In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz observes that Western thought has long been haunted by the threat of corporeal instability, framing the body’s fluid margins as a betrayal of rational selfhood. To sustain the fantasy of a sovereign, autonomous subject, normative discourses continuously sanitize embodiment, sealing its borders against contamination, disability, and decay. Yet as Stacy Alaimo asserts through her concept of “trans-corporeality,” human embodiment is always already intermeshed with the material world; the body is never a closed vessel, but a permeable, dynamic site of constant exchange.

This seminar interrogates the central question: What makes a body porous? Moving across literary, visual, and theoretical texts, we explore how flesh, organs, tissues, fluids, microbes, prostheses, pharmaceuticals, and other corporeal formations challenge the myth of bodily sovereignty. When blood, saliva, mucus, milk, and synthetic substances traverse the limits of individual bodies, such material processes unsettle conventional distinctions between self and other, human and nonhuman, organic and technological, health and illness, autonomy and dependency. Intersecting queer theory, crip studies, trans studies, posthumanism, and the medical humanities, we examine how these unruly corporeal flows reshape how we understand embodiment in relation to race, gender, sexuality, disability, colonialism, ecology, labor, and care.

This seminar considers the unbounded body from within this philosophical, literary, and cultural nexus as a primary locus of political negotiation and radical resistance. We welcome comparative, interdisciplinary papers exploring topics including, but not limited to:

• Queer, feminist, and trans approaches to embodiment
• Disability and crip theories of the body
• Critical race perspectives on corporeality
• Decolonial and Indigenous conceptions of bodily materiality
• Medical, scientific, and technological bodies
• Animality, ecology, and more-than-human embodiment
• Organs, prostheses, and bodily infrastructures
• Disease, immunity, contagion, and care
• Flesh, viscera, and bodily interiors
• Metabolism, reproduction, and biological labor
• Body archives, memory, and trauma
• Corporeality across literature, visual culture, performance, and media