Monstrous Memes: Hermaphrodites, Conjoined Twins, and the Unnatural Narratology of the Wonder Book

• In Event: Styling Early Modern Disability

Abstract

This talk considers representations of hermaphrodites and conjoined twins across a selection of wonder books. For early modern writers, these people problematize time (as in concepts of crip futurities) and space (the space of one body accommodating more than one person, soul, or sex), but their representations also behave like memes across different texts, their woodcuts being repeated with slight differences in image and text. The effect of this structure, I suggest, is to make disability pervasive, central, and even an organizing principle of cosmology. The stated goal of many wonder books is to show monsters as curiosities or singularities that evoke admiration or a sense of the marvelous, but the result is that the “mutation” of monstrosity becomes so pervasive as to be naturalized.

Author

• Elizabeth Bearden, University of Wisconsin–Madison