H. G. Wells and Monstrous Vegan Desires

Chapter 2 focuses on the work of H. G. Wells and in particular his The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The Beast People of Doctor Moreau manifest a Frankensteinian legacy through their monstrous veganism, iterating the four key traits of the monstrous vegan as identified in Chapter 1. Framed through a consideration of ‘vegansexuality’, this chapter considers the relationship between alimentary and sexual desire. Contextualized in relation to late-nineteenth-century anti-vivisection movements and Darwinian ideas, veganism, as ethical abstraction divorced from the corporeal body, is seen to result in a failure to acknowledge the reality of human desires and the inescapably cannibalistic nature of our relation to others. The veganism of the Beast People is associated with artificiality, as a linguistic appendage that must be continually recited. Veganism is also seen as a spectre of the future, a utopian aspiration corrupted by its contact with the animal body.

Embodying Asceticism: Masculinity, Manliness, and the Male Body in Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’s Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil

This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.

Reverberation

Chapter 5 explores—from the direction of non-mainstream poetics—the politics of embodiment and reception in Denise Riley’s poetry. Its focus is her late-twentieth-century avant-garde pamphlets and small press publications. What is at stake in Riley’s poetic emphasis on the punctured, uncertain, and wounded textual-corporeal body? Why do her poems invite readers to witness the traces of their physical making/printing? The chapter examines what Riley’s use of unmarked space can teach readers about their role in the politics of production and reception. It explores how sparse type energizes gaps between words (giving them a fugitive figuration) and draws attention to the conflict involved in acts of listening and receiving, inking and uttering. The chapter considers whether such effects are compromised when larger, more commercial houses republish the works.

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

To Be a (M)other: A Feminist Performative Autoethnography of Abortion

This is an abortion story. A feminist story. A body story. An autoethnographic story. This is a story of learning how to story abortion in a culture unforgiving to abortion stories. A story of embodying a body deemed unworthy of embodiment. A story of enfleshment enmeshed amid silence and violence. Influenced by feminist embodied auto-epistemologies, this essay seeks to disrupt the functionality of the U.S. American abortion debate through a performative, somatic reclamation of my experience from the semantic constrictions of highly medicalized, politicized, and individualized hegemonic discourses. Engaging a feminist performative autoethnographic praxis informed by écriture feminine, I center my corporeal body as a site of epistemological value to speak back against the limiting narratives of/about abortion while illustrating the critical creative potentials of performative autoethnographic storytelling. This essay weaves theory, lyric prose, epistolary, and poetry to performatively reconstruct, reframe, and reclaim my abortion experience through an embodied autoethnographic framework, in hopes of illuminating possibilities for others to “[experiment] with how we might tell stories differently rather than simply telling different stories” (p. 16).

Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest illness narratives: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

Corporate Bodies in Early South Asian Buddhism: Some Relics and Their Sponsors According to Epigraphy

Some of the earliest South Asian Buddhist historical records pertain to the enshrinement of relics, some of which were linked to the Buddha and others associated with prominent monastic teachers and their pupils. Who were the people primarily responsible for these enshrinements? How did the social status of these people represent Buddhism as a burgeoning institution? This paper utilizes early Prakrit inscriptions from India and Sri Lanka to reconsider who was interested in enshrining these relics and what, if any, connection they made have had with each other. Traditional accounts of reliquary enshrinement suggest that king Aśoka began the enterprise of setting up the Buddha’s corporeal body for worship but his own inscriptions cast doubt as to the importance he may have placed in the construction of stūpa-s and the widespread distribution of relics. Instead, as evidenced in epigraphy, inclusive corporations of individuals may have instigated, or, at the very least, became the torchbearers for, reliquary enshrinement as a salvific enterprise. Such corporations comprised of monastics as well as non-monastics and seemed to increasingly become more managerial over time. Eventually, culminating at places like Sanchi, the enshrinement of the corporeal remains of regionally famous monks partially supplanted the corporeal remains of the Buddha. Those interested in funding this new endeavor were corporations of relatives, monastic brethren, and others who were likely friends and immediate acquaintances. In the end, the social and corporate collectivity of early Buddhism may have outshined some textual monastic ideals of social isolation as it pertained to the planning, carrying out, and physical enshrinement of corporeal remains for worship, thus evoking an inclusive sentiment with the monastic institution rather than disassociation.

Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body.

Embodied Representation in Staged Opera

The singing and acting performer in staged opera has and also performs a body that is both a biological entity and an ideological construct: its race, sex, physique, and age are all given meaning by directors—and audiences. Within the contexts of feminist, queer, and disability studies, this chapter reads the “marked” body of the protagonist of David Alden’s 2008 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 Lucia di Lammermoor as the literal embodiment of the excruciating vulnerability of Lucia as subject through the medium of her youthfulness and her mixed race: a Down syndrome child sexually abused by her brother on stage. Just as the opera’s use of coloratura is a marked musical gesture of madness in dramaturgical terms for the “voice in performance,” so the specifically marked corporeal body of Lucia was crucial to this production’s dramatic power, as well as the ethical and political issues it raised.