submitted by 15 January 2006 by mail, or preferably by email, to Dr.Valerie Smith, Department of English, Quinnipiac University, CLA-IC, 237 Mt.Carmel Ave., Hamden, CT, 06518, or <Valerie.Smith@quinnipiac.edu>; or to Dr.Russ Pottle, Department of Literature, Saint Joseph Seminary College, 75376River Rd., Saint Benedict, LA, 70457, or <acdean@sjasc.edu>.

Sexual Politics of Pets

2006-10-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

“You’re not just buying a cat;
it’s a medical device that replaces shots and pills,”
said Megan Young, chief executive of Allerca.
“At the same time, this is a living animal,
so the well-being of our product comes before our customers.
This is not some high-priced handbag that you put back on the shelf if it doesn’t match.”

Cat Lovers Lining up for No-Sneeze Kitties
by Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times, October 6, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/science/06cat.html?em&ex=1160712000&en=5a22ee18f017cf58&ei=5070

In light of our conversation in class on the Sexual Politics of Meat, I thought this phenomenon of hypoallergenic cats, a.k.a. lifestyle pets, is revealing in regards to the ways in which we treat animals even when we don't eat them. For $4,000 one can now buy a cat that is bred "so that its glands do not produce the protein responsible for most human cat allergies."

Perhaps the most complicated sentiment from the article is an Allerca pet-owner's comments on her new cat Joshua, Ms. Chytrowsky, who says she is normally quite allergic, had no symptoms even though she allowed Joshua to sleep in her bed. “I fell in love with him,” she said. “He is a real stud — well, he is a stud, really.”

CFP: Autobiography and Fat Studies

2006-10-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

For those of you not on the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List http://cfp.english.upenn.edu, these upcoming projects may interest you:

Autobiography and the Body

We are seeking essay abstracts for a proposed anthology of essays on any aspect of the role of the body in autobiography. In recent criticism of autobiography, the body has once again becoming central to discursive constructions of the self. The pervasive influence of the Cartesian duality in the classic American autobiographies by men – such as those of Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, and Henry Adams – is apparent in their emphasis on the life of the mind, while the pronouncements of Paul de Man in the early 1980’s defined the self as inevitably an artificial linguistic construct that once again seemed to make the body disappear. Feminist scholars such as Sidonie Smith, however, have shown how for women biology has long been perceived as destiny, and thus their autobiographies often focus much more on the life of the body and its relation to their emotional lives. In recent years women writers have become the leading practitioners of memoir and autobiography, and the autobiography of disease and disability has become one of its most popular and innovative subgenres. Simultaneously, the significance of the body in life writing has gained increasing attention even among scholars who do not focus specifically on women’s life writing as scholarship of autobiography has begun to explore the science of the brain. In his most recent book Paul John Eakin, long a groundbreaking scholar in the theory of autobiography, has once again taken the lead, reading texts such as Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent in light of the most recent debates by neurologists such as Oliver Sacks, neurobiologists like Gerald M. Edelman, and philosophers of mind such as Daniel C. Dennett.

The time is ripe for an essay collection on the significance, or insignificance, of the body in autobiography. Possible subjects include, but certainly are not limited to, classic autobiographies, slave narratives, women’s autobiography, the autobiography of disability and disease, autobiography and neurobiology, or autobiography and the body as racial signifier.

Please submit electronically abstracts of no more than 750 words along with a brief CV to Dr. Christopher Stuart of the University of TN at Chattanooga at <chris-stuart@utc.edu> by January 1st, 2007. Requests for more information may be sent to the same address.

Fat Studies

CFP for 2007 PCA/ ACA
(deadline November 15, 2006)

Fat Studies is becoming an interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of “fatness” and “the fat body”; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and creates paradigms for the development of fat acceptance or celebration within mass culture.

