Abstract: Encountering the world from a newly disabled body, this project explores thinking through making, and considers the opportunities that avant garde fashion and disability studies allows for non-normative bodies. Featuring a lookbook and some words on methodology, this project showcases explorations of ripping off high fashion garments and accessories and reading through disability lit for a hybridized form of embodied knowledge. Looking at the work of Helen Cookman, who developed Functional Fashions for the Physically Handicapped; a book, fashion collection and project which spanned over two decades (1955-1976), I’ll explore her historical contributions to the world of ‘functional fashion’. Cookman’s collaborations with roughly one third of the prevailing American Fashion designers consider disability as a design problem worth innovating for, and the ways in which ‘good design’ is sometimes inherently accessible. Functional Fashions as a project and concept is no doubt teleologically linked to the influx of disabled veterans who return to America post WW2. This seemingly harmonious fusion, of a burgeoning fashion system in the US, and a population in need of garments for their newly disabled bodies, is unfortunately a historical anomaly, as disabled fashion today has yet to become widely accessible or popular. “Falling backward” to the postwar moment, this project also gazes forward to an accessible future through projects such as Rebirth Garments, a gender expansive line of fashion for all bodies. Using the skills, intel and knowledge of a newly disabled body, I will mediate accommodations for embodied knowledge through both written and garment oriented ends.
Bio: Callen Zimmerman explores intricacies of material culture and queer experience, as fashion freak, educator and maker. They teach Fashion Studies & Art History at City Tech + York College, and are always working on the intersections of radical pedagogy and artistic practices. Having recently graduated from the CUNY Graduate Center’s Liberal Studies MA program, Callen is currently in their second year in the PhD program at Stony Brook's Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Here, Callen will continue to explore the dressed body as a technology of power, through a multitude of creative means, looking at and the ways that queers have used self styling to convey desire, build affinity and signal safety.
Abstract: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopian novel We (1924) tells the story of D-503, a “number” (that is, citizen) of an authoritarian future city-state called the One State, which emerged as the victor of the “Great Two Hundred Years’ War, the war between the city and the countryside” (trans. Kirsten Lodge [Broadview 2020], 34). The One State has “conquered Hunger” with the invention of a petroleum-based food substitute, and so conquered nature, sealing itself off from the “irrational, ugly” natural world with a giant glass wall that repels even birds (34, 92). This future city is a panopticon of high-rises made entirely of glass, such that, when protagonist D-503 rises in the morning, he sees his own actions endlessly repeated by other identically dressed numbers in neighboring buildings. D-503 narrates primarily in the singular “I” but intermittently assumes a “we” voice, speaking on behalf of all numbers, and I argue that the One State’s modern urban architecture trains him to think in the plural. The particularity of human bodies, however, disrupts his understanding that the numbers are identical cogs in the machinery of the state, suggesting that nature cannot ever be fully banished while humans remain embodied creatures. In analyzing the “we” of We, this paper traces the material and cultural factors that alternately enable and inhibit D-503’s submersion in the social collective, considering why the body poses such a problem for the rationalist, authoritarian One State.
Bio: Jocelyn Sears is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University, where she is writing a dissertation on narrative voice and literary form in 20th- and 21st-century dystopian novels.
Abstract: This paper offers a new reading of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604/1623) focused on the play’s long-neglected connection to a contemporary revenge tragedy, Rollo, Duke of Normandy (1617/1639). Though each play stages drastically different plots and articulates different themes, both feature a boy singer who performs the erotic song, “Take, oh take those lips away.”
The fourth act of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's parable of law and public morality, opens with a servant boy singing an erotic elegy to his mistress, the jilted fiancée, Mariana. When a priest approaches, Mariana silences the boy and drives him offstage. Scholarship on Measure for Measure has exclusively read the music in this scene—the only time in Shakespeare's plays where a boy servant sings solely to his mistress—as mere accompaniment for one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated melancholic characters. Yet the scene grows richer, more bizarre, even, upon turning attention to its singer. Like Measure for Measure, the bloody Rollo, Duke of Normandy features a boy vocalist who sings “Take, oh take those lips away” in a scene of sexual tension. Though the song appears with a sensual second stanza in Rollo, Duke of Normandy, Measure for Measure implies and then suppresses that stanza, as Mariana urges her servant to “break off [his] song.”
This paper argues that, granted the context of these plays’ linked performance histories and the period’s startling eroticization of boy singers, the vocal song in Measure for Measure has the potential to upend the play’s dramatized organization of sexuality into paternalistic and heteronormative categories. In doing so, this paper advances scholarship on Measure for Measure by uncovering intertextual connections that later Jacobean performances of the play might have exploited through allusive vocal performance.
Bio: Aidan Selmer is a PhD student in the English department at Rutgers University. His research evaluates the role of vocal song in early modern English poetry and drama. In recent projects he takes the movement of song across media and cultural boundaries as an opportunity to reconsider narratives about anti-musicality in the period.
Abstract: This paper explores the counter-hegemonic implications of William Blake’s and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s uses of mixed media in their poetic works. Drawing on Gopal’s Insurgent Empire (2019), I bring together Blake’s and Johnson’s unconventional forms of poetry to ‘reinforce a connection of struggle against a common enemy’: cultural hegemony in Britain.
Writing two-hundred years apart, Blake and Johnson approach poetry from positions of relative struggle in London, the seat of the British Empire and, correspondingly, the epicentre of global capitalism. Residing in Soho in the late 18th century, Blake bears witness to the state’s repressions of the urban poor. Blake’s trade as an engraver informs his poetic practice, and consequently he illustrates his poems upon engraved plates in which he denounces authoritarian systems like Enlightenment rationalism, state law and imperial expansionism. In the 1970s, Jamaican activist-poet Johnson founds Dub Poetry, a style of performance poetry imbued with Caribbean musical forms. His verses relate the lived experiences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in London and rally against systematic violence committed upon black communities by the Metropolitan Police, a vestige of Britain’s colonial past.
Blake’s and Johnson’s hybridisations of poetry with visual art and music exhibit a de-linking from literary norms bound up in Western cultural hegemony, ‘the logocentric world’ that privileges writing (Stuart Hall, 1993). This paper addresses the following questions: How do these hybrid poetic forms engage and come out of each poet’s specific struggles? What do the two different media offer these poets’ radical poetry? What are the limitations of a comparative reading of Blake’s and Johnson’s poetic hybridisations as counter-hegemonic?
Ultimately, this paper seeks to establish commonalities of injustice – and some vital differences – by interrogating poetic intermediality across borders of class and race towards a goal of solidarity against systems of cultural hegemony that these poets encounter in London.
Bio: Lily Beckett is completing her MA in Comparative Literature at King's College London. Previously, she undertook her undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2021 with a BA in Classics and English. Currently, she is a facilitator for her department's Decolonizing the Curriculum initiative. Her research interests include contesting the Western literary canon, the relationship between world capitalism and world literature, and intermediality.