Re-Membering: The Materiality Of The Discursive Body Or A Return To Matter
Location
SU 124
Department
English
Abstract
My specific, material, corporeal experiences (as a cis/queer/woman, as inhabiting an able but ill body, as dependent) is always already written and read, already constituted (as list, as text becoming matter) before I walk into the room. This project will attempt to map and interrogate this always already written body: the medicalized body, the infantilized, manipulated, coded, managed, and reprimanded body. The body first constituted as language, then matter: flesh, bone, mass, disease, compliance, susceptibility. A project that attempts to re-iterate what cannot be un-written, to give voice/make visible to what cannot escape categorization. A return: to the place of the body understood by Eli Clare: to material as home, as community, as language but language under the skin, to the space of the stolen body, to the possibility of reclamation. This project will examine writing as excavation and interrogation, as catalogue and re- membering a life. Writing as tool to return limbs to their source, to a place in or on the body, to a place of concrete and hard dirt, plastic siding, blue kitchens. Writing as a way, a path to get to the yellow, a re-connection to a version, of me, of the female body, of the body, a return to the body. This project hopes to interrogate the medical industrial complex, the beauty industrial complex, their intersection and dominance over the differently abled body, the invisibly ill body. I will bring into conversation Maggie Nelson’s work blurring boundaries between theory and the material, Eli Clare’s and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s activism within the disability justice movement, Audre Lorde journaling her experiences with oncologists and examination rooms, Mary Roach’s frank discussion of death and its aftermath. I hope to move between and within the discursive body to the bloody sick body and land at the political and radical activist work of imagining alternative trajectories, this possibility that lies in the telling. This project is courting the edges of the Right Now, the edge of a rage about to burst, an eruption to disrupt the script that dominates spaces of medicalized care. To accomplish such fissure this project will attempt to challenge genre, to blur the frame of memoir/analysis/fiction in an effort to examine what is “simultaneously materially real and socially constructed,” to think about the not-performance but the “affect of the repetition of performance,” to get to the force at the center.
Re-Membering: The Materiality Of The Discursive Body Or A Return To Matter
SU 124
My specific, material, corporeal experiences (as a cis/queer/woman, as inhabiting an able but ill body, as dependent) is always already written and read, already constituted (as list, as text becoming matter) before I walk into the room. This project will attempt to map and interrogate this always already written body: the medicalized body, the infantilized, manipulated, coded, managed, and reprimanded body. The body first constituted as language, then matter: flesh, bone, mass, disease, compliance, susceptibility. A project that attempts to re-iterate what cannot be un-written, to give voice/make visible to what cannot escape categorization. A return: to the place of the body understood by Eli Clare: to material as home, as community, as language but language under the skin, to the space of the stolen body, to the possibility of reclamation. This project will examine writing as excavation and interrogation, as catalogue and re- membering a life. Writing as tool to return limbs to their source, to a place in or on the body, to a place of concrete and hard dirt, plastic siding, blue kitchens. Writing as a way, a path to get to the yellow, a re-connection to a version, of me, of the female body, of the body, a return to the body. This project hopes to interrogate the medical industrial complex, the beauty industrial complex, their intersection and dominance over the differently abled body, the invisibly ill body. I will bring into conversation Maggie Nelson’s work blurring boundaries between theory and the material, Eli Clare’s and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s activism within the disability justice movement, Audre Lorde journaling her experiences with oncologists and examination rooms, Mary Roach’s frank discussion of death and its aftermath. I hope to move between and within the discursive body to the bloody sick body and land at the political and radical activist work of imagining alternative trajectories, this possibility that lies in the telling. This project is courting the edges of the Right Now, the edge of a rage about to burst, an eruption to disrupt the script that dominates spaces of medicalized care. To accomplish such fissure this project will attempt to challenge genre, to blur the frame of memoir/analysis/fiction in an effort to examine what is “simultaneously materially real and socially constructed,” to think about the not-performance but the “affect of the repetition of performance,” to get to the force at the center.
Comments
Amanda Goldblatt is the faculty sponsor for this project.