CFP Cinema and Posthuman Bodies (5/15/2025)

Cinema and Posthuman Bodies

deadline for submissions: 

May 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Asijit Datta

contact email: 

asijitdatta@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/03/28/cinema-and-posthuman-bodies

Cinema and Posthuman Bodies

Edited by Asijit Datta 

Let us begin with a few radical questions: If posthumanism indicates the ‘end of the human’ and an overhauling of humanistic modes of knowledge, does it also refer to the vanishing of the body?; or how do we define something as nebulous as a body, which is an embodied and extracted product of its surroundings?; or is it possible to arrive at a non-epistemic body or a body outside humanism’s claims and codes? Posthumanism interprets bodies as symbiotic, interrelational, transversal, contextually grounded, porous, and entangled assemblages of geo-biological, mythological-shapeshifting forces and various inorganic components. As a discourse, it practices the overcoming of traditional bodies and their cultural differences and instead imagines bodies that are non-anthropocentric, non-dualist, multiversal, cyborg, animalistic, deformed, extraterrestrial, sedimental, fossilized, archaeological, surgical, hybrid, digital, transitive, or all kinds of ‘post-humanist’ bodies that attack the heteronormative, straitjacketed, Vitruvian corporal frame of reference. Bodies, therefore, are not static objects open to anthropological or biological interrogation but represent dynamic, multi-layered forces that transcend all binaristic scaffoldings and form networks of interaction with non-human others in the ecosystem. In the course of history, the human body has moved through the routes of dualism (mind/body), differentiation (animal/human), anatomization (rise of medicine and remapping of entrails), prohibition (church/religion), perfection (Renaissance), industrialization (Industrial and French revolutions), transformation (World War and Avant-garde, Psychoanalysis), exploration (performance arts), regimentation (surveillance and biowarfare), and mutation (AI, biotechnology, and pandemics). Debates around the transmutation of bodies also raise concerns about the reproduction of cyberized figures, creation of artificial consciousness, transgenesis, uploading of memories onto a microchip (transubstantiation), or even cryopreservation. Where must we then urgently locate retaliatory, ‘obscene’ bodies in the age of the Anthropocene?

Science fiction, and especially horror films (found footage, creature features, psychological, slasher, zombie), seem to reinstate that the body given to us is prosthetic in nature. Despite being a heterogeneous amalgam and grounded in material-informational surroundings, the body has always reconstructed itself through substitutes and supplements. Film itself, as a medium, works as a widening device, extending the properties of the body inflicted with limitations. The need for physical replacements, additions, and erasures fundamentally emerges as a consequence of the aftereffects of death or the inevitability of death – the first generates fear, the other, shock. Somatic alterations imply a deep-seated proclivity in the human heart toward the unnatural, the bizarre, the traumatic. We are fascinated by the possibilities of our own primitive/futuristic bodies. Another intriguing thing to observe is that the metamorphosed person also seeks refuge in the monstrous identity of the other that they have now become. They are often posited as an object’s return to haunt the moral and ethical foundations of society or the body’s ways of dealing with its own anxieties. Gyrating and paroxysmic bodies move films beyond diegesis to some extra-sensory, spectatorial awakening. Eventually, bodies in such films endure metaphoric and polymorphic aftereffects of hyperconsumption. Genetic engineering, the atom bomb, the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, the Cold War, and the ever-evolving colonial tendencies exposed the body to a constant feeling of nervousness and vertigo. Bodies, then, as hosts, are continuously tied to a kind of disquieting reaction to the socio-political, historical, and climatic encroacher and violator residing inside. Even early horrors like Nosferatu (1922) or Frankenstein (1931) address the problems of identity and deformity. Right from the appropriation of material bodies by amorphous aliens in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Romero’s entrails-eating and pessimistic Night of the Living Dead (1968), to Cronenberg’s cosmetic implants and media meltdown in Videodrome (1983) and Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk metal fetishist Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and down to Friedkin’s archaeological-antichristian Exorcist (1973), Scott’s extraterrestrial onslaught in Alien (1979), Boyle’s virus-crazy 28 Days Later (2002), Garland’s synthetic intelligence in Ex Machina (2014), and the recent ecological and extinction horrors like Train to Busan (2016), Cargo (2017), Annihilation (2018), and Gaia (2021) tend to convert concepts and metaphors into flesh, and flesh into something transgressive and ungraspable. A more alarming phenomenon is the sudden arrival of bodily variations or body horror in cinema, linked with depression, gender constructs, capitalist maltreatment, the environment, mechanophilia, sexual awakening, self-upgradation, self-censorship, pregnancy, infections, and sometimes even the sheer terror of being decaying mortal things. The otherized versions that a body is exposed to also enable it for an empathetic recognition of the torment of human and nonhuman others. Therefore, bodies as affective bearers of precarious coding are exhibited as sites of struggle and lessening subjectivity. However, in their heterogeneous arrangement, these ‘vulgar’ bodies are also modes of resistance.

