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. 

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

With contributions from

Susan Antebi (Toronto) – Nathalie Bouzaglo (Evanston, IL) – Carlos G. Halaburda (Toronto) – Andrés Mendieta (Evanston, IL) – Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño (San Andrés) – Janek Scholz (Cologne) – Philipp Seidel (Berlin) – Patricio Simonetto (London)