Abstract Competition
The requirements for eligibility for the competition:
1. Submit an abstract.
2. Present the paper that pertains to the abstract during the conference, on either the day of the 24th or 25th of September.
We will rely upon a panel of external judges, who are not the organizers, to score the abstracts according to the following criteria. The highest scoring abstract wins the prize.
I. 10 points. Set up topic, focus and establish key/function words
II. 10 points. Show Significance: Identify problem in field, a gap in knowledge, or a misunderstanding
III. 10 points. Identify sources or texts you will examine
IV. 10 points. Identify method (theory/tool/approach) you will use
V. 10 points. Expected conclusions.
Points total: 50
The prize: $100.
Abstract Submissions:
Adam Aziz
University of Texas, Department of French & Italian
Pride and Prejudice(d): Interrogating the Visual-Spatial Politics of Dissent between Black Lives Matter and the Homomasculinist Imagery of Whiteness in North American LGBT Politics
On June 24, 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) San Francisco withdrew from the city’s Pride parade, citing concerns that “as queer people of color, [black people] are disproportionately targeted by both vigilante and police violence.” Similar critiques of the increasing securitization, racial profiling, and corporatization in Pride parades resonated across the border. On July 3, 2016, BLM Toronto, composed primarily of black women, halted the city’s Pride procession and staged a sit-in protest, refusing to move until Pride organizers responded to their demands to address (in)voluntary practices of racialized, gendered exclusion hostile to black, indigenous, and women/queer of color participation. Implicit in this call were demands to interrogate the privileging of gay white maleness dominating the organizational and discursive framework of Pride. BLM’s refusal for co-optation and its demand for greater inclusion became central rallying points, as the reverberated cries of BLM Toronto demonstrated: “Pride Toronto, we are calling you out! For your anti-blackness, your anti-indigeneity!” BLM’s rhetoric, in turn, has drawn ire from more reserved elements of the LGBT community who accused BLM of fomenting discord within a marginalized sexual demographic.
In this project, I explore the visual-spatial politics of dissent generated from the encounter between BLM and mainstream North American LGBT politics. Drawing insight from feminist and queer of color writers, such as Audre Lorde, Katherine McKittrick, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, and José Esteban Muñoz, I investigate how BLM’s techniques of spatial intrusion and visual interruption challenge existing expectations that Pride be centrally anchored upon the visual-spatial dominance of queer, happy whiteness. I explore how critiques against BLM’s interruption of Pride deploy what Ahmed calls killjoy logic that subsequently recasts bodies of color as ‘unhappy queers’ who are spatially disruptive, visually unpleasant, and perpetually restive, in order to maintain an atmospherically happy, ‘feel-good’, affective climate. I interpret this regulatory system in terms of a visual-spatial biopolitics: What is overwhelmingly and predominantly visual in public culture is consequently legitimized and celebrated as an appropriate, respectable human face for an LGBT representational politics; what has historically always been concealed becomes seen as less than human, visually unpleasant, and politically irrelevant—a discursive mode produced out of the enduring legacies and histories of racialized segregationism, colonial ethnocentrism, institutionalized slavery, and hegemonic patriarchies in Canada and the United States. I suggest that Pride parades are animate and organic landscapes sensorially sensitive to a range of affective expressions, sight, sound, smell, mood, color—ingredients contributing to the illusory production of Pride as a visually pleasant, happy landscape mediated by a gay, happy whiteness and unblemished by angry, colored bodies. I thus argue that Pride constitutes an ongoing site of visual-spatial contestation, and so BLM’s interruption of Pride is necessary subaltern work to reclaim a dispossessed black geographic space that exposes the racial-sexual- gendered modes of exclusion operating clandestinely within Pride celebrations.
Elijah Barrish
University of Texas, Department of Philosophy
Buddhism as Biohacking: Tibetan Thought and the Posthuman
The Cyborg Buddha Project of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a think tank founded by preeminent transhumanist Nick Bostrom, promotes discussion on the impact of neurotechnology on a whole portfolio of Buddhism-associated concepts (“happiness, spirituality, cognitive liberty, moral behavior and the exploration of meditational and ecstatic states of mind”). This project has come under criticism for transplanting Buddhist philosophy into Western teleologies of techno-progress. In one harsh response to IEET, Woody Evans describes Buddhism, against transhumanism, as being “utterly human.”
In my paper, I would aim to push back against this criticism. Buddhism—specifically Tibetan Buddhism—can and should be theorized as teleological, technological, and posthuman if not transhuman. Although Buddhism involves focus on the present embodied moment—attention to breath and posture, what Evans calls “the simple and the human”—this moment is also one of posthumanism. In focusing on the body, Buddhism asks the meditating subject to realize the impermanent and empty nature of subjectivity: fleeting affect, dispersed consciousness, and the interconnection with all things. The two primary precepts of Buddhist philosophy, that all things are empty and co-dependently arising, decenter the human, put becoming over being, etc.
