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IMAGINING PERSONHOOD, BODILY SOVEREIGNTY, AND JUSTICE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
SARAH BAECHLE (UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI) AND CARISSA M. HARRIS (TEMPLE UNIVERSITY)
In response to the spate of new laws curtailing bodily sovereignty in increasingly capacious and brutal ways, not only as erotic and reproductive agency, but also as gendered self-determination, this thread looks to the medieval past as yielding rich and necessary resources for affirming the personhood of marginalized and vulnerable people and imagining forms of future flourishing. This thread centers intersectional explorations of the ways medieval constructions of personhood are implicated in enduring definitions–and denials–of bodily sovereignty. It picks up and furthers conversations begun at last year’s Colloquium in the “Genealogies of Bodily Sovereignty and Violation” thread, and proposals might consider how discourses of personhood are invoked to affirm or deny reproductive and sexual autonomy, shape ethical sexual cultures, and adjudicate trauma and violation. We welcome proposals which examine how medieval concepts of personhood demand more holistic and nuanced understanding of reproductive and sexual justice and investigate the ways personhood and justice weigh selectively or in tension with one another. In this vein, proposals might pursue broad understandings of autonomy and sovereignty, including careful, sensitive and ethical exploration of how reproductive care was differentially accessible according to class, sexuality, or race; how justice and reproductive or gendered sovereignty clash in de-personing institutions like incarceration and family surveillance; or how survivors of trauma, real and literary, imagined restitution and restoration beyond carceralism and retributive justice.
This thread also extends these conversations to the discourses of personhood underpinning the lives of queer and trans people in the Middle Ages and now. Proposals might consider how rhetorics of individuality, dignity, and legal autonomy affirm or curtail the bodily sovereignty of queer and trans individuals or how medieval medical knowledge promotes or restricts embodied self-determination. We particularly welcome proposals which address how the idea of “history” is raised to limit or deny bodily sovereignty, or which respond to worries about “presentism” or “anachronism” so often raised by work in this area.
