“Unruly Bodies in Literature and Media” _offers a close examination of the discourses surrounding those bodies that are considered abnormal, monstrous, unfitting and weird in the Western modern material and visual culture. We will move broadly in time and space within philosophical, literary, and cinematic traditions to concentrate on those moments where the body becomes a site of tangible contestation. In these instances, we will think about how the discrimination of the body determines the way we think about norms, politics and values; we will examine the ways in which the normal body designs technology and the ways some bodies are seen as proper and good and others as unwanted and dangerous.
Our investigation will begin in 1641 with Rene Descartes and the invention of the modern man with the isolation of the body from the mind. Often seen as natural and obvious, this split of the thinking substance from the extending one affects the way we consider our bodies, especially within the discourses of gender, sexuality, colonization, and ecology. Through a close examination of colonization and accumulative practices of wealth through monsters and witches, we will question basic assumptions of rational man as the apex of civilization.
Our specific concern will be on those bodies that are categorized as monstrous, and how they function to form and/or disrupt a unified, consistent discourses of the West and its proper boundaries. We will look at the ways in which the appearance of the monstrous body- with its legions and regions , its denial of binary forms of gender, its tentacles and serpentine arms, its cold and mildewed skin- disrupts concepts of normalcy and asks us to reconsider our ways of being, doing, and living. Using aesthetic, queer, feminist, posthumanist, and critical disability theories and speculative fiction works, we will try to turn the body into a material space upon which we can build new forms thinking.