Body Politics and Bodies Politic
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Lucas Wood
Organizer Affiliation
Texas Tech Univ.
Presider Name
Julie K. Chamberlin
Presider Affiliation
Indiana Univ.-Bloomington
Paper Title 1
Political Bodies, Mechanical Bodies: Ekphrasis, Automata, and (Geo)politics in Twelfth-Century Romance
Presenter 1 Name
Jonathan Morton
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte/Tulane Univ.
Paper Title 2
Politicizing the Pastourelle in the Hundred Years War
Presenter 2 Name
Elizaveta Strakhov
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Marquette Univ.
Paper Title 3
Bodies Politic and Affective Subjects in Deschamps and Chartier
Presenter 3 Name
Lucas Wood
Start Date
9-5-2019 1:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 2335
Description
This session explores poetic configurations of the politicized body in medieval Francophone literature, focusing on the relationship between the potent metaphor of the “body politic” and the broader domain of “body politics”—the ideologically charged construction, regulation, and conscription of human bodies as sites both of sensory and affective experience and of discursive inscriptions of identities framed in terms of gender, class, religion, race, lineage, partisan affiliation, nationality, etc. Considering diverse texts and genres from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, the three panelists will investigate ways in which writers conjoin body politics and representations of bodies politic so as to mediate between individual readers and various incarnations of corporate or collective identity. In this context, they will also study medieval strategies for imagining, advocating and critiquing models of embodied subjectivity and subjection by staging human bodies alongside (and playing them against) mechanical, animal, and allegorical bodies in ways that call into question the organic or artificial, monolithic or fragmentary, anthropocentric or more ecological nature of the “body politic.” Lucas Wood
Body Politics and Bodies Politic
Schneider 2335
This session explores poetic configurations of the politicized body in medieval Francophone literature, focusing on the relationship between the potent metaphor of the “body politic” and the broader domain of “body politics”—the ideologically charged construction, regulation, and conscription of human bodies as sites both of sensory and affective experience and of discursive inscriptions of identities framed in terms of gender, class, religion, race, lineage, partisan affiliation, nationality, etc. Considering diverse texts and genres from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, the three panelists will investigate ways in which writers conjoin body politics and representations of bodies politic so as to mediate between individual readers and various incarnations of corporate or collective identity. In this context, they will also study medieval strategies for imagining, advocating and critiquing models of embodied subjectivity and subjection by staging human bodies alongside (and playing them against) mechanical, animal, and allegorical bodies in ways that call into question the organic or artificial, monolithic or fragmentary, anthropocentric or more ecological nature of the “body politic.” Lucas Wood