Nov. 2025 Meeting Notes: Raw Material by O’Connor

Our November 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 5:30pm in the HHIVE Lab, also known as Greenlaw 524 or Gaskin Library, with options for members to join via Zoom as well.

We discussed the scholarly monograph Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture by Erin O’Connor (Duke UP, 2000). Specifically, we asked everyone to focus on the following:

• Chapter 3: “Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation (pp. 102-147)
• Suggested optional reading: “Introduction” (pp. 1-20)

If you missed the meeting, you can still access the texts on the Readings page of this site!

You can also access the recording of our meeting here.

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This was our final meeting of the semester! We will resume regular meetings in January 2026, and the dates are already posted to the site for all of our spring 2026 meetings. We will be in touch soon with more details about the topic for our January 2026 meeting!

O’Connor, Erin. Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Duke University Press, 2000. Duke University Press Books, https://doi-org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1215/9780822397762.

Meeting Notes (courtesy of LMCC Co-Director Mindy Buchanan-King):

• Paul: Enjoyed this reading overall; O’Connor has clever wordplay. What are others’ thoughts re: body is constructed and amputation engendered and the function of prosthetics and concealing disfigurement
• Desire: She uses the Marxist lens to look at the rhetoric of production, and development of rhetoric around breast cancer. It’s interesting in the context of what we’re reading today. Something about “The way that biological scripts are mapped onto cultural bodies”: the absolute truth, the mechanism used to do that is biological to reaffirm social beliefs. Written in the 1990s critical analysis.
• Paul: The idea of metaphor, and the connection between the limb and the human body and industry; the man needs to be whole so he can work. Everything as a cog in the machine; each worker is a series of parts in this industrial body. Also making a commentary about industry being a cause for dismemberment, or through industrial machinery. It’s okay, because we can also fix it. A way to obfuscate the problem of modernity, even talking about the sports events sponsored by railways: the endorsement of a prosthetic. The connection between industry and capitalism.
• Desire: The efficiency and malleability of prosthetics, but the ability to take them off. Thinking of prosthetics as enhancements and introducing the body to new situations. How O’Connor deals with the maintenance of the body, and questions about thing theory.
• Paul: Even early on, thinking about canes and walking sticks as a kind of prosthesis. O’Connor notes how actual prostheses can be removed similarly: novel ways to inhabit the body.
• Desire: O’Connor calls to household items, via Dickens and even Poe. Ways of pathologizing in different lenses.
• Claire: What does O’Connor’s work do for Paul’s work?
• Paul: This semester, in reformulating own research, in particular to construction and destruction of the body, whether through combat, surgery, dentistry, or even grooming. The way body parts are put on display and transmitted. Originally focused on WWI, but “George Dedlow” by Silas Weir Mitchell is on there. Talked in October about “Dedlow” and the question of reality versus hyperbole or fictional accounts.
• Claire: Read a piece about O’Connor called “Camera Medica,” and why medical photography gets written out of history. Medical photography has to make pathology surface; she talks about visibility and the origins of amputation and deformity. It’s more about Foucault all the way through; she complicates the idea of blunt realism of photography. In working on the literary history of polio and teaching herself about the case histories that are about the fundamentally narrative structure of case histories. This is about the necessity of story and how patients used to be involved in case histories. This essay, as focused on it is on prosthesis without disability studies (which is fine)—she’s reading literature almost entirely allegorically, without any analysis. She’s missing opportunities to earn more thoroughly the metaphor of prosthesis. She lost the specific historical force of what she’s doing.
• Desire: O’Connor addresses this issue in her Introduction, saying she’s applying a literary approach to non-literary things. Still wouldn’t categorize this as literary studies; the analysis was more spot-on, without doing deep language work.
• Claire: Wanting to know about pre-disposition of audiences to mistake fiction and non-fiction, then to undo the binary between fiction and non-fiction. That’s a really false line; there’s an assembly of stray parts. Craving this to be more as inventive of the imagined readers of these texts than the idea of the prosthesis.
• Desire: Bri had some insights into Silas Weir Mitchell’s readers. In reading the Afterword, heard entire classes built around O’Connor’s work. O’Connor seems to have laid the groundwork for many later scholars.
• Camille: The weakest part was trying to connect her work to 1990s theory; it felt tacked on. O’Connor does say that it’s a secondary goal of her book, to look at how metaphors and allegories and ways of thinking of the body—in relation to industry and capitalism—are still permeating into today’s world, even though we think we’re being transgressive. This chapter didn’t feel fully developed in terms of that relationship. O’Connor focused on a specific set of cultural theorists; felt a bit too shallow at the end.
