Literal Body Research Articles

Reimagining the Body Without Organs Through Exchange Value in Never Let Me Go

Abstract Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs (BwO) is one of their most abstruse, yet it remains integral to their larger project of experimentation. While the BwO has previously been described by contemporary posthuman theorists as a force of desire, in the context of the organ harvesting scheme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, clones are raised until they are mature enough to donate their organs and eventually ‘complete’ as literal bodies without organs. However, while narrator Kathy H. exists as a BwO, she is also forced to integrate into systems such as the art exchanges which occur in the novel’s primary setting of Hailsham, and the broader neoliberal marketplace of organ donation for which she was engineered. The BwO can also be read as a metonymic strategy by which to understand Speculative Posthumanism and its ethical concerns regarding the problematics of cloning. Despite the novel’s bleak reality, Kathy H. becomes a model posthuman by recording her qualitative lived intensities autopoietically. In a world increasingly obsessed with technoscience and its quantitative outputs, using the concept of the BwO to reconsider what it means to be posthuman can help us rethink what and how we value.

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs Zachary Dorner (bio) Medicine, Medical history, Slavery, Colonialism, Migration, War, Epidemiology Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. By Jim Downs. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. 262. Cloth, $29.95.) Quick, what comes to mind when you read the word epidemiology? For some it may be the Broad Street pump from the London cholera outbreak of 1854; others might picture Dr. Anthony Fauci. With Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Jim Downs prompts readers to form different associations—the slave ship, prison, military hospital, lazaretto—by rooting the development of preventive medicine and knowledge about infectious disease in "imbalances of power such as those created by slavery, colonialism, and war" (148). To do so, he recovers the experiences of people "whose health, suffering, and even death contributed to the development of medical knowledge," most of whom were people [End Page 320] of color, from the reports, journals, treatises, and lectures of the time (8). The book thus provides a corrective to heroic narratives of the declines in mortality witnessed across the Atlantic world during the nineteenth century but can, at times, ignore a longer history of understanding disease via contexts of slavery, colonialism, war, and migration in its ambition to relocate the origins of modern epidemiological practice. In Downs's telling, the century from approximately 1756 to 1866 holds the key to an overlooked history of epidemiology. The narrative operates on a global scale, often removed from the typical metropolitan centers of knowledge production, encompassing Russian prisoners, laundresses in Malta, British sailors, freed people in Jamaica, Black Union soldiers, enslaved infants, and Muslim pilgrims as examples of vulnerable populations instrumentalized for purposes of public health by military and colonial bureaucracies. Empire (whether European or U.S.), in other words, is a unifying thread through these examples, so the terms "colonialism" and "imperialism" tend to do a lot of work in the narrative, which would have benefitted from more specific definitions of both. Early chapters establish that infrastructures, power differentials, and recordkeeping routines of the British Empire enabled the extraction of epidemiological data from certain people but also created the very health crises to which those efforts were responding with such urgency. Dr. Thomas Trotter, for example, gathered information aboard the slave ship Brookes in 1783 for his theories about fresh air that stood alongside laboratory experiments and observations from Europe's overcrowded prisons on the importance of oxygen. Empire's "crowded places" provided practical sites for collecting practical observations (9). Chapters in the latter half of Maladies of Empire turn to the Civil War-era United States, the author's specialty, for a closer look at the racialization of understandings of infectious disease and their afterlives through examples of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, smallpox vaccinations, and cholera-mapping in what are some of the book's most effective chapters. Maladies of Empire is also a book about the human body. People, both individually and in groups, became sources of data for the "founding generation" of epidemiologists Downs identifies (194). Though often remaining nameless and faceless in contemporaneous texts, these men, women, and children contributed to knowledge production as literal bodies of evidence and as sources of verbal or visual information akin, in some ways, to the Indigenous informants described in other histories of imperial [End Page 321] science and medicine.1 That many of these anonymous people remain so in Maladies of Empire is not a criticism of the book, but rather an acknowledgement of the challenges posed by reading against the grain in sources that are abstracting by design. Even the most crucial sources for the study of slavery have been subject to such attention in recent years.2 Throughout the book, understandings of infectious disease act dialectically whereby they reshape perceptions of the persons who provide the initial bodily data. A prominent example for the United States is the racialization of disease susceptibility and immunity described in Chapters 6 and 7 that "solidif[ied] racial identity as a central component in epidemiology and public health" (114). To some readers...

