Global Humanities Lecture Series continues Feb. 16

York College’s Global Humanities Lecture Series continues with a faculty panel discussion, “Writing The Global Body: Philosophy, Literature, Religion,” at 3:30 p.m., Feb. 16, in Room 218 of the Humanities Center. The event is open to the public free of charge.

The panel will include Colbey Reid, assistant professor of English, Christa Shusko, assistant professor of religious studies, Dennis Weiss, professor of philosophy, and Amy Propen, assistant professor of rhetoric and composition.

Writing in 1975, the feminist literary scholar Helene Cixous (pictured) noted that a new mode of language is needed to work against the societal hierarchies that view women’s bodies as inferior. She said in her groundbreaking work “Laugh of the Medusa” that women must “write their bodies” to be heard. “Censor the body,” she wrote, “and you censor breath and speech at the same time.”

Almost 20 years later, in 1991, the actor Demi Moore appeared seven months pregnant on the now iconic cover photo of Vanity Fair magazine. Feminist scholars asked whether the representation of Moore’s pregnant body could be viewed as liberating the feminine body, or whether the image might be read as perpetuating the already existing, dominant discourses surrounding the pregnant body.

In 2009, Susie Orbach further complicated the notion of the culturally, technologically mediated body by considering the body as a product of the modern consumer culture. With these ideas in mind, this panel will consider the various dominant discourses in which we write our bodies and how these bodily inscriptions are perpetuated and sustained within global cultural contexts.