&NOW 2018

Understanding how writing thinks and acts upon “the world” involves a messy methodological engagement with the body between disciplinary categories. The body becomes a moving target in the margins, and this panel speculates on when or where it (im)positions itself. This panel looks at a series of writings that foregrounds the body. Texts reimagine and transform the body’s corporeal genealogies linked with the environment, economies, politics, place and power. To write about human experience in such genealogies is to give it speculative expression that begins to grapple with the potential and limits of hair/skin/bone/nails. As custodians of radical re-visions of social organization and behavior, writers such as CA Conrad, Margaret Atwood, Nalo Hopkinson, Anne Boyer, Robin Coste Lewis, Tananarive Due, Octavia Butler, Adrian Piper, Sylvia Wynter, Coco Fusco, Lidia Yuknavitch, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Grosz, and Kathy Acker engage these relationships. Presenting our own creative-critical work—textual and photographic—, we reflect on black joy, trauma, motherhood, war veteran, disability, and all our shifting statuses, which are articulated by the body in the text and the body as the text. This discussion is interdisciplinary, combining prose, essay, poetics, imagery and stem cell genetics. Here, we approach new social possibilities by opening new conceptualizations of identity through realist contexts.