Wow, okay. We made it! This is my last assignment* of college, like, ever, so finishing it is more bittersweet than I expected (still mostly sweet, don’t get me wrong). During our final Zoom meeting when asked to reflect on the course, I talked about one of the first times I spoke up in class, proclaiming “urethra” to an unfazed Professor Farmer. While writing this, it occurred to me that instead of shouting “eureka!” when he had a stroke of brilliance, I hope Rabelais shouted “urethra!”
While Juliana’s appetizer presentation on the relationship between illness and the grotesque became all too relevant in the second half of the semester, this class remained a bright spot. Reading Rabelais was always a way to escape some of the boredom or, perhaps less frequent but more frankly, fear that consumed the semester, and I regret that none of us ever acknowledged Matt’s weekly on-theme Zoom backgrounds.
The Bakhtinian notions of the grotesque and the carnivalesque consume my thoughts. I rarely encounter something and do not find myself wondering about false crownings or inverted hierarchies concerning that thing. Also, how’d you like that play on “consume” at the beginning of this paragraph? You know, like food? Forgive me, I am a jaded senior.
I won’t go into this too much, as a lot of my final project focused on similar themes, but I’m extremely grateful for our conversations about fatness and fat studies in this course. Junior year, I took a class on the sociology of the body, and our only reading about fat bodies concerned medical weight loss procedures. This was the first time in four years that I felt able to appreciate bodies that resemble my own and that I identify with in an academic or classroom setting.
I’ve got about one more paragraph left in me before I return to my Animal Crossing villagers (Audie just moved in, it’s very exciting), so I’ll leave with some parting thoughts concerning my reactions to our course readings as prompted in the reflection description. I find myself thinking about the character of Panurge and the relationship between misogyny and the grotesque. I think it is fascinated how gendered presentations of the carnivalesque and grotesque vary, and how sexual discourse and emphasis is distributed.
What if I call this post “Urethra! I’ve Done It!”? I think I am going to do that. Hopefully it’s good for one last laugh in this class.
*Okay, I lied, I have one more final essay for another course. But I don’t want to do it, so as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t exist in my plane of being yet.