The Dalai Lama’s recent calls for global non-secular ethics notwithstanding, Buddhism disturbs the natural law foundation that secures humanism. Indeed, master meditators have been known, after death, to remain in a state that Tibetans call the Clear Light of Dying, their bodies not decaying for weeks. What could be more post-human than the philosophy that gives us the only literal zombies observed on earth?
Andrew Belton
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Luxury of Consciousness: Some Horrors of Being Human and Living with “The Dead” in James Joyce’s Dubliners
Slavoj Žižek writes, “at the most elementary level of our human identity, we are all zombies” and that “being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, the inhuman/mechanical core of humanity.” In Dubliners, however, James Joyce imagines humanity not at the zero-level, but in all its cerebral extravagance—as the by-product and luxury of narrative-producing consciousness. For Joyce, the human is defined by the privilege of having a conscious, where that consciousness expresses a state of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. “The dead” are an entirely different story. For Joyce, they are not the necrotic and horrifyingly relentless flesh-eaters of contemporary popularity, but the “humans who no longer look and act like humans” that Žižek describes. This paper looks to apprehend the privilege of being human and the limits (if any) of being “dead” by focusing on Joyce’s distribution of consciousness as a narrative luxury. The capacity for consciousness in his literary characters demarcates the horrifying line between being human, being dead, and being a human living with the dead. Who is afforded this luxury speaks to the ways we humans continue to fantasize about zombies and our ability to endure the dystopian times brought on by the pervasiveness of the dead.
Veronica Jimenez Borja & Liza Futerman
University of Toronto, Comparative Literature
Mind Maps and Mapping Minds: Speculating Normalcy and Pathology in Sense 8
This paper investigates the spectrum that ‘being human’ or ‘human being’ entails
via the prism of the hospital space in the sci-fi series Sense 8 (2015). The series reproduces discourses of pathology and illness associated with Globalization processes that transcend traditional forms of territorially emplaced identities and societies. We are interested in the global scope Sense 8 professes by collapsing time and space through the consciousnesses of 8 individuals that are located in 8 metropolitans around the globe and drawing links between them through what is depicted, at first, as pathologized brains. The sci-fi genre and the editing techniques repeatedly question the value of science and medicine and reconstruct illness and diversity to signify superhuman
ability.
Our paper will argue that the moments whereby the individuals communicate in the most extreme way—that which renders them superhuman—allows them to embody one another, and as such, practice the most extreme degree of empathy—that in which one individual merges in mind and body with the other(s). This empathy contrasts to the isolation of the metropolitan and the dehumanization of the clinical space of hospitals where many of the events of Sense 8 take place. We will examine the space of the hospital through Derrida’s concept of hospitality as being both hostile and offering hospitality to its residents. However, the concept of hospitality will be then elaborated as the human body becomes in and of itself simultaneously hospitable to other consciousnesses and potentially hostile to the self.
Juan Manuel Ávila Conejo
University of Texas, Comparative Literature
The NotMan: Nihilism and Apocalypse in Dostoevsky’s Demons
In this work, I examine the character of Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) and its relationship with Sergey Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionary (1869) and the JudeoChristian myth of the Antichrist. Dostoevsky based his character on Nechayev’s pamphlet, in which he dehumanizes the revolutionary, depicted as a singleminded, unthinking, unfeeling, deindividualized, “doomed man.” The figure of the Antichrist, which is a central theme in Russian literature’s Golden Age, concentrates the political, identitarian, and religious concerns of the time; both of these narratives serve as foundation for Dostoevsky’s character.
I propose that the mixture of a fundamentalist political ideology with an eschatological myth produces an inhuman character, more machine and demon than real person. This artificial creature has only the triumph of the revolution as goal and destruction as method. The authors oppose each other: Dostoevsky dehumanizes Verkhovensky in order to vilify him, but Nechayev does the same to empower the Nihilist figure, who ceases to be an individual human and becomes an agent of fate and the revolution.
Jake Cowan
University of Texas, Rhetoric and Writing
I, Phone: Subjects On the Line
In her 1989 monograph on the telephone—which she calls “a synecdoche for technology” in general—Avital Ronell laid bare the metaphysical uncertainty and humanist hesitation ushered in whenever the telephone rings. Yet whereas Ronell heard in the regular chime of a quarter-costing payphone an instrument of “disconnecting force” and “destinal alarm,” a quarter century later the development of smartphones has cut the umbilical chord of fixed landlines only to capture callers in new networks as invisible as they are intertwined, encompassing as they are invulnerable. In my brief presentation, “I, Phone: On the Line,” I work to revisit and reorient Ronell’s ontological insights for our contemporary digital epoch, illustrating how the trope of synecdoche is no longer sufficient to describe our social and psychological capture by computer technology; rather, the digital has shifted the role of technology from one among many narratives to the central (in-human) metaphor prescribing the contours of daily life away from the chaos of desire toward the mechanics of drive. Extending and forwarding Ronell’s argument, my paper suggests that such media has slipped silently, though with heavy vibrations, from the occasional borders defining human experience to the ontological core setting in motion our mobile drives. That is to say, while “the human” has always been defined in relation to her prosthetics, modern technology has become so pervasive a part of everyday interaction as to make the extrahuman and the human not only indissoluble but topologically synonymous, necessitating a reevaluation of media’s ontological call.
