Bodily fictions: Ethnology and gynecology in American literature

Bodily Fictions: Ethnology and Gynecology in American Literature considers how ethnology and gynecology, which are so invested in bodily difference, can then conflate those differences theoretically and methodologically as a mode of physical, psychic, and social containment, and how American novelists have responded to these constructions of the human body in different and related ways. This dissertation takes as its starting point the human body's construction as a legible text within American popular culture as well as medical and scientific discourse and, more importantly, the failure of bodily legibility as a central tension in American Literature and culture.; Bodily Fictions first situates "transparency" as a central trope in American literature, one that finds its theoretical base at the intersection of ethnological and gynecological discourses. Second, it fleshes out the novel's function within the dialectic between science, medicine, and literature and assesses the ways in which the form of the novel contributes to this conversation by mediating the "real" and the imagined, thereby forming a liminal space within which not only the theories of the body can be mapped out, tested, and complicated, but also contest the very rubrics of analysis that assume bodily legibility. Previous critical work has demonstrated how bodies have been racialized and gendered through medical and scientific discourse. Bodily Fictions contests the very structure of the signifiers used to perform such work on the human body by considering novels that have taken to task the very notion of corporeal transparency. Ethnology and gynecology both racialize and gender bodies and arrange them in taxonomic and hierarchical relation to one another by aligning these identificatory categories with biological, and therefore unalterable, pathology. In so doing, this dissertation explores the American novel as a critical and resistant site wherein the body is written outside and in collision with the rubrics made available for reading the human body through ethnology's and gynecology's pervasive lenses.