A is for Abjection - The Lucy M. Freibert Lecture

Event Details

"A is for Abjection: Bilious Methods in Nineteenth-Century American Literature"

Ben Bascom, West Virginia University

This talk brings together queer and disability studies to tell a messy history of the relationship between the body and sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. It focuses on “bilious methods”—the way the body’s apertures, conduits, and fluids shape conceptions of subjectivity. Proffering a bilious reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and related texts for what they teach us about bodily abjection, this paper examines how involuntary acts and involuntary desires tell a story about the sexual history of the will.

Ben Bascom is an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University. His book Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2024) takes up queer methods to reorient the field of early American literature around a series of marginal and eccentric life narratives, thereby to consider the specific power relations that stabilize white republican norms. His lecture draws from research on his current book project, a literary history of mental health and sexuality in the long nineteenth century.

A free, limited-edition letterpress print will be available to attendees.

This lecture is sponsored by the Lucy M. Freibert endowment and organized by the Department of English Research Committee.