In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.

This seminar seeks to foster a discussion in order to understand how the body can be read as a transnational figure of resistance and refusal both in the 19th century and today. Through various disciplines on the subjective and untold experiences of the body, health(care), and illness, we hope to shed light on the fluctuations in imperial medical frameworks and decolonial epistemology that pose alternative narratives–both realist and speculative–about biomedical discourses of health, gender and sexual normativity, disability/deficiency, hygiene, humanness, life/death. We are interested in questions such as: How are illnesses phrased, represented, imagined in marginalized communities?  How is the effectiveness of care and therapies a scientific, ethical, and cultural problem? How can the medicalized body—or the body that is made into a site of changeability and “treatment”—become a speculative site entangling place, race, gender, and sexuality?

This seminar welcomes papers that take on interdisciplinary approaches to literature and other forms of cultural production such as film, print culture, and music that engage with the theme from the 19th- 21st centuries across the world. We are especially interested in lesser-known materials and understudied communities. 

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Narrative medicine from all types of media
Bioethics
Biopolitics and governmentality
Mental health and literature, art and media studies
Limitations of medical or pharmaceutical knowledge
Medicalization of health/illness
Marginalized bodies in medicinal knowledge (queer, disabled, racialized, female)
Community/Immunity
Pandemic and contagion
Aging studies and end-of-life care, childcare/youth studies
Utopia/Dystopia/Ecotopia
Toxicity and Waste 
Trauma and memory studies
Supernatural bodies, cyborg and alien “others”, metamorphosis and transformation
(Digital) post-life, afterlife studies, martyrdom 
Animal studies, Post-humanism