2020 Abstracts
Abstracts for the Annual SECAC Conference Host Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University Convened Virtually November 30th - December 11th, 2020 Conference Chair: Carly Phinizy, Virginia Commonwealth University Hallie Abelman, University of Iowa The Home Lives of Animal Objects Ducks give pause to the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, who encounters them in rubber, stone, and wood while scanning aisles of gift shops and flea markets. Always perplexed by their flat bottoms, Clark notes how this perplexing design decision maintains visual (over tactile) privilege. The portal opened by this reflection exemplifies the precise intersection of animals, material culture, and disability driving Abelman’s performance-lecture at SECAC2020. Abelman treats each animal object she encounters as a prop and every mundane interaction with it as a performance, so Abelman demonstrates how the performativity of these obJects can elicit necessary humor, irony, and satire often missing from mainstream environmentalist narratives. Be they tchotchkes, souvenirs, commodities, or toys, each of these obJects has a culturally specific relationship to the species it portrays, a unique material makeup, and a history of being touched by human hands. Attending to the social construction of these realities aids an essential reconciliation between commodified animals and real animal livelihoods. Overall, the audience gains a better sense of how animal obJects can not only misrepresent a species but also contribute to that very species’s demise, be instrumentalized for the perpetuation of racist ideologies, and mobilize ableist fears. Rachel Allen, University of Delaware Nocturnes without Sky (World): FreDeric Remington Pushes Indigenous Cosmologies Out of the Frame This paper examines Frederic Remington’s (American, 1861–1909) The Gossips (1909) and the impact of his final paintings on Indigenous people and our cosmologies.
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