Proposals in the area of Fat Studies are being accepted for the 2007 PCA /ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) National Conference in Boston, MA, (April 4-7 2007; Boston Marriott Copley Place). Papers are welcomed from academics, researchers, intellectuals, activists, and artists, in any field of study, and at any stage in their career.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

·representations of fat people in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
· cross-cultural or global constructions of fatness and fat bodies
· cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
· portrayals of fat individuals and groups in news, media, magazines
· fatness as a social or political identity
· fat acceptance, activism, and/or pride movements and tactics
· approaches to fat and body image in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology
· fat children in literature, media, and/or pedagogy
· fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, gender, and/or sexuality
· history and/or critique of diet books and scams
· functions of fatphobia or fat oppression in economic and political systems

By November 15, 2006, please send an abstract of 250 words or a completedpaper to Fat Studies area co-chairs, Stefanie Snider (ssnider@usc.edu) and Lesleigh Owen (goddess_les@yahoo.com).

Please include your complete contact information, and a CV and/or 50 word bio, along with anticipated A/V needs.

Completed papers for those accepted will be due to Stefanie Snider by March 1, 2007. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at http://www.popularculture.org.

Talk on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

2006-10-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

I just found out that there is a talk by Peter Eisenmann, the architect of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, on Tuesday, October 24th, 8 pm in the IMU Frangipiani Room.

We were talking about the relations of memorials and bodies several times in the seminar - and already back then I had to think of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, because although it looks very abstract, it is a very "bodily" memorial: as visitor you have to go into the memorial, are surrounded by these different high beton stelae and walk on an uneven ground, which creates an uneasy atmosphere on a very corporeal level. (But actually I was wondering if I would have felt this atmosphere if I hadn't known what the monument was about.)
There is also a bodily anecdote to this memorial: Lea Rosh, the driving force behind it, wanted to put a tooth, which she found in one of the concentration camps, into one of the beton stelae - which led to a heated discussion and many protests. It was argued that in this way the memorial would be turned in a tomb or a graveyard - what I think is interesting in regard to Mary Douglas and her definition of dirt and taboo: only one little (and even invisible) part of the body can "pollute" the whole memorial.

More infos to the memorial:
http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en

Scars

2006-10-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

Check out this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/arts/design/04scar.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

An artist, Ted Meyer, has made monoprints from people's scars, and at an exhibition at the National Museum of Health and Science.
http://nmhm.washingtondc.museum./news/news.html

He has put together prints of people's scars with their photographs, a diagram of the scar on their bodies, and their personal stories of how they received the scars.

For me, scars can be interesting stories about the body's lived experience, or shocking reminders of the body's fragility. Some of the stories that I read from the exhibition catalogue were incredibly hopeful (the first successful liver transplant for an HIV+ patient) and also very scary (one woman's car accident.)

I suppose, also, that I am mindful of the visuals of war veterans who have been maimed in today's recent wars. Sometimes the stories are too scary to ask about.

My question for those who are interested to respond: How do we react when we see scars or maimed bodies? Why is it uncomfortable to talk about to the person whose body bears these marks or losses? Is the artist Ted Meyer, with his monoprints, successful in his endeavor to tell the stories of scars in a beautiful, compelling way?

back scar: monoprint, gouache, color pencil, graphite.

Foley's Follies

2006-10-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

Kelly's post about babies as property, Tim's post about anti-abortion protestors re-presenting the absence of bodies, and Peter's posts with me about children and coporal punishment collide for me in the past couple of weeks about the current political scandal of Congressman Mark Foley and his abuse of power with his young male interns. Of course, it is improper for a boss to abuse his/her status over an employee; but, many facets of this scandal seem to be telling about our impressions of bodies today. To raise just two:

First, all of Foley's interns had to be at least 16 (Lewinsky, by comparison, was 22). As Katha Pollit points out on commondreams.org, 16 is the legal age of consent in Washington (and most states); so, despite most media covereage, Foley is NOT a child abuser. Since the US is one of five countries in the world where it is legal to place a 16 year old on death row--2% of our death row population in 2004--calls to "protect the children" sound disingenuous to me. Sadly, I have not assigned a book on children's bodies in my seminar; so, I'm hoping some of you reading this blog will have scholarly readings to recommend about these rhetorical constructions of children's bodies, esp. the ways we simultaneously romanticize and demonize them. One I could suggest, though less focused on bodies per se, is Lawrence Grossberg's Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future.

