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ABSTRACT Mar 18
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Dostoevsky and Disability (MLA 2025, Guaranteed Panel) (MLA 2025)

New Orleans
Organization: International Dostoevsky Society
Event: MLA 2025
Categories: Comparative, Popular Culture, Literary Theory, Women's Studies, Aesthetics, Anthropology/Sociology, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Food Studies, History, Philosophy, Eastern European, Science
Event Date: 2025-01-09 to 2025-01-12 Abstract Due: 2024-03-18

This guaranteed panel brings the multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky's work -- including those with physical dis/abilities, chronic illnesses, emotional-cognitive differences, or the deaf, blind, or non-verbal -- into conversation with the growing fields of Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities within Slavic Studies.

In light of the Presidential Theme of Visibility, we urge scholars to go beyond abstraction and metaphor, examining the political positions, socio-economic worldviews, and existential stakes that shaped how disability and the disabled were framed in Dostoevsky's oeuvre.
 
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
 
- Disability and identity (personal selfhood, social role, etc.) in Dostoevsky
- Tensions between socio-political, medical, and religious constructions of disability
- Tensions between body-, mind-, and soul-centered approaches to disability
- The relationship between disability and sexuality
- Gendered disability or feminist approaches to disability
- Disability and nationality or ethnicity
- The performance of disability in Dostoevsky
- Disability, deviance, and sin
- Addiction through a critical disability lens
- The traumatized, ageing, or chronically ill body
- How disability is taken up in adaptations of Dostoevsky's works
 
Please submit a brief bio and 250-300 word abstract by March 18, 2024 to Melanie Jones at mvjones@bard.edu.

mvjones@bard.edu

Melanie Jones