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Abstract
Richard Sennett has suggested that throughout its history, western civilization “has had persistent trouble in honouring the dignity of the body and diversity in human bodies” (15). This is particularly true in urban spaces, where diverse types of bodies come into contact, intermingle, and disperse. The bodily freedoms of the industrialized city have given way to a body rendered passive through the technologies of speed; the mobile, contemporary body traverses vast stretches of urban and suburban conglomerations without having to actively engage with that space. Consequently, the risk of “feeling something or someone as alien” (Sennett) and the aversion toward physical and moral “contamination” demands urban designs which increasingly disengage privileged bodies from the urban environment while marginalizing others.

If the body has served as a model for specific forms of urban design and spatial practice throughout history, it has also served as a symbol of social and political collectivities and of the nation. While the discourses of colonialism and nation-building are invariably modelled on the male European body, this “master image of the body” cannot be contained, for it is undermined by the reality that “each human body is physically idiosyncratic” (Sennett). Consequently, those bodies which correspond to this idealized model are construed as proper, privileged bodies, while others are understood as abject, transgressive, and potentially polluting bodies which must be expelled or rendered docile through various technologies of surveillance, marginalization, and control.

This panel invites papers that discuss representations of “scandalous bodies” in the Canadian and/or American city within a comparative and inter-disciplinary perspective. Whether in terms of "race," ethnicity, class, gender, ableness, or sexual orientation, the body is a “surface of inscription” (Grosz), and the ways in which certain bodies are represented or symbolically situated in urban space reveals that such errant bodies are perceived as a threat to the proper collective body. Topics may include discussions of the body in relation to ghettoization, moral panic, urban violence, homelessness, border spaces, surveillance, constructions of gender in public space, and “queer space.” As pliable flesh,” Grosz suggests, “the body becomes a text, a system of signs to be deciphered, read, and read into.” Please send 250 word proposals by email to domenic.beneventi@gmail.com