Michael Dorman
The University of Texas at Austin, Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies
Chernobyl’s Effects In Belarus
In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions which resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disasters to date. On the Saturday morning following the explosion children went to school, people went fishing in the reactor’s cooling ponds, and, with the exception of those called to help at the reactor, the daily lives of those in the contaminated areas continued as usual. The reactions of party members and plant workers in the hours and days following the accident were characterized by fear, confusion, and an overall unawareness of the severity of the accident. Outside of the circles of upper level Soviet officials, no one would know that Belarus had received an amount of radioactive fallout equivalent to that of 350 nuclear bombs until 1989. Since the catastrophe, 2.3 million Belarusians, including 700,000 children, have been effected by Chernobyl. Moreover, 2.1 million Belarusians are currently living on contaminated land. Though more than 30 years have passed since the accident, the debate as to the danger of Chernobyl fallout in Belarus continues. Many western organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization dismiss the effects of the accident, attributing the rise of all health problems with the exception of thyroid diseases to “radiophobio.” However, since the accident congenital deformities in Gomel, Belarus’s second largest city, have increased by 250% and birth defects have risen by 200%. Thus, it seems that the effects of Chernobyl in Belarus are far more severe than the scientific community is prepared to admit.
Xuefeng Feng
University of Texas, Department of Asian Studies
Ghosts in Motion: Marx, Deities, and the Constitution of Revolutionary Reality
This paper analyzes The White-haired Girl, a famous Chinese opera commissioned by the Chinese Communist Party in 1945 and raises a seemingly absurd question, that is, how ghosts move, or the mobility of ghosts. I investigate three aspects of the opera, its production and dissemination, that is, the mobility of the ghosts in question, the process of assembling these actors, and the durability of that assemblage. I argue that these three aspects are key to understanding the formation of what we call reality, in this case, the class-oriented reality of the Chinese Communist Revolution.
The opera stages a heroic narrative of class struggle through the protagonist Xi’er’s (the white-haired girl) liberation. The intriguing fact of the story is that it originally derived from the white-haired deity worship in northern China. Communist Party intellectuals took inspiration from the local belief, and rewrote the story in which myth is replaced, and disenchanted, by scientific explanations, and the deity metamorphosed into a living girl. Competing with interpretations emphasized on cultural politics and power relations in the process of this adaption, the current paper revisits the opera differently on two levels. Firstly, it identifies actors that possess disparate ontological positions in producing the historic episode. In this regard, the opera should be treated as a process of ontological translation rather than a consequence of cultural translation/negotiation. Secondly, instead of speculating a certain ontological relativism, I follow the empiricist route of Actor-Network- Theory (ANT), and argue that as long as actors act, they exist, whether the actor is a human, or a ghost. In Latour’s word, realities as well as divinities “are not substances, but all actions”. In and around the opera, deities and ghosts act painstakingly, exactly because they know if they stop doing so, the allegedly objective reality of class society would evaporate and vanish immediately and altogether.
Kristyn Goldberg
University of Texas, Communication Studies and Rhetoric and Language
Who is Really the Monster here?: (Re)visioning the Frankenstein Myth
This paper begins to unpack what is part of the growing body of critical cultural work of music videos. Specifically, it is a close examination of Lady Gaga’s music video, Yoü and I. Using Rushing and Frentz’s extensive research on the presence or Jungian archetypes in film, this paper argues for similar, though not precisely the same theoretical approach in reading the music video as an artistic expression of a particular cultural epoch. This paper will focus on the Frankenstein myth. I argue that there are two sub-versions of the Frankenstein myth, creator-based narratives and creation-based narratives. Technology has supplanted the fear of a more organic creation/Monster originally present in the myth. In my feminist interpretation of Gaga’s video, I challenge the single-origin existence of either narrative. In so doing, I explain how Rushing and Frentz’s original thesis that technological angst could be resolved by reincorporating the feminine in cultural unconscious overlooks an important step. Ultimately, I argue that by viewing the Frankenstein myth from a creation/Monster-based standpoint, it becomes obvious that the feminine is not in need of reincorporation, rather, it is buried beneath, covered over by a technological angst which writes the female/Monster out of the creator/created
Liza Goodstein
University of Texas, Comparative Literature
Unnatural Bodies: Agency and the Performance of Hysteria in Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions tracks the colonial education and progressive alienation of a young girl in late-1960s Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. The various psychological “nervous conditions” experienced by the female characters in the novel manifest in their bodies as they struggle against the twin dehumanizing structures of colonial rule and patriarchal sexism. Paradoxically, the women of Nervous Conditions regain limited agency through their performance of mental illness, a condition likewise dehumanized. I would like to draw a parallel between the treatment of neuroses in the novel and feminist scholarship of hysteria, which posits that “the hysterical woman is both a sign and symptom of the cultural meaning of gender” (Briggs 247) and raises questions of women’s agency through the performance of hysteria. Dangarembga’s neuroses present themselves at the intersection of cultural anxieties around gender and race. While European and American physicians historically viewed hysteria as a product of “overcivilization,” often caused by women’s higher education, the anorexia and depression suffered by Dangarembga’s characters are the result of colonization. These conditions have concrete effects on the body, leading to wasting and paralysis, but they also create space for women to reclaim control over their bodies and reassert their humanity.
