ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Living/Thinking in Monstrous Times

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Our moment is multiply monstrous. Across critical academic spaces, and within the history of science, we work across a shared affect of disgust and fear as intellectual institutions are surveilled and defunded, and our vulnerable communities within and beyond them are kidnapped and incarcerated. Simultaneously, many of our own knowledge systems and bodies are targeted as monstrosities—trans people and critics of fascism are targeted as terrorists; purported threats to a white nationalist settler nation state. Talking about monsters and monstrosity is not new in the history of science, and in this roundtable, we bring together queer, trans, and anti-colonial methods and modes of attention to (re)think about how to do work in the monstrous present. What other options do we have, beyond an overdetermined and overly romanticized monster-as-portent? If we need not more portents, how does “the monster” help us out of what is happening now? The roundtable participants draw from their research across histories of trauma (Clayton), sex (Velocci), animal science (Wesner), and monstrosity itself (Rich), in order to reflect on how our fields’ engagement with abjection and harm might offer openings for relating to the study and practice of monstrosity in ways that reckon with the (necessary?) violences of revolution, collective survival, and post-apocalyptic persistence. We aim to offer engagements with and beyond conversations across history of science and STS about care; see what we might learn from monsters about harm; and foreground queer and trans creative/destructive praxis.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chairs

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College

Participants

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

• Angélica Clayton, University of Pennsylvania

• Miriam Rich, Dartmouth College

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College

Session Organizers

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College