How do we talk about vulnerable bodies? How do vulnerable bodies speak for themselves? And how does scholars’ own body talk - not just the ways we conceptualize our own embodiment, but how we live its messy realities - impact on our ability to listen to our objects of analysis? These are some of the questions I’ll be exploring in a keynote paper at the 4th Annual MML Graduate Network Conference this week. If that’s piqued your interest, check out the formal abstract below, alongside the full slide deck. And now, by the powers of time travel and the internet, a captioned recording of the talk itself. No pressure, though. If you don’t have bandwidth for thinky things right now, I’ve put together a playlist to get you in the body talk zone, full of songs that speak to where my head’s at with this paper, that I listen to when my body is talking at me, too.
Pain and chronic illness in the medieval era were understood, and lived, as integrally productive states, governed by an explicit epistemological compulsion. Esther Cohen remarks: ‘In the widest sense of the term, it might be said that pain was seen as an avenue to knowledge. Knowledge of the body, of the soul, of truth, of reality, and of God. Whether self-inflicted or caused by others, physical pain was a way of affirming the boundaries of identity.’ That pain is communicative, that it means something, was taken for granted in the Middle Ages. In this context, Steve Larocco’s theorization of the ‘semiosomatics’ of pain, which stresses above all that pain is ‘informational’ and ‘imperative’ seems downright medieval. The lived materiality of chronic illness in the Middle Ages is, ultimately, impossible for us to ever recover. Nevertheless, we can discern – if only we look hard enough, feel with enough sensitivity – the ways in which the ‘semiosomatics’ of chronic illness, as a category of disability, penetrated the socio-cultural fabric of the Middle Ages, how they disturbed the status quo – and how that disturbance continues to make itself known, felt today, as a genealogical echo passed down to – and lived by – the modern disability community. ‘Inarticulate’ bodies can and do talk, even those notionally disembodied by the passage of centuries. This paper seeks to listen, and decipher what they have to tell us.
Edited 22/02/21 to add video recording of talk. Enjoy!