Jeremy Cameron Goheen
University of Texas, Department of English
Living In Coal: Disability, Transcorporeality, and the Bodily Passages of Chimney Sweep Literature, 1684-1824
Disability and environmental scholars often talk about the body in what seem to be contradictory ways. On the one hand, disability scholars reject the idea that having an able body is somehow a prerequisite for being human, and that those with disabilities are, in fact, valuable members of society. On the other hand, within the environmental humanities it seems many scholars look for opportunities to describe disturbing, disabled bodies in order to expose environmental injustices. In a sense, environmentalists rely on the idea that bodies, and disabled bodies in particular, have been damaged—that they are, in fact, wrong. This presentation explores the extent to which a study of eighteenth-century philanthropist Jonas Hanway’s and nineteenth-century poet John Holland’s representations of child-chimney sweepers can help us alleviate some of the tensions between disability and environmental studies. If Hanway’s descriptions, in particular, of the chimney sweeps prove problematic for disability scholars, they nonetheless remain attractive sites for the environmental inquiry. Made possible by the materialist discourse produced by those like Robert Boyle in the 17th century, Hanway and especially Holland registered what I’m calling bodily passages. In so doing, they rendered the sweeps as remarkable “transcorporeal” (Stacy Alaimo’s term) bodies through which they could make visible the ways in which coal—a lively, toxic substance—consumed or dissolved bodies everywhere. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking through the transcorporeality of the sweeps can help patch what might be perceived as disjunctions between disability studies and environmental studies.
Emily Harring
University of Texas, Department of English
A Touch of Aglæca: Beowulf as a Monstrous Hero
Scholarship on monstrosity asks a variety of questions: What makes a monster? Grotesque features? Paranormal abilities? Superhuman strength? What separates monsters from man? What comes first: the monster or the hero? At times, the answer lies in language; this paper explores the relationship between description and action using the anonymous, Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf. Anxious over acquiring reputation and glory, Beowulf does not lack in monsters. The bloodthirsty Grendel haunts Heorot for twelve winters, capturing and consuming the men within the mead-hall. Grendel’s mother, if not the typical monster, both kills a man brutally outside of the hall, as well as nearly matches Beowulf in strength once he is in the mere. A more contestable monstrous figure, though, is Beowulf himself. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and Beowulf are described in the same way throughout various parts of the texts through the term aglæca. The meaning of the word and its origins remain unknown, and the two contesting definitions fall under the category of ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘fierce fighter’ and then the monstrous, the savage, the cruel. Historically, the critical landscape of Beowulf has created a division between how the term operates for Grendel as opposed to Beowulf. This paper suggests that the use of the term for both the villains of the text, as well as the famous champion, allows readers to draw a more intimate connection between the monsters and the hero; a connection that, perhaps, suggests that in order to be a hero, one must also have a touch of the monster within himself.
And:
“We shall be monsters”: The Medieval Foundations of Gothic Literature
My paper discusses the desire to place contemporary horror cinema as a consequence derived solely from the Gothic tradition of the eighteenth century. This line of inquiry is in conversation with Noel Carroll’s statement that “Of greatest importance for the evolution of the horror genre proper was the supernatural gothic, in which the existence and cruel operation of unnatural forces are asserted graphically” (4). While the trajectory of the contemporary horror genre clearly extends from the gothic tradition, the gothic tradition extends from the medieval oral tradition that contained grotesque, dangerous monsters that were also “asserted graphically.” Certainly, without Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) or Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), or even later nineteenth century sensualist penny dreadfuls that warned against all kinds foul, vulgar, and unsavory behaviors, we would not have the horror genre as we know it today. However, a much older, medieval tradition has also strongly influenced horror’s cultural identity. A few of the best examples come from the Old Irish The Táin, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East, and Marie de France’s “Bisclavret.” These four texts help prove that the horror genre, which scholars and critics have long since believed to be a strictly Gothic derived tradition, also has roots in the anxieties and fears circulated within medieval literature. I believe that collapsing the divide between medieval and gothic literature will lead to productive lines of inquiry into the development of contemporary horror cinema.