Finally, the boundaries of consciousness are overwhelmed by the inherent plasticity of the body. The torture and distortion of bodies in horror or speculative cinema reconfigures its borders and stretches it beyond the grotesque and the bestial. These neomaterialist bodies, with their disintegrated constitution, challenge the divinely ordained authorized agents of humanism and the paradigm of autonomous transhumanism. Posthumanism tries to push the body from disidentification to reidentification. Bodies, under the posthumanist lens, are artifacts, artistic fabrications, postnatural, and mediated. They are not some authentic unity-to-be-preserved, but rather chimerical, microbial, and non-unitary. Horror films are strange places of post-death human afterness that also provide openings for the microbes living inside us to migrate to other, happier spaces.

This edited volume is in search of articles that discuss the potentialities and pluralities embedded within diverse posthuman bodies in horror and speculative cinema. The book invites original contributions on topics related to:

 

Posthumanism and Folk Horror

Posthumanism and Zombies 

Posthumanism and Body Horror

Posthumanism and Slashers

Posthumanism and Ecohorror

Posthumanism and Monstrosity

Posthumanism and Body Invasions

Posthumanism and Aliens

Posthumanism and Disasters

Posthumanism and Parallel Universe

Posthumanism and Extinction

Posthumanism and Alternate Intelligence 

Posthumanism and Cyberpunk

Posthumanism and Dystopia

Posthumanism and Mutation 

Posthumanism and Found Footage

 

Specific Guidelines for Submission:

If interested, kindly send abstracts of 350 words, a 100-word bionote, and 5 keywords to kimoextraterrestrial@gmail.com by May 15th 2025. 

Publisher: Bloomsbury (yet to receive the contract)

Full-length articles (6000 - 8000 words) by 30 September 2025. 

 

For any queries, please contact Dr Asijit Datta (asijitdatta@gmail.com). 

Last updated April 1, 2025

CFP Monsters & Monstrous Bodies in American Culture and Society (3/13/2022; NEASA 6/10-11/2022)

Upcoming sponsored session. Sorry for the short notice.



CALL FOR PAPERS

MONSTERS & MONSTROUS BODIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

SPONSORED BY THE MONSTERS & THE MONSTROUS AREA OF THE NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE/AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION


PROPOSALS BY 13 MARCH 2022


We seek paper proposals of 250 words or less to complete a panel on the theme of “Monsters & Monstrous Bodies in American Culture and Society.” Presentations might focus on the representations of monsters and the monstrous in American dramatic or literary texts, visual media, or works of popular culture (such as comics, films, games, or television programing) or on the ways that monsters and the monstrous are created and/or perceived in American society.


This session has been proposed for the 2022 meeting of The New England American Studies Association (NEASA) to convene at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from 10-11 June 2022.



