More Fuss about the Body: New Medievalists’ Perspectives
Call for Papers
Call for Papers
International
Congress on Medieval Studies
Kalamazoo, MI — May
9–12, 2019
Organizers: Stephanie Grace-Petinos and Leah Pope Parker
In her 1995 essay “Why All the Fuss about the Body?: A
Medievalist’s Perspective,” Caroline Walker Bynum presented a nuanced picture
of embodiment in the past in order “to suggest that we in the present would do
well to focus on a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies.”[1]
The same year saw the release of Bynum’s magisterial exploration of the body,
identity, and medieval Christian eschatology in The Resurrection of the Body
in Western Christianity, 200–1336. Almost 25 years later, Bynum’s call for
diversity with respect to histories of the body still invites increasingly
nuanced approaches to medieval embodiment. This panel seeks to honor Bynum’s
seminal essay, while using it as a springboard for future investigations
concerning the body, both medieval and modern.
We
seek papers that deal with personhood, identity, and the material body,
updating histories of the body through areas of study that have grown in
popularity since the mid-1990s, including disability studies, trans studies,
queer theory, postcolonial studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, animal studies,
and the global Middle Ages, along with new developments in feminist and
critical race theory. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
- Bodily integrity and the limits of the body, healing damage to the body, or bodies and borders (i.e. the treatment of bodies in immigration/incarceration);
- Theologies of death and resurrection and rituals of burial and remembrance;
- Bodies centered and marginalized—including discussion of recent movements such as #metoo and Black Lives Matter;
- Gender expression and/through the body;
- Normativity (cisheteronormativity, compulsory ablebodiedness, etc);
- Flora and fauna, cyborgs and prosthesis;
- Present-day concepts of embodiment and their medieval predecessors as presented in popular culture (e.g. the television shows Supernatural or Game of Thrones);
- Comparative and cross-cultural concepts of the body; and/or
- The body in queer/crip time.
The organizers of this panel are committed to including
perspectives representative of the diversity of the field, and to amplifying
voices that are too often marginalized by systemic discrimination in academic
employment, publishing, funding, and conference programming. In the spirit of
Bynum’s invitation to consider “a wider range of topics in our study of body or
bodies,” we welcome papers that offer critical reflections upon the field of
medieval studies, and which represent diverse and innovative perspectives on
medieval histories of the body and contemporary medievalisms. Given the
limitations of a single conference panel, submissions will also receive early
consideration for an edited volume on the same range of topics.
Please submit abstracts of 200–300 words to More.Body.Fuss.Kzoo19@gmail.com
by Friday, September 14, 2018, along with a completed Participant
Information form. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the
abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded
to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per
Congress regulations. The organizers are happy to answer any questions via the
aforementioned email address.
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