Second, although I assume I'm preaching to the converted here: despite ongoing media coverage of Foley's sexuality, most child abusers are straight men. For a great essay including stats on this, read Carol Norris' "The Radical Right, the Myth of the Gay Child Abuser, and You" (also on commondreams.org). The homophobia of the mainstream media is only matched by their ongoing ineptitude at actually undertaking investigative reporting. This is an old myth; but, does anyone have any insights to why this inaccurate stereotype of gay man persists today in the new millennium? Why do you think it continues to have rhetorical traction, esp. in terms of what mainstream culture apparently is willing to believe about gay bodies?

Bill Keane, Neitzsche and Scarry

2006-10-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

This seems to interact with some of Scarry's thoughts on war in interesting ways.

Babies as object of property

2006-10-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know the history of surrogacy or when adoption laws began? We're reading "On Being the Object of Property" by Patricia Williams, and she talks abour her own history with slavery, but also the Baby M court case where because the mother "signed away" her rights to her child, she was denied parental rights (if I"m understanding the case correctly). The view was that this wasn't really a "sale of a child" but rather a contractual obligation. How is it that children are still viewed as property? Pro-life advocates argue for the unborn fetus, yet once the child is born, especially in adoption cases, it seems as if the child loses all rights, being able to be sold to the right bidder? How does this happen? I've never thought of children as commodities like this, but it is happening. What can we make of this?

"On Torture"

2006-10-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

In the Bodies and Rhetoric seminar, we're currently reading Scarry's Bodies and Pain. Scarry argues that torture's "activity has a structure accurately summarized by the word 'stupidity,'" a fact that heightens the significance of the juxtaposition between what actually occurs in the act of torture and its ostensible political purpose of "intelligence gathering" (278). This "is not an aimless piece of irony but an indication of the angle of error...that may separate a description of the event from the event itself" (278). In light of this quote, I found this article to be very interesting. I think Ed Kinane captures in his discussion of the relationship of our current government to practices of torture some of the same memetic phenomena that Scarry highlights in her discussion of torture as representative of a regime's fabrication of illegitimate and oppressive power. I was also struck by the rhetorical force of Kinane's title, "On Torture," which in its allusions to similar and more famous titles ("On War," "On Rhetoric," etc.) implicitly makes an argument that Scarry explicitly advances, that torture, despite being enacted on a much smaller scale, is in terms of its cultural force and significance at least as important a phenomenon as war itself. I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than that...any thoughts?

torture links

2006-10-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone: I'm including here some links that might be helpful for the U of I course as we move from Scarry to a broader focus on torture. The IU course might well be interested in some of the prevailing definitions of torture as a way of 'updating' Scarry (sadly!) when you read her book in a couple of weeks.

Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

US Torture Statue (includes definitions of torture)

Trope, Affect, and Democratic Subjectivity

2006-09-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

All -

I just got this announcement/call for papers for a November 2-5, 2006 conference at Northwestern:

Conference on Trope, Affect, and Democratic Subjectivity
>
>
The Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University
will sponsor a conference this November 2-5, 2006 on Trope, Affect, and
Democratic Subjectivity. The conference will feature plenary addresses by
leading scholars in classics, comparative literature, political theory,
communication studies, and other disciplines, as well as concurrent presentations. Scholars who wish to be included in the concurrent sessions
are invited to submit abstracts or papers by September 15, 2006. Those
selected for presentation will be notified by September 30.
>
The conference will be co-sponsored by the Northwestern Program in
Rhetoric and Public Culture, and directed by program faculty Dilip Gaonkar,
Robert Hariman, and Ernesto Laclau. The conference builds on the renewed
interest in rhetoric that is occurring across the human sciences. This
continuing displacement of modernist assumptions in the conduct of inquiry
reflects not only the legacy of the linguistic turn of the 20th century, but
also more recent and equally profound shifts in both intellectual culture
and configurations of the political in the 21st century. What began as a
crisis in representation has become a basis for focused critical study
regarding a volatile field of transformations across increasingly fungible
media, practices, and peoples. To that end, the conference focuses on the
crucial theoretical conjunction between trope, affect, and democratic
subjectivity. By "trope," we feature the productive capacity of discursive
operations for transformation; by "affect" we mark the significance of latent economies of signification and social energy; by "democratic subjectivity" we orient towards the constitution of the political subject as a citizen capable of public
participation and collective agency.
>
All papers presented will be eligible for publication in a volume on the
conference theme to be edited by the conference organizers. Applications
for presentation should be sent to r-hariman2_at_northwestern.edu. Inquiries
about attendance should be sent to Amber Day, a-day_at_northwestern.edu.

