Join us for the final Winter DS Brown Bag talk! Denise Grollmus, Dept of English. Friday, March 1, 12 pm, MGH 024.
Title: “The Sacred Disease: Narratives of Addiction and the Making of the Post-Secular Self”
Date: Fri, March 1st, 12-1 pm
Location: MGH 024, UW Seattle (the D Center)
Abstract:
“The Sacred Disease” explores how twentieth and twenty-first century addiction narratives employ religious discourses that challenge addiction’s pathologization and criminalization, as well as the ontological assumptions that undergird these articulations. Each chapter examines a contemporary text that routes addiction through a specific religious framework, including: a Pueblo cosmovision in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, a Catholic conception of original sin in Mary Karr’s memoir Lit, the Catholic sacrament of penance in Lars von Trier’s film Nymph()maniac; and Voodoo, Santeria, and Brujeria in the television show True Blood. Contrary to suspicious readings of addiction narratives – which read their use of religious and spiritual discourses as disciplinary – "The Sacred Disease" uses these frameworks’ religious hermeneutics to theorize and model modes of reparative reading that show how these stories effectively resist white, heteronormative, and masculinist demands for liberal self-governance. I argue these religious frameworks not only revise medical and moral definitions of addiction, but also reframe conventional notions of disease and agency. They do so precisely because they employ more holistic, porous, and context-dependent ontologies than dominant Cartesian dualisms. Thus, these stories express addiction and recovery as developing a syncretic (what I mean by “post-secular”) selfhood that enables life-sustaining networks of mutual aid and interdependence as opposed to self-governing secular subjecthood. While scientific models of addiction pathologize dependence and disavow the supernatural, these stories enact addiction recovery through interdependent and post-secular processes, enabling a capacious, antiracist, and holistic notion of well-being. My work intervenes not only in the privileging of critique as a dominant interpretive method, but also participates in the effort to offer alternatives to liberal accounts of agency and to reposition religion in literary studies. In this talk, she’ll be discussing how disability studies informs her project, as well as how it makes crucial interventions in the field.
Bio:
Denise Grollmus is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Washington, where she successfully defended her dissertation on December 6. She applies queer, feminist, critical race, and affect theories to study issues of religion and secularism in twentieth and twenty-first century American Literatures and Cultures. She is also a journalist and creative writer whose public scholarship has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus.
Accessibility Information:
CART captioning and ASL interpretation have been requested. The D Center is mobility-aid accessible and a scent-free space. We thank the D Center for hosting the DS brown bags this quarter!
Contact: Joanne, jwoiak@uw.edu