LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the
Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways in which
literary and artistic texts have represented, interrogated or challenged juridical
notions of ‘personhood’. The guiding
assumption behind our conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically)
given, stable property of human
beings (which precedes their interaction with the law), but that ‘personhood’
is assigned to selected (and historically varying) ‘bodies’ by discursive
regimes, such as those of law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During
the conference we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in
which the implications and scope of legal, political or medical
conceptualizations of personhood can be dramatized and thought through, and in
which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed and
disseminated.
The symposium broaches the question of personhood
on three different levels: those of the body,
the individual and the community. Questions to be addressed include
(but are not limited to), firstly: From which discourses did notions of bodily
integrity historically emerge? Which social, political and medical developments
are currently challenging these notions? How do artistic, cultural and
socio-political phenomena (such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die
movement, etc.) invite us to rethink our notion of the human body?
Second, what literary and rhetorical
figures made it possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle
ages and the modern era? What is the legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such
as children, illegal immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the
undead? What could ‘animal personhood’ entail?
Finally: how do collective bodies acquire
personhood? How did art and literature represent legal entities such as the
medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the nineteenth century
corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of sects, networks,
conspiracies, and resistance movements?
The conference is organized in cooperation
with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and is made
possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.
400-word proposals for 20-minute papers can
be sent to Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS, Leiden)
at legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Deadline: 14 February 2014