Plenery Speakers:
Gabriela Basterra (New York University; Gabriela.basterra_at_nyu.edu)
Barbara Biesecker (University of Iowa; Barbara-Biesecker_at_uiowa.edu)
Barbara Cassin (CNRS, Paris; barbara.cassin_at_wanadoo.fr)
Joan Copjec (SUNY, Buffalo; joancopjec_at_hotmail.com)
Oliver Marchart (University of Basel;Oliver.Marchart_at_unibas.ch)
Monique David-Menard (Centre d'Etudes du Vivant, Universite Paris;
Mdm01paris_at_aol.com)
Jean-Claude Monod (CNRS, Paris; jcmonod_at_hotmail.com)
Jelica Sumic-Riha (University of Ljubljana; jsumr_at_zrc.sazu.si)
Diane Rubenstein (Cornell University; dsr27_at_cornell.edu)
Phillipe Salazar (University of Cape Town; Salazar_at_telkomsa.net)

A Serious Coup

2006-09-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

"Thailand's coup leaders have banned go-go dancers from performing for troops on the streets of Bangkok, fearing soldiers may be distracted."

According to the BBC story, dancing near tanks has been banned in order "to maintain the seriousness of the coup." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5384544.stm What do others make of this? I'm curious how these bodies are determined as inappropriate, as opposed to tourists taking photographs of the tanks, or residents bringing the soldiers flowers and food. Although I can never imagine a coup in the US, I wonder how this scenario might get played out in other countries or political situations.

This also raises the issue of control of the dancers' bodies, the bodies of the soldiers, as well as the bodies of the spectators (and media). In class we discussed the control of US male soldiers' bodies (from forbidding soldiers to have bowel movements while 'in the field' to placing chemicals in their food to prevent erections while serving) and yet the general sense of encouragement for male soldiers to 'unleash' and be uncontrolled when displaying their masculinity via their (hetero)sexuality.

Is the key issue in this story really that male soldiers will be distracted, or is it that the placement of sexually-coded bodies in relationship to the soldiers and tanks is somehow undermining the political cause both locally and internationally? Are politics always 'serious' (i.e., no go-go dancers) and in what ways do political causes benefit from the stereotypical display of the female body? I think this draws attention to the fact that the sexualized female body is exploited for practically everything else - why draw the line at a coup?

{photos from http://www.news24.com/News24/Backpage/Offbeat/0,,2-1343-1347_2004462,00.html and news.bbc.co.uk}

more erotica

2006-09-26T07:07:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to add a photo to another post; so, this post really is a response to "Coding Body Parts as Patriotic"--my apologies for a new post.

Strikingly, I saw a similar piece of erotica in the Gabinetto Segreto (“Secret Room”) of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples this past May. The flying penis key chains (yes, there were more than one) is from antiquity. You are supposed to sign up for the room to tour this collection of erotica (the keychains are just a part) in order not to have too many people in the room becoming too excited at once.

Calling Dr. Finnegan

2006-09-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

Today's entry over at Cara Finnegan's blog touches on an issue we discussed in depth in today's class at Illinois: the distinction between affect and emotion. Brian Massumi insists on the importance of this distinction wherein emotion is 'owned and recognized' while affect is less known or knowable. Affect names intensities, self-directed vibrations, transformations. And Cara's entry perfectly crystallizes one thing that's at stake in this distinction: not just the knowability, but the expectation that frequently precedes emotion. This entry helps me understand in a new way Massumi's assertion that affect is asocial, especially if we think of how profoundly social emotion (or what he calls emotion) can be.

We miss Cara at Illinois while she is away on sabbatical, though we prefer to let that sense (what I'm calling 'missing') manifest itself in various untold ways and will most likely not leave boxes of tissues outside her office.

Coding Body Parts As Patriotic

2006-09-25T19:26:00.000-07:00

So my professor for my Politics of Fashion class clued me into the following link - I want to suggest the site - or at least a reading we could do of the site - is related to the subject matter of our class, but I admit it is pretty crass (rhymes with brass!). Hey, it's about a body part, alright? That's the connection.