Beauty and the Bikini: Embodied Respectability in Nigerian Beauty Pageants

Abstract:In the world of Nigerian beauty pageants, the bikini remains a fraught embodied symbol and aesthetic practice. Pageant affiliates, critics, and fans alike strongly debate the question of whether to include bikinis in these events. This article draws primarily from nearly a year of ethnographic observations of two Nigerian national beauty contests in 2009-2010 to show how various stakeholders used personal, domestic, and international frames about women’s bodies, and the bikini in particular, to bolster respectability. Through embodied respectability, women’s figurative and literal bodies were used to strategically situate propriety, social acceptance, and reputability for the self and the nation.

Straightwashing the Census

The Trump Administration’s recent decision to reject proposed sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) questions from the 2020 Census and the American Community Survey — a component of the Census — received widespread attention. Many critics of this decision focused on the symbolic effect of the decision — when one is not counted as a matter of data, one does not count as a matter of morality or humanity. While visibility is important for such symbolic reasons, it is also important as a matter of policy, power, and economic justice. The U.S. government uses population data to drive policy decisions about the allocation of $675 billion in federal funds, most of which is apportioned to anti-poverty programs. It uses this data to assess the effectiveness of these anti-poverty programs vis-a-vis different demographic groups, including race, ethnicity, and gender. But two population demographics — sexual orientation and gender identity — are not considered when the federal government makes policy decisions or tracks program efficacy, because SOGI is largely absent from government population surveys. This Article examines the “straightwashing” of the census through the “Identity Undercount” — the failure of the state to collect SOGI population data. The Identity Undercount, while counting the literal bodies of LGBT people, erases their lived identity. For many in the LGBT population, their lived identity and reality is one of poverty and powerlessness, a reality contrary to the widely accepted narrative that the LGBT population is more affluent and powerful than the rest of the population. The limited data that is available demonstrates that LGBT people live in poverty at rates disproportionate to the non-LGBT population and fare more poorly than their non-LGBT counterparts on other measures including health outcomes, homelessness, and employment discrimination. Because federal and state governments rely on population data to inform a multitude of policy and programmatic decisions, the straightwashing of government data does real harm to LGBT people in poverty. If policymakers cannot see the problems, they cannot craft meaningful policy solutions or modify existing policies to meet the needs of the LGBT population. Because data are tied to resource allocation, the Identity Undercount results in resource deserts — where LGBT people do not get critical and necessary services. As a result, the Article argues that the government should collect SOGI population data and that the near-complete failure to do so makes the state an active participant in creating and sustaining institutionalized poverty for LGBT people.

Reasonably programmable literal notation

General-purpose programming languages typically define literal notation for only a small number of common data structures, like lists. This is unsatisfying because there are many other data structures for which literal notation might be useful, e.g. finite maps, regular expressions, HTML elements, SQL queries, syntax trees for various languages and chemical structures. There may also be different implementations of each of these data structures behind a common interface that could all benefit from common literal notation. This paper introduces typed literal macros (TLMs) , which allow library providers to define new literal notation of nearly arbitrary design at any specified type or parameterized family of types. Compared to existing approaches, TLMs are uniquely reasonable . TLM clients can reason abstractly, i.e. without examining grammars or generated expansions, about types and binding. The system only needs to convey to clients, via secondary notation, the inferred segmentation of each literal body, which gives the locations and types of spliced subterms. TLM providers can reason modularly about syntactic ambiguity and expansion correctness according to clear criteria. This paper incorporates TLMs into Reason, an emerging alternative front-end for OCaml, and demonstrates, through several non-trivial case studies, how TLMs integrate with the advanced features of OCaml, including pattern matching and the module system. We also discuss optional integration with MetaOCaml, which allows TLM providers to be more confident about type correctness. Finally, we establish these abstract reasoning principles formally with a detailed type-theoretic account of expression and pattern TLMs for “core ML”.

Consuming the Word: The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church by Scott Hahn

212 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) and taught the Lord’s Prayer on Palm Sunday. The baptizands of Hippo wore white and received anointing before and after baptism as he had in Milan, but there was no foot-washing, since the hereditary guilt of original sin was thought to be cleansed in baptism itself. In a digression, Wills argues that Augustine probably taught the newly baptized about the Eucharist, and in so doing he would have ridiculed the idea—espoused by Ambrose—that the bread and wine were the literal Body and Blood of Christ. It is unfortunate that the tendentious Wills—more clearly seen in works such as Why Priests? A Failed Tradition—inserts itself here. Likewise, Wills sees “sacramental legalism” in Augustine, which would be better understood as a pastoral and theological desire for precision . Like Harnack and the historical Jesus, the Augustine Wills describes at such times is only the reflection of his own face, seen at the bottom of a deep well. In time, Wills concludes, Augustine referred more to Ambrose to credential himself against opponents and adopted Ambrose’s coercive tactics and emphasis on the cult of miracles, both of which he had earlier disdained. Still, in the end, “Ambrose was remembered and celebrated for his forcefulness, and Augustine for his inwardness” (159). Nathaniel Peters Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Scott Hahn Consuming the Word: The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church New York: Image, 2013 176 pages. Hardbound. $22.00. In two very different contexts – a homily on Genesis and his massive apologetic against Celsus – Origen speaks of believers “eating the flesh of the Logos.” In one instance he is clearly referring to the hearing of Scripture proclaimed within the liturgy, and in the other to participation in Eucharistic communion. Hahn’s principal contention in this new volume – giving voice to an ancient and deeply Catholic intuition – is that the Word of God is much more than text on page and that the New Testament (read: New Covenant) is more than simply a collection of privileged texts. 213 Book review Hahn devotes the first third of his book to situating the language of diathêkê (and its later Latin equivalent testamentum) within the context of first-century Judaism, demonstrating with numerous texts how the language of covenant cannot be properly understood apart from the notion of sacrifice implicit within it (a connection grasped, he suggests, intuitively by first-century Jews and Christians, but something not native to modern readers). Hahn offers here in popular, accessible terms the fruit of his more dense and scholarly work, Kinship by Covenant (2009); more than mere contract, a covenant establishes a bond of kinship – in this case, between God and his people. In the first and second centuries , this “New Testament” (as often juxtaposed to the “Old”) was understood not in terms of particular texts considered inspired and therefore privileged (whether Jewish or Christian), but as a living relationship rooted in an event, a covenantal relationship established in the saving death of Jesus Christ. Long before the “New Testament” became something literary, it was liturgical: it was a sacrament before it was a document, and the document was and still is, in a very real way, normed by the sacrament (51). The Church, Hahn contends quite rightly, should recover “the convenantal essence of the sacraments – especially baptism and the Eucharist…our sense of the saving power of the Word of God and the response of faith [God] seeks from us in the liturgy” (120). It was from within the liturgical life of the Church that the Scriptures were born, and it is there where believers need to renew their own faith in God’s revelation of himself, most fully in the Word-made-flesh, Jesus Christ. Christian faith is not faith in a text, no matter how privileged, but in a Person, “[t] he Body of Christ that is risen and ascended in glory is the New Covenant; and it radiates out through the Spirit to encompass each one of us – through the liturgy and sacraments” (117; cf. reprise at 145). The pattern of divine humility (as the Fathers would often call it, divine sugkatabasis, God...

Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome Steven Mailloux (bio) An ancient traveler once remarked to his Athenian audience, “As I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, ‘To the Unknown God.’” Here St. Paul tells of walking through the city and being impressed by the religiosity of its citizens. They were so religious that they not only had altars erected to the whole pantheon of local and national deities; they even erected an altar to some god they might have overlooked. But instead of using this city-walk discovery to chastise the Athenians for their idolatry, Paul strategically exploits it as an opportunity to tell his hearers the Good News: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.” He states that he knows the name of their unknown god: He is the “God that made the world and all things therein. . . . [I]n him we live, and move, and have our being.” And now this God, the God, “commandeth all men every where to repent” and follow his risen Son, the embodied Logos.1 In this essay I discuss another site of city walks, of moving bodies through space, in order to explore the relation of rhetoric to narrative. More specifically, I describe walking rhetorics and narratives of embodied intensities as I travel back and forth between hermeneutic theory and interpretive practice, between generalizing about narrative rhetoric and doing readings of particular examples of such. Once again I am trying to illustrate something I call rhetorical hermeneutics: the use of rhetoric [End Page 125] to practice theory by doing history. In this case, I use some emplotted rhetoric to practice a bit of narrative theory (with Paul Ricoeur and Kenneth Burke) by doing mini-histories of embodied experiences of American travelers in Rome during the mid-nineteenth century.2 Following Ricoeur, I am thinking about narrative as the configuration of the temporal dimension of lived experience and experience as the temporality of living configured as narrative. Ricoeur writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (52). Narrative enables humans to grasp the nature of temporality, while narrative’s inseparable connection to temporality is what makes narrative meaningful.3 I want to illustrate concretely these somewhat abstract claims by using the records of American tourists in Rome to think about narrative rhetoric as embodied movement in space over time. I talk about literal bodies wandering through material circumstances as well as figurative bodies used imaginatively to move thought and feeling into new locations. In so doing, I am not attempting to replace Ricoeur’s hermeneutic focus on temporality but merely adding to it an emphasis on the spatial dimension of narrative. For many Americans visiting Rome in the nineteenth century, the city became an imaginative landscape for thoughtful feeling about art, religion, and politics. Often such rhetorical imaginings developed through the narrative placement of real and fictive bodies into Rome’s urban space and its historical time. For example, in his 1857 journal Herman Melville describes standing in the Coliseum and “repeopling” it with sculptures from the Vatican to bring stories of ancient gladiatorial spectacle to present life (111). He and other American visitors also repeopled the cityspace with specific historical persons (Caesar, Cicero, Paul) as a way of relating classical and Christian Rome to contemporary US culture. On February 26, 1857, Melville writes of walking from the Roman Coliseum to the Capitoline gallery. There he gazes at the statue of the Dying Gladiator and notes that it “shows . . . humanity existed [then] amid the barberousness of the Roman time, as it [does] now among Christian barberousness” (Journal 106). Almost exactly one year later, Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne was also greatly moved by this famous statue, though his response seems more aesthetic than ethico-cultural: “I was not in a very fit state to see it, for that most miserable sense of satiety—the mind’s repletion when too much rich or delicate food has been forced upon it—had got possession of me. . . . Still, I...

