Welcoming 2012 (a wee bit late)

We are back! Hello, and happy new year, and our deepest apologies for such a long silence. It had been our intention to post a little bit over the holidays, but like most holiday goals we fell short and were lost in a well-spiced mulled-wine abyss for much longer than we expected.

However, to kick off the year we'd like to draw attention to a kind of companion post which ties in surprisingly well to our last post of 2011. This article by Susan Dominus was brought to our attention recently and seemed rather appropriate given the news we brought you around Christmas time of the successful birth of conjoined twins Jesus and Emanuel in Brazil.

Dominus' article, (and warning, it is quite a long-winded one), focuses on conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan in British Columbia, Canada, who, as craniopagus conjoined twins, raise quite a different question regarding subjectivity and separation. In many ways, the interest isn't any different from the traditional obsession with conjoined twins' shared experience and exactly how far it extends - experiments exploring shared sensation never seem to change much beyond the pinching and prodding of first one twin and then the other. However the notion of a thalamic bridge does seem to offer a uniquely complex set of questions regarding Krista and Tatiana's development and the prospects for their future identity.

The article also raises and glosses over some of those aspects of life as conjoined twins which have historically always seemed to hover in the shadows. While she specifically refers to the family's refusal to subject the twins to unnecessary medical study (“If one of them needs it for their health, by all means, they can do what they need to do,” said their step-grandfather... “But I’ll be damned if you’re going to poke and prod and experiment on them”), she also makes extensive reference to the response of the medical community to the discovery of the supposed thalamic bridge.

Similarly, the article appears to emphasise the girls normality, almost going so far as to suggest an absence of any spectacular element in their public lives (“Guests might have looked for a half-second longer than they ordinarily would, but they invariably smiled at the sight of the girls’ evident glee, just as they would at any other two small children”) and yet refers not only to the fact that the girls have been the subject of a documentary (on the National Geographic channel, to be precise), but also rather glossing over the family's pursuit of a reality television show.

This endeavour seems to be inspired by talent manager Chuck Harris, who in this interview is titled a “freak wrangler, manager and talent agent ”, and who refers to himself as  “the conductor of a symphony of wackos... When you need something strange and eye-popping and nobody knows where to look, I’m the guy to find it for you.”

While the idea that the twins may share more than just physical sensation is a fascinating one, and no one seems to deny that it poses brand new implications for understanding subjectivity and a sensed embodiment, their labelling on the part of one neuroscientist as “a new life form” and their engagement with a self-identified “freak-wrangler” seem to raise some unfortunately more familiar ghosts of the past.

Sensuality as Disability - Victorians and Precocious Puberty

Since this week (22 November to be precise) marked the start of Disability History Month here in the UK, we thought that it was a  good time to draw your attention to a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies from 2008, which explores the subject of "Critical Transformations: Disability and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Britain". Best of all, the issue, guest edited by Mark Mossman and Martha Stoddard-Holmes, is available free online in full.

Pieter Paaw, "Skeleton and Skull of a
Child." (1633), © University of Toronto
Library, 2003 

The journal offers a number of interesting articles exploring the intersection of gender and disability, such as Joyce L. Huff's "The Domesticated Monster: Freakishness and Disability in Fitz-James O'Brien's 'What Was It?'". Yet what is perhaps most interesting within the context of this conference (and this blog) is the inclusion of M. Jeanne Peterson's "Precocious Puberty and the Victorian Medical Gaze".

Peterson's article considers the responses on the part of Victorian medical reports to cases of precocious puberty and the way that they were tied to anxieties surrounding conceptions of gender, bodily normalcy, even the state of childhood itself. In so doing, she demonstrates, to quote Mossman and Stoddard-Holmes's introduction to the issue, "the fecundity of visual and structural disruptions of “normal” masculinity and femininity for narratives of pathology and normalcy." The introduction goes on to note that the article

"work[s] on the continuum on which the normal and the extraordinary both reside, noting the various points (and convergences) of discomfort, apprehension, attraction, and wonder these “extraordinary cases” produce"

In consciously choosing to place early-onset puberty within the discourse of disability, Peterson acknowledges that her decision may raise some questions, given that,

"precocious puberty would seem more a case of early ability rather than disability. But early puberty can also be understood as deviance, as straying from norms of bodily development. In the phenomena of early puberty doctors found amazement, desire, and dread."

In Peterson's study, then, the precocious development of physical markers of puberty, those undeniable indicators of the body's eroticism, its sensuality, become in and of themselves an illustration of disability. This definition of the preciously pubescent body would seem to bind Victorian constructions of disability, of exceptional bodies, to the sensual body in a way which is often overlooked. Sensuality here stands at the very core of disability, in stark contrast to a traditional conception in which the senses,  if not deliberately removed, are at the very least forgotten.

Fourth Plenary Speaker: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Earlier in the month we wrote a blog post about Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's fantastic new book, Staring: How We Look. We are therefore very honoured to be able to announce today that Prof. Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, will be attending the conference in June as the fourth plenary speaker, joining Prof. Margrit Shildrick, Dr. Peter Hutchings, and Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Together, these four speakers bring with them research expertise in all areas that the conference hopes to explore.

Video is copyright Emory University, 2010

Prof. Garland-Thomson's work has explored the extraordinary body in different contexts and from a variety of perspectives, from historical and cultural conceptions of freakery to contemporary reactions to and constructions of disability. Her most recent work explores our conflicted engagement with the impulse to look, and she has also put together a short video briefly discussing some of these ideas. This year (2011-2012) she also stands as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Once again, we as the conference organisers would like to thank everyone who has responded so positively to the event and given their support, whether it be as keynote speakers or future delegates (we have already received some fascinating abstracts)! We are both excited and honoured to be involved in this project, and we cannot say how much look forward to working with you all.