The site American Brass Balls sells, well, brass replicas of testicles. But it is how they signify these metal testicles that interests me: "Having American Brass Balls means 'We've Got What It Takes' to: Defeat Terrorism and those who promote it; Defend our Homeland; Show Courage and Determination in the face of adversity."

The sentiment of having "balls" is cliche, but here it has been recoded (and commodified into a disturbingly realistic product) to address the fear of terrorism present in our culture over the past five years. While the site insists that brass balls are for both men and women, it seems to me the site and its shiny products are somehow unable to avoid masculinist associations.

Bodies in Prison?

2006-09-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of next week's conversation on Foucault's Birth of the Prison (in Phaedra's class), I thought we could discuss alternatives to the treatment of and attitudes around prisoners' bodies. One example might be meditation courses that are offered in prisons, such as the Vipassana Meditation Center in the Tihar high-security jail in New Delhi which has their own meditation center within the prison. The security guards are also required to take a meditation course prior to the course being available to inmates. http://www.dhamma.org/prisons.htm offers examples of successful meditation courses for both in-mates and security guards (and police cadets!) in India and world-wide.

The photo above is from the documentary "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana;" this is one of the many inmates who cried in the arms of the head security guard and meditation assistant instructor upon completion of a ten day sit.

The following excerpts are from http://www.dhamma.org/jaipur.htm, and raises the specific issue of what to do with prisoner's bodies (should they be chained while in meditation?). This describes a struggle that took place in 1975 when meditation was first introduced in an Indian prison. For what it's worth, there are no armed guards watching meditation students in the prisons today!

{FYI Goenka Ji is responsible for bringing Vipassana meditation teachings to India and world-wide from Burma; "dhamma" can be loosely translated as 'teachings'}:

...leg irons and handcuffs were used for hardened criminals. Four such prisoners were brought into the meditation hall locked in these fetters. Mr. Goenka was walking nearby and when he saw this... He exclaimed: "How can people in chains be put before me to meditate? This cannot happen. Remove the chains!"

But the Inspector General of Prisons (IG) said that this could not be allowed; the security in the jail was his responsibility; he could not remove the leg irons or the handcuffs. However, Mr Goenka was firm. He said he could not teach Dhamma with people sitting before him in chains. He was giving Dhamma; he had come to remove the chains. The IG told him he could remove the chains from within, but not the outside chains! Mr. Goenka insisted that those who were meditating must not be in chains...

The IG... said any one of them might try to be a hero, and strangle Mr. Goenka or me to death in the snap of a finger. We discussed the problem and finally came to an agreement to remove the chains and fetters. An armed guard would be posted at a strategic point to shoot any prisoner who started to advance menacingly. I told the IG to ensure that no panic shooting took place.

The chains and locks were removed... The course started. I sat at the front... My eyes were fixed on that armed guard, my heart throbbing and deep anxiety within! But with every passing moment came more relief... The red-hot eyes of the criminals who were the cause of so much turmoil changed and their faces beamed. Tears streamed down their cheeks...

Anne Galloway Talk on Monday

2006-09-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 25
5PM
Krannert Art Museum Auditorium
Anne Galloway

If you didn't get enough on considerations of bodies and space this past week, directly after our class on Monday the School of Art and Design Visiting Artists Series is hosting a lecture by Anne Galloway. The talk is entitled "Understanding People's Experience with Technology at Work and Play." I'll be walking over right after class if you want to go.

On her website, she argues: "After more than a decade of personal computer and cyberspace studies, wireless, wearable, context-aware and networked technologies are challenging social and cultural researchers to take up a revitalised and critical focus on computing in everyday life. Our increasing ability to take computers from the desktop into the world-at-large is creating different associations between people, objects and places."

Even if you can't catch the lecture, her website totally roxzors!

uncanny

2006-09-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

[cross posted at blogos]

So today was space day in my seminar, and it started with an email from a student in class asking that I sit in a different spot at the table. The room is in fact pretty small, and I do recall last time having to crane to see certain people in it, and so I happily obliged. I hope that went better.