• Desire: O’Connor does talk about Haraway and the “Cyborg Manifesto” and the way O’Connor does want to take it more into monsters and monstrosities. Several texts like Geek Love come up in the Afterword. The Afterword felt like the more frustrating part of O’Connor’s text. Her key takeaways: trying to rethink the concept of monsters (what is a monster, what is monstrosity?), what does it mean to read a figure as a human oddity and to plant that onto the figure of the monster.
• Carmen: Interesting that the thing that robbed these men of their masculinity was performing their masculinity. Many lost their limbs because they were going to war; the way that was restored was through prosthesis, then they could return to being a man by being a laborer.
• Desire: That was an interesting idea and thinking about the malleability of masculinity, and molding that to a Victorian ideal. On p. 6, in the Introduction, Victorians saw disease as something made and something indicative of being part of the labor force. That seems to contradict the idea that being seen in public—that visibility—needs to be restored. Would like for O’Connor to come back to that idea.
• Camille: Use of the word “illth” as a combination of illness and wealth; the productive body was marked in certain ways.
• Claire: This is a vital point about one being injured by industrial labor, and the prosthesis as returning him to that labor. Drawing our attention to the sense that manhood needed only to exist in the body; it needed to exist in work. Page 130 really gets to this idea.
• Paul: The idea of labor and social mobility. Thinking, too, about Pat Barker’s Regeneration novels, and the paradox of dealing with the thing that caused an injury, then returning to that site of injury. Also the questions of visibility and invisibility, and the desire to hide it. The goal is to trick people into thinking you’ve had no injury. Performing your masculinity, it’s a matter of getting back to it.
• Carmen: Being a man is constantly putting your manhood at risk.
• Paul: Strange interplay between engendered amputation and the stump being feminized. The stump as hysterical—the amputated body as a “split personality.”
• Carmen: Maybe stumps are gendered themselves more than the whole body to offer a solution. (Replacing the missing limb with a prosthesis “fixes” the femininity and restores masculinity to the body.)
• Mindy: Question of facial disfigurement and how facial prosthetics may have been read by O’Connor.
• Camille: Going back to the hysterical stump, and the “spasmodic”—having a life of its own—and how it would be figured in the nineteenth century. Thinking of Emily Martin’s Woman of the Body and how scientific language is still coded along gender lines, like the “mass of quivering jelly” of the stump. Without the prosthesis, the man is also sexually impotent, and how O’Connor codes that language. The little tidbits and facts thrown in were interesting, like the sports awards going to a prosthetic manufacturer. Although, in some ways, there are still conversations around that, like the question of what are acceptable prosthetics (enhancement versus returning to baseline function). Now we’re getting into a different technological space where we have to think along the lines of enhancement.
• Desire: The time period she’s thinking of is the starting point of engagement with capitalism and commerce. Also thinking of policies and thinking about legislative language. That forward thinking O’Connor is trying to do is an interesting point, now that we’re in the future (relative to this text).
• Paul: The examples in O’Connor about testimonials to the use of prosthetics. If you’re going to make an artificial limb, why not make it better than what most people have. (The “artificial replacement” becomes the new standard or ideal.) That leads to thinking about modern cosmetics and beauty enhancements.
• Desire: O’Connor’s use of “ideals” and how that sets the stage for mental health discourse, about pharmaceuticals and what’s needed to function. What are the metrics of wholeness? How do we assess what wholeness is? Thinking about self-assessments; the self does not exist in a vacuum. Also other kinds of “scripts” to think about how that wholeness is defined. The argument undergirding this book is capitalism, and what that does to our ideals of wholeness.
• Paul: Thinking about how much can I lose while I’m still me? Going back to disability studies, thinking about prescriptions, some people don’t want to take medicine because they feel like part of them may be “amputated” in a way as a result of taking medications.
• Desire: O’Connor’s point about alcoholism via Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” is influenced both by alcohol (artificial support?) and living with/as a prosthetic. Something beyond the biological self…
• Camille: O’Connor is also saying re: narrativizing selfhood, she says she’s working back on scholarship that just conceptualizes interiority. She’s showing that selfhood is also materially constituted, and doing it quite effectively. The class element is interesting; the material selfhood she looks at is mostly working class. Whereas the complex psychological figure is thinking more about the bourgeois.
• Desire: Range of types of examples between the introduction and the afterword; learned a lot from this reading.
• Claire: This reading sparked a lot; thinking about bourgeois and the category of the “normal,” which is also a product of the nineteenth century and the history of the novel. There’s an implicit standard of normality that runs through this.
• This was our final meeting for fall 2025. The dates for the spring 2026 meetings are confirmed and posted to the LMCC website.

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Note: The featured image for this post is an image taken from O’Connor’s monograph (p. 118). The full caption (which appears on p. 119) reads:

Fig. 6. (opposite) Pictures of incompletion. From B. A. Watson, Treatise on Amputation of the Extremities and Their Complications (1885). Courtesy of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia.