VariAbilities 2025
Representing the Body:
Exploring Unique Representations across Visual Disciplines
To be held at
Mercy University
11-15 June 2025, New York, U.S.A.
The representation of the body is a fundamental aspect of
human culture, reflecting societal values, norms, and power structures. From
ancient civilizations to contemporary times, various visual disciplines have
been employed to create different forms of bodily representation to convey meaning, express
emotions, to teach and tell stories. This conference seeks to examine a wide
range of representations across multiple visual forms, and across a wide
history, shedding light on the ways in which they intersect, diverge, and
influence one another.
Some of the key questions we
shall address might be: How do different visual disciplines (e.g., medical
imagery and illustration, painting, photography, sculpture) represent the human
body, and what are the implications of these representations? What role does
performance play in bodily representation, and how do various forms of
performance (e.g., doctor/patient interactions, dance, theatre, music) shape
our understanding of the body? How do word-based and image-based portrayals of
the body differ (e.g. literary and cinema, poetry and portraits), and what
insights can be gained by comparing these approaches?
In what ways do
representations of the body reflect social attitudes towards gender, race,
class, VariAbility, and other forms of identity?
These some of the many questions you may wish to explore, you may have others!
Programme
Friday, June 13th,
2025
9:00-9:15
Registration
9:20-10:20 Session
1
Visual
Representations of the Human Body: Health Literacy Supporting Icon Development
Corrine Hajjar,
University of California San Diego
Emojis: The Digital
Body in Expression, Psychology, and Technology
Damien Germino,
Mercy University
10:30-11:30 Session
2
Psyche, Soma, and Cyberpsychosis: Representations and Consequences of Cyborg
Situations in
Cyberpunk Story and
Media
Chris Loots, Mercy
University
The Cultural and
Political Monster: David Cronenberg’s Body Horror as Disability
Representation and
Identity Crisis
Billie Anderson,
Western University
11:40-12:40 Keynote
Address I
Chris Mounsey,
University of Winchester
12:40-2:10 Lunch
Break
2:15- 3:45 Session
3
Ethiopian Healing
Scrolls and the Afflicted Body
Xiaoli Pan, Rutgers
University
“The most perfect
human beauty is that most free from deformity either of body or mind”: John
Flaxman’s Corporeal
Instruction at the Royal Academy of Arts
Joshua Hainey,
University of North Iowa
Frida Kahlo as
Wounded Storyteller
Madeline Sutherland
Meier, University of Texas Austin
4:00-5:00 Session 4
Languorous
Bodies/Laboring Bodies: Imaging Parisian Sex Work during the Belle Époque
Jacqueline Banigan,
University of Iowa
Divinely Human: The
Transformative Power of Naturalism in the Works of Caravaggio
Heather Thorpe
Saturday, June
14th, 2025
9:00-10:00 Session
5
Achilles on Skyros:
Clothes Make the (Wo)Man
Lillian Joyce, The
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Hiding in Plain
Sight: The LGBTQ+ Artists of the Fifteen Gallery in Manhattan
David Stewart, The
University of Alabama in Huntsville
10:15-11:15 Session
6
Performing Gender
in the Historic Circus
Betsey Golden
Kellem
Gendered Difference
and the Tree-Human Body in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French
Art
Amelia Goldsby, The
University of Iowa
11:30-12:30 Keynote
Address II
Anatomy into Art: the Anatomical Imaginary in Enlightenment France
Dorothy Johnson,
The University of Iowa
12:30-2:00 Lunch
Break
2:00-3:30 Session 7
Would you like to
see my feet?”: Post-polio syndrome and embodiment
Maddy Mant,
University of Toronto
Title TBA
Jennifer Biener,
Mercy University
Associations
Between Toxic Industrial Air Emissions and Dementia Risk
Breanna Crane
3:40-4:40 Session 8
A Mysterious
Malady: The Effects of Lovesickness on the Body in Nineteenth- Century British
Art
Anna Isabel, The
University of Iowa
The Indispensable
Eye: Interpreting Vision in Odilon Redon’s Eyes in the Forest
Abigail Yoder,
Saint Louis Museum of Art
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