The Scarlet Letter's Romantic Medicine

THE SCARLET LETTERS ROMANTIC MEDICINE Jane F. Thrailkill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sin, like disease, is a vital process. . . . Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observation and analysis. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Henry James, in his early evaluation of The Scarlet Letter, astutely noted that the novel's dramatic center lay not with the chastened Hester Prynne—who "becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure"—but with the two men who had shared her bed: "The story," James observed, "goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband." James's emphasis on the intensity ofthe men's bond, and his description of the doubleness of Roger Chillingworth's attentiveness to Arthur Dimmesdale, calls attention to the novelty of Hawthorne's portrayal, in which Chillingworth appears (in James's words) "to minister to his [Dimmesdale's] hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain" while "revelfing] in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulating] them by malignant arts."1 The ersatz physician does not merely attend to his patient's symptoms but also reads them, testing and modulating his evolving interpretation of their significance by eliciting from the preacher telltale spasms and winces. Dimmesdale, in short, offers up to his observant companion a literal body of evidence, a set of physiological and affective traces of actions past. As historian Henri Ellenberger has observed, Chillingworth's corporeal epistemology is predicated on eliciting his patient's "pathogenic secret," that which the sufferer will not, or cannot , express, but which is the hidden source of his bodily ills.2 In the words of one late-nineteenth-century surgeon, a canny physician knows that the involuntary motion of the body—such as a patient's pulse—"tells its own tale."3 A number oftwentieth-century readers have, like James, discerned that the imbrication of medicine and detective work in the elaborate, evocative interactions of The Scarlet Letters fictional doctor and patient was indeed one of "the highly original elements in the situation that Hawthorne so ingeniously treats."4 Yet there has been an instructive discrepancy in the critical interpretation ofChillingworth's hermeneutic practice. For the psychoanalytic critic Frederick Crews, Chillingworth's pursuit of somatic clues cast him as "the psychoana- 4 Jane F. Thrailkill lyst manqué."5 Chillingworth, in Crews's psychoanalytic account, is alert to the symbolic significance of his patient's symptoms, a reading that modulates the character's malevolence. The psychoanalyst is attentive to the body's gothic eloquence, as an astonished Sigmund Freud discovered when the "painful legs" of his early patient Fraulein Elisabeth von. R. "began to 'join in the conversation' during our analysis ."6 From a psychoanalytic perspective, even as Chillingworth exacerbates his patient's pain he nonetheless prods the minister toward the cathartic acknowledgement of his pathogenic secret that marks the end—in the dual sense of goal and conclusion—of a psychoanalytic encounter. Chillingworth anticipates the twinned interpretive and therapeutic force of the method Freud would develop a half century later: as Freud wrote of his patients' quirks and odd comments, "it is difficult to attribute too much sense ... to these details."7 For the historicist critic Stephanie Browner, however, the attentions ofChillingworth possess neithertherapeutic potential nor hermeneutic density. Rather, in Browner's account, Hester's husband fixes the object of his scrutiny with the "blank, unassuming, and yet knowing gaze of the new [scientific] medicine."8 Browner argues that Chillingworth, embodying what Michel Foucault has termed the "clinical gaze," reduces the dynamic intricacy of his patient's distress to a singular source—an act of adultery—just as modernizing medicine at mid-nineteenth century was challenging an earlier holistic paradigm of illness by affirming a materialistic, lesion-based account of health and disease. Whereas Crews discerned in the relationship between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale the (admittedly twisted) elements of a dynamic therapeutic encounter, Browner suggests that "the obviously demonic figure" in essence performs a premature autopsy on the agonized minister. In the psychoanalytic account, the human body is understood to speak multivalent, nuanced, potentially therapeutic truths elusive to both doctor and patient and discernible only through collaborative acts of imagination and interpretation; by contrast, in the biomedical...

