Call for Papers // Society of Early Americanists // 2027

“Queer Humors”

Humoral theory—the medical notion that the body is organized and motivated by four fluids or vapors that course through its system—is perhaps humorous today but that should not limit our attempt to understand the influence it retains on conceptions of the body and embodiment. Humoral theory considers the body as a microcosm that mimics the seasons and weathers of the world, framing the body as a porous vessel deeply entangled within its environment. Importantly, this model of the body explains mental moods through physical states. This proposed panel endeavors to bring together a variety of papers that are interested in investigating and interrogating the meaning of the material body within and around forms of mediation, attention, and interpretation. In our contemporary moment, for elaboration, life-sustaining water is being siphoned off from communities to cool massive buildings that store the digital records that facilitate the algorithms which then tell consumers what to purchase in order to align their embodied lives toward the biopolitics of health. How do our understandings of the body signify differently when we think of these advancing systems of extraction, subjection, and abjection as connected to the ongoing march of the emergence of nation-states and their cultural residues? What opportunities for thinking and conceptualizing might be imagined from the archives prior to the full-fletched industrialism of the nineteenth century? 

Although this panel is inspired by a desire to think with and against the way humoral models of the body linger and retain their powers of description, the overarching motivation is to put multiple fields into conversation, such as affect, critical race, early American, queer, and trans studies. As such, this panel is interested in thinking of queer in its multiple valences, as a verb, noun, adjective, and more—perhaps a word to consider the entire disintegration of the linguistic meaning-making system or an expression to signal campy improvisation toward something new, different, or alternative. Some possible themes may be the following: the body as a system; the body as a cog in a system; the body as a source of extraction; the body as a site of resistance; the body as a function of comfort, the medium or platform of desire; the body as subject, object, and abject; the body as the source of laughter—bawdy humor or intestinal guffaws and fart jokes; the body as the site of the production of the inappropriate, the taboo; the body as mass, matter, and material; the body as rhythm, sense, and sensation. 

All are welcomed and encouraged to send in 250–300-word abstract proposals along with a brief bio to ben.bascom@mail.wvu.edu before May 18, 2026. Please reach out to Ben Bascom with any questions leading up to the deadline if you would like to brainstorm or workshop a possible paper submission to receive feedback.