Program Final (Sept 17, 2012)

Program Final (Sept 17, 2012) Where not otherwise indicated, the chair of the session is the final speaker. Session 1 - Thurs 1:30pm - 3pm Session 1 (D) Frontier 202A Disease and Subjectivity M.K. Nixon. Keep Bleeding: Hemorrhagic Sores, Trade, and the Necessity of Leaky Boundaries in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year This paper considers the way in which nonhuman contagious disease is crucial in shaping human subjectivity. To this end, this essay probes notions of two boundaries that are both political and personal—the border between the national subject and the international other, and the boundary between the self and all that lies outside of it—in a consideration of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 text, A Journal of the Plague Year. Operating from the notion that the personal is indeed political, this essay asserts that these two borders are largely intertwined, particularly when considering infectious diseases. By way of examining attitudes towards national and personal boundaries, this paper focuses in large part on Defoe’s representation of the eponymous buboes of the bubonic plague, juxtaposing and exploring his depiction of suppurated and calcified bubonic sores as metonymic signifiers of both personal and national boundaries that are transgressed or fortified, respectively. Examination of Defoe’s illustration of bubonic sores shows that Defoe depicted the Great Plague of 1665 in ways that I assert were thoroughly influenced by his conceptualization of international trade—a conceptualization which resisted the nationalistic xenophobia typical of his day and instead embraced a type of individualistic mercantilism. Defoe’s views on economics and trade, then, influenced his understanding of the Great Plague and cycled back to result in a view of man and nation that advocates permeable boundaries even in response to the hugely threatening potential of a complete breakdown of self- and nation-constituting borders. Kate Schnur. Patient Training: Re-Defining the Human in White Noise and What I Did Wrong The question of the role of technology and consumerism in constructing Jack Gladney’s illness has been widely debated in DeLillo criticism. Scholars such as Arthur Saltzman and Andrew Price argue that conspicuous consumption is what Gladney uses both to defend himself against death and to wallow in the fear of his inevitable demise. However, such claims rely on an understanding of postmodern illness as something unnamed and invisible. This limitation overlooks what we can learn from tying DeLillo’s novel to literary depictions of material, specific illnesses that exist in a similarly technologically-mediated postmodernity. My paper will explore this connection through performing an intertextual analysis of DeLillo’s White Noise and John Weir’s account of the AIDS crisis in What I Did Wrong. Specifically, I will rely on Annemarie Mol’s theory of disease multiplicity in order to understand how the existence of SLSA 2012 Online Program Page | 2 the disease in each text is transformed and designed through the patients’ interactions with medical objects and technologies. In turn, I will then look to how patient subjectivity is constructed in each text through the characters’ submission to medical technology and through the multiple forms of the disease they confront in the hospital and their day-to-day existence. I argue that White Noise is instrumental in understanding how medical technology trains the patient to be an obedient subject of the hospital domains in What I Did Wrong. Despite this, it is necessary to remove readings of medical technology from the confines of nihilist obsessions with hypothetical death . Session 1 (E) Frontier 202B H.G. Wells, Hybridity, and Convergence Christina Alt. Controlling the Non-Human: Ecology in the Work of H.G. Wells My paper will relate the depiction of environmental management in H.G. Wells's Men Like Gods, a work of Utopian fiction published in 1923, to the discourse surrounding the emerging science of ecology in the early twentieth century. It will outline the particular view of man's relationship with non-human nature promoted by the dissemination of ecological ideas in the early twentieth century. Contrary to what current popular notions of ecology might lead one to expect, early twentieth-century ecology promoted the idea that greater understanding of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment would make it possible for human beings to assert greater control over the natural world and more successfully manipulate nature to desired human ends. Through a recuperation of Wells’s conception of ecology and its possible applications, I will demonstrate the way in which the emergence of ecology initially gave rise to a new optimism – or hubris – regarding humanity’s ability to exert control over the non-human world. Overall, my paper will demonstrate the value of reading early twentieth-century representations of humanity's treatment of nature with the complex and contradictory attitudes of early ecology in mind. Karen Mizell. Mad