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