But what I really signed on to write about is the uncanny post over at Working Blue in which Jenny Edbauer writes about her new attraction for actor network theory. In response to today's reading, which, among other things, included Lefebvre, a piece on Lefebvre by Ackerman, and also Edbauer on rhetorical ecologies, one STS/Latour/rhetoric person in our class actually called this new affinity by suggesting that Latour's notion of actant seems important for what Edbauer is doing with ecologies (which, by the way, we all really grooved on, especially the business about 'verbing' rhetoric). IOW, the rhetorical situation needs to be thingified even more, or to account for what Jane Bennett calls "thing power."

There were more affinities to be sure--like the specific analysis Edbauer offers along with Elizabeth Grosz's meditation on bodies-cities, but because I need to eat in order to make it in time to tonight's new materialisms group, where we're talking about some really great stuff (courtesy of Jane Bennett and Brian Massumi), I'll just settle for pointing out the uncanniness of that affinity detection and say rock on, Edbauer.

Bodies, Memorials, and Abortion

2006-09-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in seminar on Monday the “Right to Life” groups that create roadside cross displays honoring aborted fetuses. Growing up Catholic in the Midwest, I became quite familiar with the practice and with the displays themselves. In nearly every case I have seen, each cross serves as a representative of some larger number—i.e. the number of abortions in a year, the number of years since Roe v. Wade, etc. The displays usually turn up in yards next to churches, but quite often in the Midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin), I have seen them in out of season fields. One huge display stays up year round on the stretch of I-164 between I-64 and Evansville, IN.

When thinking about the practice in terms of rhetoric and the body, the crosses and the practice itself operates as the voice of the unborn for those who want to give a voice to that ?demographic?. The bodies that never existed outside of a uterus are symbolically represented the same way the bodies of millions of people that did live are every year—in cemeteries.

Here are some photos from fields in Maryland hijacked from a church website. If I can get my camera to some around here, I will post those at a later time. Make of it what you will. I am interested to here what other people think about it and your own experiences with this or other memorials.

http://www.smclife.org/

Performance Studies Working Group

2006-09-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

In case anyone is interested, especially in light of this week's readings, I thought I'd send out word that the first meeting of the IPRH reading group PSWG - Performance Studies Working group will be this Tuesday night at 7pm in the basement of the IPRH building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I have pasted the description of the group below, but you can let me know if you have any questions about it, or if you'd like me to add you the the e-mail list!

This group is a continuation of a one first started by Professor Julia
Walker two years ago. The Performance Studies Working Group (PSWG)
seeks to facilitate conversations among scholars divided by
disciplinary training and/or period of specialization but united by a
common interest in the emergent field of performance studies.
Encompassing everything from theatre studies, to music and dance, to
art history, to sociology, to anthropology, to the philosophy of
language, and beyond, the field of performance studies remains vast
and, at times, intimidating in its scope, requiring a master key to
all the various models and methodologies developed in its name. PSWG
thus seeks to provide a forum for exchanging knowledge about
performance from across the various disciplines, while tracing the
continuing emergence of this field.

More Material Rhetoric: Dead Bodies

2006-09-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

Hi, All,

I thought I would add some material rhetoric to the conversation from the IU end of things. Here is an article from the Sun Times last week.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-train06.html

My initial reaction was shock, then laughter, but looking more closely at this, I started to think about all the ways in which we treat the dead body. In the IU class, we're reading Mary Douglas's book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo where she analyzes how a variety of cultures treat dirt, purity, cleanliness etc. through religious and secular rituals and looks at how pollutants play an important role in maintaining social structures. I would be interested to know the history of the fascination in preserving the dead body or in keeping the ashes of the dead after cremation. This may sound like a silly question, but why isn't the dead corpse just seen as a "pollutant?" How are the ashes of the dead not seen as dirt? Why does it seem really creepy for a woman to spend 23 hours on a train with her father's dead body?

Honor in Sports and Repetition

2006-09-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

I have two varying questions/comments after reading Bodily Arts. My ideas are in relation to sports within American culture because it is central to my research interests and am grappling with how to explore these ideas in my own research. So here goes:

