organizers: Myra Seaman (College of Charleston) and Molly Lewis (George Washington University)

Recent critical responses to the entrenched traditions of humanism offer alternative frameworks for considering the relationships—material, ideological, emotional—between those it designates as human and everyone and everything else. Posthumanism rejects humanism’s assumptions of innate human exceptionalism and reveals the structures it deploys to prop up its version of the subject. The very existence (material as well as conceptual) of this humanist subject is shown to depend on those excluded others whose contributions it must, to sustain the myth of its exceptionalism, deny. These others are marked as insufficiently human by their non-standard gender, race, status, sexuality, or by being perceived as lacking animation or cognition. The posthumanist subject, in contrast, is produced by an aggregate of diverse agents. This panel will seek a posthumanist understanding of medieval subjects.

Participants might investigate various ways medieval cultures incorporated the nonhuman and the ecomaterial as tools for actively imagining and defining human identity—tools typically ignored in the humanist study of medieval subject identities but restored to significance by posthumanism. Possible questions for consideration include (but are not limited to): How is our understanding of the medieval human subject reconfigured through our readings of the nonhuman? How do pre-Enlightenment cultures conceptualize the human subject in relation to or in terms of other subjects? In what ways are those human identities that are deemed deficient (based on formulations of medieval gender, race, status, and sexuality [to name a few]) imagined through the nonhuman? Do recurring tropes indicate particular patterns of association between the human and nonhuman? What significance might these connections suggest?