EXTREME CORPOREAL EXPERIENCES. Testing de Limits of the Gendered Body.

Testing the Limits of the Gendered Body: Extreme Corporeal Experiences 

Nuns that survived only on breathing air, mesmerised people that underwent surgery without feeling pain, “hunger artists,” fakirs, Houdinian escapists and other freaks of the spectacle; explorers, divers, climbers; spiritualists, self-experimenters, and testers of drugs: a motley crew that put their bodies to the limit in the name of religion, science, honours, self-esteem or business. Indeed, the list can be sundry and lengthy. However, all these people have at least two things in common. First, the idea, the hope perhaps, that their will, their sang-froid, their exhausting training, their knowledge, or their faith will help them. Second, a close sense of being observed, of having their public, as the fascination that these cases arose was discussed in convents, plazas, journals, and scientific venues alike.   

It is precisely the tension between these two poles, the intimate struggles in their tormented bodies and the public gaze of the spectacle that interests us, as the boundaries between the normal and the extraordinary, life and death, human and non-human, science and fraud, future and past and the subconscious and the rational, are tested and questioned, embedded in a gendered body.  

Our papers examine how the body and its limits become matters for empirical experimentation, with a gender approach. Some of the questions that we would like to ask are:

• How did these people perceive the working of their senses, mind, emotions, will, etc. in these extreme conditions?

• Which was and how did they negotiate the public reception of their experiences in scientific and public spaces?

• What were the rhetorical devices that they used to fashion themselves and their achievements? How did they deploy their witnesses? Which technologies and objects were involved?

• How different were these experiences in male and female bodies and their public displays? How did they serve to construe notions of masculinity and femininity?

Program

9:00h-9:15h: Welcome

Supernatural Wills, Minds, and Bodies

9:15h-10:15h: Agustí Nieto-Galan (iHC-UAB) & Enrique Moral de Eusebio (UniversitatPompeu Fabra)10:15h-11:15h: Hansun Hsiung (Universitat de Durham) & Elena Serrano (iHC-UAB)11:15h-12:15h: Stefan Pohl (Universidad del Rosario) & Mònica Balltondre (iHC-UAB)

12:15h-13:00h: Lunch

Beyond Borders: Dead/Alive, Humans/Non-Humans

13:00h-14:30h: Fernando Vidal (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) & Laura Guinot (Universitat de València) & Rubén Gómez (iHC-UAB).

14:30h-16:00h: General Discussion

Organisers: 

Mònica Balltondre (Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Universitat Autònoma Barcelona) 
Elena Serrano (Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Universitat Autònoma Barcelona)