As we learned in Phaedra's class from Hawhee's book, honor production was a central part of athletics within ancient Greece. This got me thinking about how within United States culture (and I would think more globally as well) that honor and dishonor is created for athletes through the cheering and booing that occurs at sporting events as well as the endorsement deals and print time they gain from being loved by the public. This honor production, though, seems to have extended further in our current sports culture as we question a player's character through his/her performance, particularly in negative terms. For instance, Alex Rodriguez has gone from being highly admired in the public with one of the highest deals in baseball and multiple endorsements, but is now drawing more boos and ire than any player in baseball (and during a year that would be career highs for most players). The fans and media now question his mental state and performance (he has acknowledged that he goes to a therapist--gasp! weakness). Yet, why is the culture so critical in a time that he is performing on the field? Has the production of honor changed? I even wonder if our move toward honor through endorsement contracts and high profiles has backfired for A-Rod in ways that the public has become more resentful of him. I am extremely timid to think of honor as only being marked by championships because we seem to honor and admire athletes who never win a championship and don't want to blame them for not having all the pieces to fall into place for his/her team. I guess my question is more of how do we mark or rhetoricize honor in our current athletic climate or in American culture more generally?

My other question is whether the repetitive nature of sports potentially creates a more stable model for cultural imitation. The embodiment of masculinity attempts to be stable and I know that each player has to continue a particular type of performance to be marked as masculine, but am beginning to think whether expectations for athletes and their sexuality are less maleable and inclusive to changes. For instance, within men's sports the gay athlete is still extremely feared within the lockerroom. Athletes may remark that they don't have anything against gays, but that a gay teammate would disrupt the lockerroom environment or that a gay teammate wouldn't be accepted if they were openly out. If sports has historically been integral in creating a model for the public culture, then what type of model is this? The antagonistic attitude towards the gay athlete is certainly disheartening to say the least.

Phusiopoiesis?

2006-09-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Debbie, we had a great time talking about your book in seminar this morning. One question I dared not answer, though I did manage to pronounce it outloud, was about "phusiopoiesis"--one student said she googled it to learn more and only found your name again. Another asked if it was merely metis & kairos combined. Could you perhaps share some more insight into this term and its usefulness for your work?

Rubble Rhetoric

2006-09-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Material rhetoric:

"Made in the U.S.A."

rubbing statues

2006-08-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

cross posted at blogos

Yesterday our seminar readings (Blair, Crowley, Hayles, and Ratcliffe) clustered around materiality. Carole Blair's essay on memorials (in Rhetorical Bodies), and her discussion of supplementing memorials--i.e., how people sometimes leave things like flowers and notes behind--got us thinking about other ways visitors change such sites. At stake in this inquiry is the question of material's mutability. It is intriguing that structures made of stone, bronze, granite, or marble can still be encountered interactively.

We looked at some images of bronze statues in particular and talked about the practice of rubbing statues, usually on their noses or feet, but sometimes, ahem, elsewhere, and the way that rubbing acts as a kind of polishing, so that the nose on Lincoln's tomb remains shiny while the rest of his face has darkened over time. (I'm including the images we examined here.)

Does anybody know where this practice originated? I know the Buddhist practice of rubbing the Buddha for health has been around since ancient times, and this practice of rubbing statues of local heroes for luck is common in Europe and the U.S., especially on college campuses (see, e.g., John Harvard's shoe below). I haven't been able to find any information on how this cultural practice got started, but I'm kind of obsessed with it.

Introducing the IU seminar

2006-08-28T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hi, all. I wanted to offer a bit more background on who showed up in the IU seminar today and a bit about what we talked about. The seminar has 17 students (currently) from Gender Studies, Applied Health Sciences, Folklore, Art History, and Communication and Culture. We are cross-listed with American Studies and Cultural Studies. At IU, Communication & Culture is a multi-disciplinary department, including Rhetoric & Public Culture, Film & Media Studies, and Performance/Ethnography (Anthropology). Students expressed a range of interests, including but not limited to: pregnancy/birth; military/memorials; sports; technolog/new media/cyborgs; identity (esp., gendered, sexed and sexualized); and body image/fat.

