CFP: 19th C. Women and Medicine (9/25/03; NEMLA, 3/3/04-3/7/04)

No Way to Treat a Woman:
Medical Constructions of the Feminine in 19th Century British Literature

NEMLA 2004, Pittsburg PA, March 3-7

Nineteenth-century advancements in medical science led to increasingly
complex notions of the body, health, authority, and knowledge. The
newly forged philosophical, psychological, and social relationships
between bodies and the newly professionalized medical industry were
perhaps particularly conflicted for women. In "literature"--from
fiction to advertising copy to urban legend--the century is full of
sensational medical myths that simultaneously trouble and reinvent ideas
of the feminine. From the forced and unnatural maternality of
_Frankenstein_ to the surgical precision and moral tyranny of Jack the
Ripper; from Fanny Burney's "Mastectomy" to the blood "transfusions" of
_Dracula_, from Charlotte Smith's melancholia to the manipulated sanity
of Collins's _Woman in White_ to Freud's Dora, the nineteenth century
medical "feminine" is constructed as mystery, authority, patient,
specimen, mother, predator: women are both authorities over and victims
to their own bodies.

This panel seeks to examine the ways in which the rise of medicine
influenced women's negotiated (and renegotiated) relationships to their
bodies. I am especially interested in the extent to which these
influences have impacted female identity beyond the close of the 1800s.
I seek papers that investigate the impact of nineteenth-century medical
science on society, individual identity, and art, particularly those
that extend their investigations, if speculatively, into the twentieth
century.

Deadline approaching! Please send abstracts of 250 words (for 15 minute
papers) by September 25th (preferably via email), to

Shannon R. Wooden
Department of English
University of Southern Indiana
8600 University Boulevard
Evansville IN 47720
swooden_at_usi.edu

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Received on Sun Sep 14 2003 - 17:08:37 EDT