Extra/Ordinary Bodies: Interrogating the Performance and Aesthetics of “Difference”
Hyatt Atlanta Buckhead
Atlanta, Georgia
November 16-19, 2017
Historically, bodies have been divided into categories that separate the normal from the abnormal, the natural from the monstrous. In Generatione Animalium, Aristotle describes terata (monsters) as defective beings because they disrupt the order of nature. Subsequent approaches to defining our world, and by extension the human body, continued throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and into our present understanding of scientific, racial, and moral difference. These “extraordinary bodies,” as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls them, have persistently been understood as aberrations that produce either fear or marvel. She says, “Because such bodies are rare, unique, material, and confounding of cultural categories, they function as magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment.”
A focus on extraordinary bodies also provides an entryway into a discussion of aesthetics. In our culture, bodies that fall outside heteronormative ideals of beauty, health, and behavior are marked as “other” and regularly oppressed by cultural and social institutions. For example, scholar Kathleen Lebesco has argued that fat bodies are revolting bodies, bodies that actively rebel against normative cultural assumptions, challenging patriarchal and economic power structures. Additional examples of these kinds of bodies include people of color, undocumented immigrants, queers and queers of color, indigenous peoples, disabled people, and the poor. For these individuals, performance has the potential to destabilize—or rewrite—existing cultural power structures and establish alternative narratives of embodiment.
Program Chairs:
Jimmy A. Noriega, The College of Wooster
Jen-Scott Mobley, East Carolina University
Analola Santana, Dartmouth College
Program Committee:
Patrick Anderson, University of California San Diego
Faedra Chatard Carpenter, University of Maryland
Catherine Cole, University of Washington
Laura Edmondson, Dartmouth College
Gad Guterman, Webster University
Ric Knowles, University of Guelph
Carrie Sandahl, University of Illinois Chicago
Karen Shimakawa, New York University
Harvey Young, Northwestern University
Jill Stevenson, Marymount Manhattan College, ex officio
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