Beyond introducing ourselves, I raised a few points that folks may or may not wish to discuss further on the blog. First, I assigned Debbie Hawhee's book for next week along with readings from Plato and Descartes. The goal is to emphasize that body studies is not "new or "trendy"; in fact, as long as there have been academies, academics have studied bodies. So, whereas Plato and Descartes' writings represent the body/soul and body/mind splits that long have been perpetuated by some academics, Debbie's book provides a wonderful argument using historical evidence that the bodily arts long have been vital to rigorous scholarship and thinking (even for Plato himself). Looking at the U of I syllabus, I see all of you also will be discussing what a rhetorical approach to bodies might entail. Acknowledging the body is not new to the academy seems important not only to re-imagining what we have been taught about what it has meant to be an academic historically, but also what it could mean or become. Questions to consider: what myths remain about athletic bodies? about academic bodies? Who gains and who loses out when we perceive athletic and academic bodies in a rigid binary (opposing each other)? And what difference does a rhetorical approach to sports--or bodies--make? Is Grosz's (U of I reading) approach a rhetorical one, even if she might not claim it as such?

Robbie Cox at U of I

2006-08-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

Funny this, Phaedra tipped me off that my own department is bringing in Robbie Cox on Sept. 8. Those of you interested in Environmental Rhetoric and social movements will definitely want to plan to attend. Date: September 8. I'll post the time and place as I gather more details.

Here's what I have so far, with a hat tip to Ned O'Gorman:

Department of Speech Communication Colloquium Presents

J. Robert (Robbie) Cox
Professor, Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Former President of the national Sierra Club

"Manufacturing Doubt: Public Communication and Global Warming."

Haraway and Adams at IU

2006-08-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

I am resisting blogging until Monday, once my seminar has had a chance to meet. But, I wanted to share the news with U of I folks that Donna Haraway, Carol Adams, and other well known body scholars are coming to IU next week for a conference on animals. For the program and more information, see: http://www.indiana.edu/~kspirits/

provisional thoughts and questions

2006-08-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

How much is consciousness influenced by the physicality of the body? Is consciousness just thinking? Do we only think in language (fully formed words and clusters of words)? Are our words (their sound, shape, linearity, other?) limited by the physicality of our bodies (mouth, face, throat, brain, cns, other)? If yes to all of these, then it seems like at least a simplistic argument could be made that physicality does influence (constrain?) thought and therefore perhaps consciousness (is that an analog for “mind”?).

We can think of other ways corporeality affects (limits? constrains? contains?) psychicality: the behavior of dna and rna; neural pathways and synapses (made especially clear when they dysfunction (alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, other); the interplay of matter and energy; dopamine, hormones, adrenaline and other secretions; blood flow and pressure (sometimes resulting in strokes), heart rate, emotions, sleepiness, oxygen availability, drugs (from coffee and cigarettes to heroin and lsd), and more ….

I’m not a biologist and I certainly don’t want to engage in reductionism and determinism. I also don’t want to constrain or contain our discussion of mind and body to these sorts of questions. But the above observations at least appear to support claims that our bodies are able to influence (enable and limit) our psyches. But how much? And there are certainly many other ways mind and body interact. Is this even a good starting point (on the mobius strip)?

"New Materialisms" Group at UIUC this Fall

2006-08-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

For those of us at UIUC who need another materiality fix on Monday nights - a mere three hours after our seminar on Bodies and Rhetoric ends - the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive theory is sponsoring a seminar/reading group entitled "New Materialisms" (upon linking, scroll down or select "seminars" at the top of the screen). It meets on five Monday nights throughout this semester.

The rationale for the group relates to what we discussed yesterday - the group wants to move away from conceiving bodies merely as sites of discursive production and consider how subjectivity might be conceived after reading in several fields, including physiology, science studies, and "(alternative) philosophical traditions." They will even be reading some Massumi and Grosz like our seminar, so I imagine there will be some crossover and those of us working in cultural, rhetorical, and writing studies could offer the group additional perspective.

on blogging on bodies

2006-08-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

This blogspace is designated for members of two rhetorical theory graduate seminars, one at Indiana University (C619, "On Bodies") taught by Phaedra Pezzullo and one at the University of Illinois (SPCOM 538, "Bodies and Rhetoric") taught by Debra Hawhee. Given the overlap between the courses, we thought group blogging might be a good way to bring the courses together for a little extra-institutional, inter-seminar engagement with the hopes that we might reconvene 'live' at the IU/UI gathering in Bloomington this January. Blog participation, while encouraged, is not required, but we do hope 'on bodies' might be a lively space for seminar participants to share resources and responses, grapple with concepts, seek and offer feedback, extend course discussion, 'blog out' (ie report out of a particular meeting for those on 'the other side'), or otherwise engage course materials.