Gray Hemstreet
University of Texas, English Department
Homo Homini Monstrum: Alchemy and the Absent Supernatural in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is typical of the Gothic genre not only in its preeminently Gothic setting, but in its frequent references to dark or mysterious supernatural forces, including devils, monsters, sorcerers, alchemy, miracles, and magic. Unlike many other Gothic texts, however—and especially unlike more traditional renderings of the Faust myth—Notre-Dame de Paris rejects its own supernatural elements as mere superstitions, prejudices, and relics of an outmoded worldview. The action of the novel unfolds largely in consequence of events that do not take place, wrought ostensibly by beings that do not exist. Reality proves thus to be significantly shaped and altered by fiction: by what is false rather than true, absent rather than present.
In recent years, scholars have remarked on the novel’s overt preoccupation with signs, language, and acts of reading and misreading, but have had little to say about its surprising juxtaposition of Faustian mythological tropes with post-Enlightenment skepticism. By examining the various roles played by language, signs, stories, and supernatural phenomena, my project will endeavor to show that the novel’s real “magic” manifests not in the alleged sorcery of its characters, but in the arcane and often monstrous narratives that invisibly structure and transform their reality. Furthermore, I will suggest that Hugo’s narrative seeks to perform a traditionally alchemical miracle of its own: the resurrection of the cathedral itself, as effected through a transmutation of dead matter (the stone edifice of Notre-Dame) into a living text (Notre-Dame de Paris).
Grace Hobbs
University of Michigan, Comparative Literature
Abstract
What is left for someone who has lost everything that makes human life good? What of the “human” remains in that life? Readers of Euripides’ Hecuba are divided on this point: some, taking their evidence from Hecuba’s speeches in the first half of the play, see properly human life as anchored by a consistent ethical core, one that does not change even in adversity. Others see in Hecuba’s revenge in the play’s second half the worst possibilities for humanity, as she abandons law and ethical conviction for savage violence. Critics tend to agree, however, that Hecuba’s transformation into a dog at the play’s end is punishment for and confirmation of her moral and ethical degeneracy. She has lost her humanity, and so she becomes inhuman.
But to read Hecuba this way is to make a number of assumptions: that revenge is an inherent evil, and that it is worse to be a dog, under any circumstances, than to be a human. I contend that with Hecuba, Euripides points us toward a more expansive, if still imperfect, version of justice. Hecuba’s revenge and subsequent transformation – from woman to dog to her own grave (κυνοσ ταλαινησ σημα, mound of the suffering bitch) – makes her the sign of the limit case for how human law cannot account for human loss. Revenge is a kind of justice, too; one that reckons with the particularity of what is lost in human life in a way that law cannot, if it hopes to be impartial. Hecuba’s cynosemiosis does not mark her loss of humanity, but paradoxically, her insistence on the value of precisely those human goods critics accuse her of abandoning: the nomoi of kinship and philia.
Junting Huang
Cornell University
Beckett’s Tape Recorder: Technical Objects and Mediated Subjectivity
On a winter day in 1957, Beckett listened to his first radio play broadcast from London. Soon after his radio premiere, the British Broadcasting Corporation took an unusual step in sending him a tape-recorder. This tape recorder later became one of the most important inspirational sources for his play Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett had no mechanical aptitude, but, while laboring through the operations of the tape recorder, did he speak to the recorder as Krapp speaks to the tape? Did he think aloud? Did he listen to himself, pause, stop, playback, rewind, and fast-forward?
As a unique “technical object,” Beckett’s tape recorder embodies a complicated relation between the human and the technical. This intimacy, as Mark Hansen has articulated, demonstrates the synthesis and the interdependence of the human subject and the technical other. Indeed, the technical object is intertwined in the process of individualized subject formation. But for Beckett, there always seems to be an incompatibility between internal solipsism and external materials. How does the “exteriorized” technical object host the enclosed subjective universe? How does Beckett establish an emotional rapport with, as what Bernard Stiegler has termed, “the organized inorganic matters?” What is the relation between lived experience and non-living thoughts? In this paper, I examine two specific ways in which the tape recorder registers different materialities that speak to Beckett’s life-long struggle with the cogito and mediated subjectivity: 1) the magnetic storage as a phantasmal medium; 2) the looping structure as a self-referential paradox.
Jacob J. Isler
The Unversity of Texas
Abstract
Current models of consciousness, the human experience, and mental health rely heavily on the assumption that just one agent of self exists in every one brain. In the status quo, deviations from this model of singularity in mind are heavily stigmatized and often considered disordered. This paper opposes this bias by analyzing one form of such plurality of consciousness: tulpamancy.
Tulpamancy is a meditative technique used to create and interact with tulpas, which are experienced as being fully autonomous and conscious entities within the mind. This paper builds on research defining the relationship between tulpamancy and mental health by analyzing the results of a series of surveys. Particularly, it investigates two associations found in the population of tulpamancy practitioners:
1. The prevalence of mental illness among tulpamancers, which exists in over 75% of the population.
2. Reports of improvements in mental health and cognition, especially amongst those diagnosed with a mental or neurodevelopmental disorder.
