Queering / Embodying: Materiality Beyond Identity
"To affirm a materiality-or, to be less abstract, to insist on the livability of one's own embodiment, particularly when that embodiment is culturally abject or socially despised-is to undertake a constant and always incomplete labor to reconfigure more than just the materiality of our own bodies. It is to strive to create and transform the lived meanings of those materialities."
-Gayle Salamon
The body has emerged as a central site for critical engagements with questions of subjectivity, experience, identity, and materiality in queer and feminist theory. Some of these critical engagements have politicized the body as the locus of identity, while others have problematized foundational assumptions about embodiment. This conference seeks to dwell in the "incomplete labor to reconfigure more than just the materiality of our own bodies." As interdisciplinary graduate students engaged in a number of critical fields, we want to think the body beyond identity or static materiality. We invite scholars who are interested in engaging with the histories, though sometimes painful, as well as the dynamic possibilities of embodiment.
Potential topics address, but are not limited to, how embodiment informs our understanding of :
- Culturally abject/socially despised bodies
- Strategies for reconfiguring/thinking beyond bodily materiality
- Lived experience
- Sex practices
- Community and belonging
- Ethics
- Humanism, post-humanism, & trans-humanism
- Representations of materiality
- Theory of Mind
- Disease
- Practices of consumption