Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth Century German Culture

Summary

SINCE THE 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about “extraordinary” bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as “unexpected” from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human— continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. A lthough scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenthcentury aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a selfidentical, logical “whole” likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human.

In a previous “Forum on (New) Directions” (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to “unexpected” bodies in our field. S tephanie M. Hilger's “Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century” calls attention to the health humanities, which “allow for a fresh perspective”; she elaborates: “Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind.” Eleoma Bodammer's “Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies” seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that “could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions.” This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the “body” and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth- century literature, culture, and the body.