This paper explores several hypotheses that may explain these associations. Analysis of survey data reinforces the correlation between tulpamancy and improvements in perceived mental health and concludes that there is no causal relation between tulpamancy and the development of new mental illnesses. In essence, assumptions of the connection between individual identity and biological mind may be flawed. Rather, the evidence suggests that that there may be several models of this relationship that are optimal for functionality, happiness, and mental health.
Joseph Kuster
University of New Mexico, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures: German Studies
The Picture of Innocence: Depictions of Morality and the Monstrous Child in The White Ribbon
In this paper, I intend to examine the construction and violation of perceived binaries between children and adults in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009). Specifically, I will approach the film through the elements of the horror genre, postulating the children as representatives of a monstrous other whose presence exists to throw a seemingly orderly world into chaos. Haneke’s film engages with traditionally constructed notions of childhood—that children are inherently innocent and exist independently of the ‘real’ world. The results of this social projection—children are vulnerable and must be protected—create a stark binary between the social politics of the adult world and the allegedly empty cultural space of childhood. Rather than accepting it as a space of innocence, I contend that childhood is an inherently violent time because of children’s roles as the bearers of a culture’s moral legitimacy—the tension between children as individual subjects and as a cathected symbolic group necessarily results in disorder. The inherent falsity of this established binary is evident in both The White Ribbon and conventions of the horror genre. This paper will interrogate how the ‘monstrous’ child is used in Haneke’s film—how depictions of monstrous children both uphold and violate the moral expectations that contribute to the child/adult binary—the image of the violent child is monstrous because it is both completely inhuman and recognizable as a child. These characters function as villains, yet nevertheless carry the social expectations we have of children—they violate our sense of morality and cultural values by embodying them. Ultimately, The White Ribbon both disrupts and upholds traditional constructions of childhood and the division between adult/child—it depicts a conflicted world in which children claim their status as the moral center of a community by manipulating and violating the image of the ‘innocent’ child through violence.
Emily Ma
University of Texas, Art and Art History
Products in Suspension: Novel Materials and Posthumanist Perspectives in Contemporary Art
The past few decades have been marked by the proliferation of new materials across a variety of applications. While advances in synthetic techniques have improved structural and compositional integrity, the rise of additive manufacturing and other large scale production methods, conversely, have demanded brittle, throwaway prototype formulations. These materials have since been incorporated into contemporary art media, often ironically, to highlight the ephemerality of modern development and creation processes. Such is the case with artist Josh Kline, who re-appropriates a variety of these novel components for his pieces, and most recently, began utilizing printing technologies to display parts from his human subjects. The resulting disembodied physical elements are united by their reproducibility – easily disposed of after their relatively short lifespans – and only serve to communicate the concepts behind each work within a narrow temporal context. However, with each item contained in a set of high-resolution digital copies, Kline noted printing technology might eventually realize a true incarnation of the piece. Despite the emphasis on the immateriality of these elements, Kline’s media has in-turn managed to take on a posthuman capacity, exceeding the limits imposed upon the durability of his creation. While the polymers created by 3-D printing may highlight the disposable nature of each object, the life of the work evolves beyond its presentation, and for that matter, its presenter. This study analyzes Kline’s work from the perspective of those tasked with its maintenance, developing not only a prognosis and treatment for the original work, but also predicting the intentions of its creator.
O’Connor-Korb, Alison
Department of Folklore, University of California Berkeley
Extrahuman, Extra Ordinary- the Transformation of Uji no Hashihime and Posthuman Teratology
It is comforting to categorize the monster as Andrew Ng Hock-Soon’s ‘intimate stranger’, an ersatz to human culture and custom who is perpetually distant, totalizing, and distinct. The fringes of nature and society are their home, which they return unless they are killed, or worse, normalized like the oni scared away by soybeans in the Japanese festival of Setsubun. But the most familiar monstrous tropes cannot accurately define the innately undefinable, and in spite of the advance of scientific classification and technological innovation, the monster has evolved and even thrived, adapting to our fears and concepts of the Other. In order to better understand the monsters of legends as well as the uncannily human monsters that have become pop culture phenomena, we must eliminate our distance from them and instead approach the monster as an equal.
In my paper, I propose a repositioning of the monster grounded in Patricia MacCormack’s posthumanist teratology and declaration that the monster is ‘a metamorphosis’. Instead of constantly disappearing into retreating to the borderlands and fringes of humanity, I argue monsters have always existed within the societal sphere and even within the human body, springing into existence through catalysts that can be both supernatural and mundane. To explore the monstrous potential that exists within everyday human existence, we will examine the Japanese folktale of Uji no Hashihime, a woman who uses objects found within the home to transform into something both and beyond human- an undying, shapeshifting oni that appears in such totemic texts as Tale of Heike and Tale of Genji as well as collection of setsuwa, or incidental tales.