Building Traditions: Comparing Space, Ritual, and Community in Three Congregations

This article presents initial findings from an ongoing comparative study of religious identity, culture and community. Here, I address the more narrow question of how local congregations embody and reflect particular setsof religious ideals and beliefs. My central concern is to explore how the buildings in which people worship, the ritual movements of the congregation, and the pastors' vision of what it means for the church to be "a body" reflect the broader theological traditions of which these congregations are a part. Based on interviews with pastors, their spouses, and participant observation in multiple services, small groups, and new member classes, I assess the coherent threads of meaning that form the fabric of congregational identity. The analysis extends theories of religious affiliation by focusing on religion as embodied-both in the literal bodies and ritual movement of church goers, notions of religious communities as themselves "bodies, " and the embodiment of religious belief in the spaces in which congregations worship.

Black women, identity, and cultural theory: (un)becoming the subject

In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the girlfriend as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes. The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

Embodying the Spirits Among The Iu‐Mien

This paper exploresTaoistrituals among Iu‐ Mien refugees in the United States and the ways in which Iu‐Mien spirit masters provide means of embodiment for the spirits and gods. The Iu‐Mien practice over two hundred separate rituals to provide healing, pay the spirits for benefits received, purchase good health, life, children, and wealth from the spirits, provide spirit guardians, and assist souls in their transitions through the Iu‐Mien universe. This paper examines the ways in which the gods are embodied during specific rituals in sacred spirit paintings (mienvfang), which in themselves are literal bodies of the gods, complete with bones, flesh, and clothing. In other rituals, the Mien spirit masters themselves embody the gods in trance. The relationship of these embodiments to Iu‐Mien cosmology as well as to communication with the spirit world via divination, ritual, and Chinese literacy is discussed.

Posing the Phallus

Why was the phallus posed (as a question, as an object, for a picture)? Why, between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, was the phallus posed so often and so insistently: by Jasper Johns in 1955, with the inclusion of a green penis among the bodily fragments ranged in the shuttered compartments of his Target with Plaster Casts; by Yayoi Kusama, beginning in 1961, with her Accumulations, articles of furniture and clothing covered with dense fields of fabric-stuffed phalli; by Eva Hesse in the mid-1960s, with such works as Ingeminate, a pair of tubular balloons, twinned phalli, bound and stiffened with cord and connected by a length of rubber hose; by Louise Bourgeois in the late 1960s, with Fillette, a two-foot-long latex phallus hung from a hook (and, in 1982, tucked snugly under the artist's arm in a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe)? These parodies of the phallus (for parodies they are) had potential political effects: made literal, the phallus might be undermined as a patriarchal symbol. Indeed, rendered literal enough, it might be turned into an explicitly counterpatriarchal object, or rather part-object. For to parody the phallus by posing it was, in these and many other instances, also to propose it as part-object. This phallus-as-part-object-or target of the drives, as desublimated, literal body part-was, to be sure, a proposition of its time. In the New York of the 1950s

The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome's Letter to Eustochium

This essay explores the theory of sexuality that Jerome sets forth in his Ep. 22. Focusing on the manner in which sexuality is discussed in terms of erotic metaphors of the female virginal body, the essay argues that Jerome's view of asceticism was founded on a paradox wherein erotic sensibilities are both denied and intensified. Perspectives drawn from contemporary literary-critical theory are used to uncover a figural movement in Jerome's text in which an attempt is made to "erase" the literal body and its dangerous sexual passions by "rewriting" it with Scriptural tropes. The essay proposes that Jerome's ascetic theory foundered on an interpretive problematic, namely, his figuration of asceticism in terms of linguistic metaphors of desire.