Place & time: virtual | Friday, 16.12.2022 | 15:00 to 20:30hs CET

The Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies Online International Conference Unreal Embodiments examines how the notion of monstrosity operated in medical and cultural texts of modern Latin America to perpetuate and yet simultaneously resist coercive systems of sexual discipline, gender regulation, and ableism. By studying a series of scientific and cultural sources, from psychiatry, criminology, and endocrinology to trans* novels, poetry, the printed and digital press, and graphic narratives, panelists will explore the multiple somatic and aesthetic constructions of queer, trans* and crip embodiments. The conference traces an ample genealogy that identifies a radical shift in perspectives of gender, sexuality, and ableism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Whereas in the modern cultural archive, the monster was a marker of pathology, contemporary postmodern literature and visuality reimagine the meanings of monstrosity and embodiment through a post-humanist lens. Revealing the bio-aesthetic procedures of ‘monstering’ and ‘re-monstering’ will offer new methodologies to show the cultural trajectory of body dissidence within the current scholarship on gender-sex minority populations.

Programme
15:00-15:10 Unreal Embodiments: Welcome Remarks
Carlos G Halaburda and Janek Scholz

15:10-15:40 The Endocrine Monster: Uranists and the Literary Origins of Hormone Science in Modern Brazil
Carlos G Halaburda, University of Toronto

15:40-16:10 Cisgender Monstrosity: A Brief History of Cisgender Frontier in Argentina (20th Century)
Patricio Simonetto, University College London

16:10-16:40 Amoeboid Shape-Shifting and the Monstrosity of Slime in Lino Arruda, Bruna Kury and Aun Helden
Janek Scholz, University of Cologne

16:40- 17:10 Rita Indiana’s Monsters – Speculative Writing from the Caribbean
Philipp Seidel, Freie Universität Berlin

17:10-18:10 Dinner/Lunch Break

18:10-18:40 Fora do lar. Trabajo sexual, sexualidades no normadas y universos criminales a partir de las transposiciones cinematográficas de A navalha na carne de Plínio Marcos
Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño, CONICET/Universidad de San Andrés

18:40-19:10 Pánico marimacho: deporte, feminidad masculina y moda en el fin de siècle
Nathalie Bouzaglo, Northwestern University

19:10-19:40 Masculinity and Gestation: Claiming the Right to be a … ¿Monster?
Andrés Mendieta, Northwestern University

19:40-20:10 Tocophobia, teratology and obstetric instruments in Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia (1919)
Susan Antebi, University of Toronto

20:10-20:30 Closing Remarks
Lino Arruda

For registration please contact Bettina Zellner Grieco, bzellner@smail.uni-koeln.de.