Science, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Non-Human Animal Ethics This presentation traces the trajectory of Victorian ambivalence regarding scientific progressivism in The Island of Dr. Moreau to contemporary biotechnology which aspires to alter natural attributes of nonhuman animals according to human specifications. I examine Wells’ portrayal of Dr. Moreau’s experiments as a prescient reflection of modern biotechnological research which is often driven by an amoral scientific curiosity in the biological uplift of nonhuman animals. Finally, I probe moral-theoretic considerations that figure into Moreau’s scientific and cultural attitudes toward the use of animals in research, still evident in contemporary biotechnological realities. Session 1 (F) Frontier 202D Dog Fights, Foxy Dogs, and Doggie-style Peter Hobbs. Canine Cartography: On the Queer Pleasures of Being a Dog Dogs are fags. There is no getting around it or avoiding them. They are constantly having public sex and in ways that brings home the difference between sex and reproduction, and sex and gender. Despite efforts to dress them up as model canine citizens, they will often betray themselves as deviants. Even the spayed/neutered police dog runs the risk of being outed as a sexual outlaw. Doggie style won’t be denied. Dogs are in your face, sniffing each other’s butts, and perhaps humping your leg. In the biting spirits of Foucault, Haraway, and von Uexkull, this paper maps a canine cartography or Umwelt. More specifically, I focus on the practice of scent-marking as a nuanced form of nonhuman intelligence rather than a mindless exertion of territorial control. I am interested in scent-marking as a collective act in which dogs SLSA 2012 Online Program Page | 3 use their urine to produce a canine public sphere of pheromones. Dogs are thus presented as agents and subjects of meaning who, acting as emissaries or ambassadors, provide us with glimpses of a furry ontology, which is, like all ontologies or worldviews, ever-partial, ever-emergent. This furry ontology, in turn, complicates our notions of both discipline and innateness so that we are forced to acknowledge that, like humans, dogs are neither solely social construction nor biological phenomenon, neither solely docile bodies nor feral spirits. What I am proposing is a speculative mapping of canine life that does not secure socioscientific truths but is more interested in detailing a lively and uncertain terrain. Ian Werkheiser. Fighting Nature: An Analysis and Critique of Breed-Specific Flourishing Arguments for Dog Fights The "sport" of dog fighting is rampant in the United States. In this paper I will analyze current justifications for the practice as an argument from flourishing: some breeds of dogs are born to fight and want to fight, and therefore people who run these events are helping the animals achieve their full natural development. I will show that this argument is inadvertently supported by dog owners who try to give other types of dogs breed-specific flourishing, such as allowing their collies the chance to herd sheep. It is also supported by those who advocate for breed-specific legislation, which rests on the fundamental idea that some types of dogs have violence in their nature. Neither group of people would presumably see themselves as being on the same side as those who raise and train dogs to fight. However, in their endorsement of breed-specific natures, they open themselves up to the argument that “letting” dogs fight to the death is more kind to the animals and truer to their natures than keeping them as house pets. I will also critique this concept of breed-specific flourishing and consider rejecting or modifying it. I will further argue that an understanding of both the sociology of the fights and the biology of the dogs reveals that we can stop the practice while still keeping breed-specific flourishing as a concept if we wish. This is because dog fights are not in the nature of fighting dogs. Christina Chia. Fox/Dog Something curious has happened to the dog family tree over the past decade. The fox, taxonomically a distant cousin in comparison with the wolf, has come to occupy a privileged spot in the science of dog evolution and social morphology. I’m referring specifically to the silver foxes in the long-running Novosibirsk, Siberia domestication experiment (1959-present): selecting only for tame behavior, or what the US biologist Brian Hare has recently termed “niceness,” the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev and his collaborators engineered a “domesticated elite” population that, starting from roughly the 10th generation, exhibited floppy ears, piebald coats, and other dog-like physical traits previously unknown in foxes. These puppy-like foxes have made possible novel scientific understandings of dogs that emphasize their distinctiveness rather than degrees of inferiority from wolves, e.g. in Raymond Coppinger’s “dogs domesticated themselves” hypothesis (Dogs, 2001) and Hare’s studies of canine social cognition.

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