Vasilina Orlova
University of Texas at Austin, Anthropology Department
Russian Literature on Bratsk Dam: the Human in People-Altered Landscapes of Soviet Industrialization
The Bratsk dam’s first turbines were set in order in 1961, and the submergence of territories had begun. The Angara River, the only river which carries water from lake Baikal, has turned into the Bratsk reservoir, the second-large people-created water reservoir on the planet. Thousands of square kilometers of forest and arable land were inundated, thousands of people living in rural settlements, relocated to newly built half-urban centers. The construction of the Bratsk dam, one of the “projects of the century,” was meant not only to satisfy the country’s growing needs of energy, but also to demonstrate state power, a spectacular dynamism and strength of the Soviet utopia to the world. While some Russian writers praised the dam as a paragon of human capability to conquer nature and change environment (Evtushenko, Dobronravov and Grebennikov, Markin, et. al.), others created works of profound poignancy about alteration of the rural, conflict of generations, and incurable sorrow over the loss of the familiar world (Rasputin and other “derevenshiki,” “villagers,” including Vampilov, Shukshin, Astafiev, and early Solzhenytsin). Newspapers, such as “Krasnoe Znamya” (“Red Flag”), “Komsomolski Korchevatel” (“The Comsomol Exterminator”), and “Angarskaya Pravda” (“The Angara Truth”), blared with enthusiastic reports and untiringly criticized the remnants of “retard social practices” (“perezhitki”), yet the oral accounts of events were not always so exuberant (Gavrilov). My research is concerned with question: how “the human” changes, in rapidly transforming landscapes of industrialization?
Claudio Eduardo Moura de Oliveira
University of Texas, Comparative Literature
Jewish Women in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: conversion and queer bodies
The Cantigas de Santa Maria are a compilation of 420 songs dedicated to the Holy Mary, put together by King Alfonso X of Castile around the second half of the 13th century. Written in medieval Galician-Portuguese, this collection of devotional poems are almost all set to music and it contains numerous illustrations in the form of visual narratives. The project of the Cantigas occupied most of Alfonso’s reign and is important not only for the studies of literature, music and art, but also for its depiction of social, religious and ethnic practices and qualities, which make for a great document on the views of the court of Alfonso on the ordinary habits of medieval Iberia.
Among the 420, thirty cantigas are dedicated to Jews. In this paper, I shall analyze four of these which address Jewish women. Along with moors and general sinners, Jews are, in the Cantigas, the outsiders in need of salvation. The subordinate status of the Jew will be explored in this paper through a depiction of women as others and the process of conversion that erases their queerness and turns them into good and devote Christians. The Jewess’s body will be explored as a space of dominance and potential for change, in accordance with Sarah Lipton. By investigating both text and illuminations, and contrasting them with equivalent stories from different sources or traditions, this paper will analyze the relation between gender and religion in
Paulina Jaime Pozas
University of Virginia
Plagued Origins: Romantic Pursuits Haunted By National Historical Conflict in Junot Diaz’s short story “Nilda”
In To Wake the Nations, Eric Sundquist describes Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno as anticipating “an explosive heightening of the conflict between American democracy, Old World despotism, and Caribbean New World revolution.” Like Sundquist, scholars such as María del Pilar Blanco and José David Saldívar study more contemporary works in an attempt to locate this familiar colonial discourse that manages to make its way into literary surfaces via different modes, genres, and narrative styles, especially in post-modern, hemispheric American works. One of these modes, a very popular mode, is the Gothic. The telling of ghost stories and haunted landscapes, many scholars argue, is actually a disguise for the telling of the tragic and catastrophic history that envelops and haunts a nation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Gothic mode is a prevalent one in the hemispheric imaginary and is especially poignant in those works that attempt to assimilate and work through turbulent national histories. Further, these works tend to express the political discourses that haunt their nation in regards to its relation with colonialism as well as post colonialism, producing, then, a work where a revolutionary process takes place and allows a national, unconscious history to be embedded in its characters through ghosts narratives and such.
Junot Diaz’s short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, does exactly this. In Diaz’s story, “Nilda,” we encounter a type of haunting that does not follow the Gothic mode per se, but rather a haunting of relationships, more specifically in the romantic arena, that envelops characters in a continuous and somewhat predetermined unconscious history – one that locates people’s placement in an ecology of loss, connecting the haunting of love to a haunted national history in the global south, specifically in the Dominican Republic. In this paper, I argue that Junot Diaz’s short story, “Nilda,” explores the ways in which the characters, especially Yunior, give life to a confrontation with the unspoken, unacknowledged, unrecognized and turbulent national history of the Dominican Republic that manifests in the difficulties of finding and keeping love cross-generationally.
Ranga Saikrishna
Osmania University
Signs of Xenophobia: A Case Study on the Dethroning the status of God towards foreigners in India
The Signs of Xenophobia is prevalent in all societies. The fears, apprehensions, anxieties, insecurities towards strangers, immigrant, or foreigners with intense hatredness, believing a potential threat, racial discrimination, and violent attacks are predominant signs of xenophobia. India is so diversified with multilingual and multi- cultural people, regions and religions. India accommodated foreigners and immigrants with the honour “ Athidi Devo Bava” which means the foreign guests are equally treated as God. But whereas the recent xenophobia incidents on Africans in India had proven that “Äthidi” the guest or foreigner can be victimised dethroning the status of God. The recent attacks on Africans in the capital city of India, Delhi and the IT hub of India, Bangalore are the predominant signs of xenophobic.
The research paper investigates the factors which led to the xenophobia act and critically examines the signs of xenophobic on Africans in India. The media stereotypes and portrays the xenophobic incidents and claims the victims, immigrants or foreigners labelling as – illegal immigrants, criminals and stealers etc. The representation or portrayal of xenophobia in the various media is crucial to understand the signs of Xenophobia. The research paper analyses the media effect of xenophobia analysing the various print media articles which led to the dethroning the status of God towards foreigners in India.
Brian Selman
The University of Texas at Austin, Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies
Slavic, Soviet, and Sacrificial: How Cultural Norms Exacerbated the Negative Effects of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
There was no lower class of citizen in the late Soviet period than the dreaded “Chernobylite,” the former inhabitants of Chernobyl and the “liquidators” sent to manage the nuclear disaster’s aftermath. The mere mention of Chernobyl calls to mind images of abandoned apartment complexes, horrifying birth defects and cancers, and the dazzling, yet deadly, radiation cloud that exploded into night sky of April 26, 1986 near Pripyat, Ukraine. The Chernobylites interviewed by Svetlana Alexeivich in her book Voices From Chernobyl provide detailed personal accounts of coping with the effects of radiation exposure following the nuclear catastrophe. While many of the cases of unnecessary radiation exposure described in the interviews can be attributed to the average citizen’s ignorance of radiation and its effects, just as many accounts illustrate instances where Chernobyl victims intentionally put their lives in further danger, already aware of how radiation affects the human body. This paper seeks to find explanations for this seemingly incomprehensible behavior. I compare accounts described in Voices From Chernobyl with those found in Plutopia by Kate Brown in order to contrast Chernobyl with other instances of widespread radiation exposure caused by nuclear facilities and nuclear disasters that occurred both in the Soviet Union and the United States. By supplementing these books with cultural knowledge from Linda Ivanits’s Russian Folk Belief, I demonstrate how Slavic cultural norms combined with Soviet social elements formed over decades of conditioning exacerbated the deadly effects of radiation and heightened individual suffering following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Sierra Senzaki
University of Texas, Department of English
“Other than Human Forces”: Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Posthumanist Being
How are we humans affected by “other than human forces”? Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and New Materialism, I ask what new understandings of Virginia Woolf become visible when we allow ourselves to blend together the humanist knowledge categories of “nature” and “culture” and attend to the ways sensation and emotion function at this crossroads. I focus specifically on what Woolf describes as “moments of being” and “moments of non-being” in her unpublished memoir, “A Sketch of the Past” (1939-40). These two types of experience, which Woolf uses to theorize mind and memory, are also grounded in interactions between the human body and its nonhuman surroundings. By tracing these interactions, I reveal the key role that the nonhuman plays in Woolf’s understanding of experience, perception, and memory. I argue that Woolf’s moments of being and non-being should be reconceived as posthumanist moments of being, which are vivid encounters between the fleshy self and its material surroundings, and humanist moments of non-being, in which the human utilizes the nonhuman as a tool to subdue emotion. Ultimately, my project illuminates how carefully Woolf thinks about human interactions with the nonhuman and allows us to refine our own understanding of our relationship with the world in which we are enmeshed.
Seth Uzman
University of Texas at Austin
The Road, Mitsein and the Absurd: Centering the Human in Heidegger’s Fundamental Question
Since its publication in 2006, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has offered scholars a literary platform for debating identity and subject formation through the lens of existentialism and the tradition of French and German continental philosophy. While much has been written on The Road’s illumination of human community, Being and Being-with- Others, little has been written on the relationship between the subject-forming canvas of human community and what Heidegger called Enchantment or, equivalently for Sartre and Camus, beholding the Absurd. In this paper, I exploit McCarthy’s novel to argue two things. First, the relationship between human community and our enchanting experience of the Absurd is dialectical. On the one hand, the former seems to condition the appearance of the latter, while on the other hand, the Absurd can only enchant and present itself by adopting the appearance of a human subject. Second, I argue that this problematizes the question that Heidegger argued was the starting point for enchantment and philosophy in general, “why is there something rather than nothing?” Since somethingness and nothingness carry meaning only for the constituted human-subject, whose unraveling the novel bears witness, McCarthy offers the more organic and fundamental question, “why am I not alone?”
Ryan Williams
University of Texas, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Global Policy Studies at the LBJ school
Abstract
Historians and area studies scholars can’t embrace the extra-human without reconsidering the techniques they use to make meaning of their subjects. Methodologies that worked well for human-centric inquiry must be amended or combined with new, powerful ways of seeing. This paper presents a case study that demonstrates the importance of relational dynamics. I argue that network analysis should be a foundational tool for scholars interested in the extra-human.
graclsconference2016 