Author Topic: Bodily Transgressions in Gothic TV - Deadline: 2021-09-24  (Read 2159 times)

nicholasdiak

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Bodily Transgressions in Gothic TV - Deadline: 2021-09-24
« on: September 18, 2021, 02:47:22 PM »
Call for Papers: Bodily Transgressions in Gothic TV – Console-ing Passions 2022

The recent boom in horror films and scholarship testifies to the rich generic, thematic, and formal spaces the gothic provides for engaging what scares, horrifies, and haunts us. As seen in films like Get Out (2016) and The Invisible Man (2020), horror and gothic texts have particular power to speak, especially in the current moment, to marginalized, oppressed, and Othered subjectivities. However, the self-versus-other gatekeeping and disciplinary taste cultures which long excluded the horror film from gothic studies, and which dismissed the gothic itself as a monstrously hybridized, corrupted form, continue to neglect the televisual. This panel seeks to redress such erasures by interrogating the surge in horror and gothic TV over the last decade, including series like American Horror Story, Penny Dreadful, The Haunting of Hill House, Sharp Objects, and Lovecraft Country.

As with older cinematic and literary forms, such recent television confirms the centrality of the body to the gothic, which has long spectacularized bodily transgressions, bodily transformations, and body horror. As Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) demonstrates, the gothic encompasses and exposes the uncanny experience of being a body vulnerable to mutilation, pain, and death as well as the way corporeal fears and anxieties about transgressive bodies/bodily transgressions are connected to social constructions of the normative body. The body gothic, Reyes argues, explores the body’s expectations and limits, and the promise and horror of its breaching. This panel calls for papers that explore the themes and politics of bodily transgression in horror and/or gothic television (or television incorporating horror or gothic elements).
Potential topics include:

• Bodily transgression/transgressive bodies configured in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and/or nationality.
• Body horror and/or the gothic body as a mode for exploring experiences of racism and/or racialized violence; misogyny and/or gender violence; or nativism.
• Contemporary and/or historical anxieties about the body: the national body, the gendered body, the dis/abled body, the racialized body, the techno-scientific body, the surgical body, the aged body, etc.
• Connections between bodily transgression and the sublime or metaphysical; the uncanny, the abject, the grotesque, or the repressed.
• Bodily transgression and the exploration of borders, limits, and boundaries of space, place, time, and/or identity.
• “The promise of its breaching” - bodily transgressions as radical or liberating.
• Themes of torture, mutilation, gore, and dismemberment in relation to tropes of the mystic, the occult, and the supernatural.
• Transgressive bodily transformations, hybridization, or reproduction -- racial, gendered, human, national, etc.
• Explorations of the body around gothic hauntings, contaminant, and entrapment.
• Embodied monsters and the monstrous.

Please send a 250 word abstract and short bio to Jackie Pinkowitz and Lucia Palmer at pinkowitz_jm@mercer.edu and lucia.palmer@mga.edu by Friday September 24. Notice of decisions will be sent by Sunday September 26.

The 2022 Console-ing Passions Conference will be held at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, June 23-25.