Stigma: Writing Abjection, Reimagining Power
Description
The word “stigma” literally means a “mark” or “brand” of disgrace. In its early Greek usage, a stigma described a cut or burn inscribed on the skin to mark enslavement, criminality, or defilement. In this sense, to stigmatize is to write on flesh: to write some bodies out of “the human” and render them as objects ripe for extraction. Yet, as a written and (re)interpretable mark, a stigma’s meaning can’t be fully controlled. Since ancient Greece, a variety of interpretive communities have adopted the language of “stigmatization” to theorize the hermeneutics of violence and to develop practices of re-reading and re-writing aliveness amidst social/political death. Hortense Spillers describes the wounding of captive Africans as the imposition of “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” later describing these marks as intergenerationally transmissible “stigmata.” Heather Love traces the ways that “stigma” as theorized in midcentury deviance studies shapes both the racialized exclusions and the radical coalitional potential in contemporary queer theory. For medieval stigmatic and ascetic Catherine of Sienna, meanwhile, receiving the physical imprint of Christ’s wounds meant immersion in divine abjection and a radical identification with her community’s reviled “lepers.” Variously used to theorize racialization, queerness, poverty, mental illness, and somatic-psychological extremities of religious asceticism, “stigma” brings us to the body-psyche nexus where orthodoxies about suffering rupture.
This seminar will investigate the multifaceted phenomenon of stigmatization as a way to ask, with Darieck Scott, “is there anything of value or to be learned from the experience of being defeated, humiliated, abjected?” (Extravagant Abjection, 6). Turning, as Scott does, to literary imaginations, forms, and methods, the seminar will explore how violence intended to confine and eradicate meaning comes back to haunt, crack up, and tear through language—and in doing so, reconfigures the kinds of meanings language can bear. How might language of stigma, which locates violence in the interpretive, relational nexus of reading and writing, illuminate the cruelties, complicities, pleasures, and longings that attend literary creation? Reciprocally, how might the marks, breaks, and wounds born out in aesthetic forms reconfigure notions of power and/or ignite devotion to flesh, in all its precarity?
By tracing the various histories and resonances of “stigma,” the seminar aims to provide a gathering place to discuss the risks and possibilities of solidarity amidst defeat. Papers might address:
the relationship between stigma, abjection, scapegoating
stigma’s significance in the intersections of Black Studies, queer theory, poetics, psychoanalysis, mysticism, phenomenology, etc.
“stigmatized” forms and aesthetic performances
the risks of empathy, erasure of difference, illegibility
sound, somatics, multisensory stigma
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Alani Hicks-Bartlett is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature, French & Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies at Brown University with affiliations in the Department of Italian Studies, the Programs in Early Cultures and Medieval Studies, the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. She has recently published on premodern disability, gender, and black feminist thought in comparative contexts.
Speaker Bio
Lacey is an associate editor for The Yale Review and a lecturer in Yale's
English department. A theorist of the aesthetics and semiotics of the secular, she
is particularly interested in the meta-'s long-standing relationship to melancholy.
Lacey holds a PhD in Religious Studies and English and is currently at work on
her first monograph: Breakdown: Modernity's Metafictions. Her writing has been
published in The Kenyon Review, Literature & Theology, and Image.
Speaker Bio
Joachim Ozonze is a doctoral candidate in Peace Studies and Theology at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. His research explores the intricate interplay of ritual, drug violence, and healing, examining how communities inscribe and disrupt cycles of violence through ritual performances. His work draws on theological ethnography, ritual theory, and peace studies to propose new frameworks for healing and justice.
Speaker Bio
Máire Kayegi is a PhD student in the department of Comparative Literature at NYU. Her research interests include Black studies, poetics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and visual culture(s).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Margaux Delaney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of the Literatures of English at Cornell University. Her dissertation, The English Heroic Epistle, 1591-1621: Complaint, Shame, and the Stigma of Print, argues that this genre of female complaint poetry uses women’s writing to represent the shamefulness and precarity of exposure on the commercial print marketplace. Her work on early modern women’s writing is forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies and Borrowers & Lenders.
Speaker Bio
Cedar Lensing-Sharp (they/he) is a Lecturer in German at UCLA. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Their current book project, Erotic Epistemologies: Knowledge Production in Lesbian Novels Against Sexology, argues that German and French queer women novelists narrativized identity and desire in critical dialogue with 19th-century sexological case studies of female homosexuality, thereby producing embodied critiques of scientific knowledge production about sexuality.
Speaker Bio
Brandon Menke is a poet and assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is affiliated faculty in the Gender Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. from Yale and his MFA from NYU. His work appears or is forthcoming in ELH, POETRY, Post45: Contemporaries, The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Istifaa Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University.
Istifaa’s research looks to queer/trans of color performance, aesthetics, and speculative fiction for
its disruption of colonial and transatlantic violence. They deeply consider what it means to be
(in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. Istifaa is thinking with the
concept of porosity, as the negotiation of matter and site of mergence, to think through the
permeability and in-between-ness across sites such as flesh, disease, conspiracy, apocalypse and
(un)worlding as inhabitations and praxis of queer/trans of color life and precarity. Istifaa is also a
filmmaker/artist and pursues collaborative and movement-based projects that center creative and
sensorial modes of knowledge production.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Cameron Manley is a second-year graduate student in the Slavic department at Princeton University. He has an MA from Oxford University in French and Russian as well as a MPhil in Comparative Literature from Cambridge University. His research interests include Soviet literature of the post-Stalin era, Soviet dissidence, as well as contemporary Russian literature.
Speaker Bio
Jeremy Matthew Glick is Professor of African Diasporic Literature and Modern Drama and editor of Situations: A Journal of the Radical Imagination. His forthcoming book is entitled Coriolanus/Lumumba: An Essay on Adaptation and Alignment.
Speaker Bio
Andrés is Philosopher from the National University of Colombia, he holds an M.A. in Spanish from the University of California, Riverside, where he is Ph.D. candidate. His research focuses on urban violence in Colombia, particularly the role of young men in it as depicted in cinema, literature, and non-hegemonic cultural expressions. Misnaza also examines how these expressions trigger critical apparatuses that allow for a better understanding of the violence faced by impoverished youth.
Speaker Bio
Sally Hansen is a postdoctoral teaching scholar at the University of Notre Dame. Her book project, Sounding Stigma: Graphic Poetry, Mysticism in the Flesh, and the Marked Body explores an eclectic group of visually experimental artists who all describe their compositional processes as "marking," "wounding," or "stigmatizing" language. She theorizes their verbal messes as plural performances of "mysticism in the flesh" (Moten) or "consent," in Glissant's terms, "not to be a single being."