Please send your proposals, contact information, and a brief academic biography to the session organizers at Popular.Preternaturaliana@gmail.com. We will share them with the conference committee for approval.


***Please Note: Vaccination and masks will be required of all presenters and attendees.***

Questions about the conference and the submission process can be sent to the NEASA Conference Committee at NEASAcouncil@gmail.com.


NEASA will be awarding prizes for the year’s best presentation by a graduate student or non-tenure track scholar (Mary Kelley Prize) and by an undergraduate presenter (Lisa McFarlane Prize). The Lois P. Rudnick prize for the best academic book in American Studies written by a New England scholar or about New England in 2020-21 will also be awarded. (Details and deadlines at https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/9793082/new-england-american-studies-association-neasa-awards.)



Further details on The New England American Studies Association can be found at https://newenglandasa.wordpress.com/.


The Monsters & the Monstrous Area maintains a blog at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/ with more information about its objectives as well as resources for furthering the study of monsters.

 

CFP Conference series 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture (3/7/21; Conference series | 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture)

 

Conference series | 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/12/11/conference-series-50-shades-of-gothic-the-gothic-across-genre-and-media-in-us-popular

 

deadline for submissions: 

March 7, 2021

 

full name / name of organization: 

PopMeC research collective and academic blog

 

contact email: 

popmec.research@gmail.com

Confirmed keynote scholars so far: Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Xavier Aldana Reyes, Kyle Bishop, Kevin Corstorphine, Justin Edwards, Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Michael Howarth, Evert J. van Leeuwen, Elizabeth Parker + Michelle Poland, Julia Round, Christy Tidwell, Jeffrey Weinstock, Maisha L. Wester.

Please, check this page for updates on keynote talks and panels.

 

Defining the Gothic has proven to be a difficult and elusive task for scholars, possibly as this literary current often pervades cross-genre narratives and media, embracing many topics related to the very essence of human nature. Indeed, the nature of whatever it may mean to be human seems to be at the core of William Veeder’s definition the Gothic as a healing mechanism found in societies that “inflict terrible wounds upon themselves,” especially in order “to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity” (1998: 21). This wide definition of the Gothic acknowledges the pervasiveness of the genre and its ramifications when it comes to reacting—“healing and transforming” (1998: 21)—to the perils of societal structures and thus confronting the manifold disruptions of social and moral codes, as well as the actual and imagined fears intrinsic to the cyclical crises our societies face. The advent of modernity represented a major concern in the post-revolutionary United States. Inspired by the literary genre that emerged in 18th century England and its subsequent evolutions, Gothic fiction became a suitable means for exploring the newfound anxieties relating to the specific configurations of the colonial societies and their challenges as new communities. Drawing on European gothic tropes and arguably starting with Charles Brockden Brown’s tales, American Gothic fiction has been popular throughout the centuries up to the present day. Furthermore, many popular culture products engage—in more or less overt ways—with gothic elements in the attempt to confront myriads of conflicts, anxieties, and epochal concerns that have marked our societies. 

 

The struggle between dictated social conventions and the repressed, multifaceted self—liable to fragmented identity and ambiguity—has been central to Gothic narratives. Hidden moral, social, and scientific aspirations emerge, often accompanied by the tension toward a liberation of repressed desires and the fear of the consequences of such liberation. Moreover, the creation of taboos and moral codes set hierarchical boundaries for society to theoretically function without disruption. Gothic characters and dynamics blur such boundaries, thus facing social and psychological dilemmas peculiar to contemporary contexts, and strugglingagainst uncertainty, mistaken self-conceptions and perceptions of reality, contradictory behaviors, feelings of guilt, and exasperation. Terror might lie in altered psychological states, be intrinsic to an incomprehensible or unacceptable alien outsider, or haunt the places where a character would naturally feel safe.

Gothic modes have also been characterized by the notions of disturbance and indulgence, or by a peculiar sense of irony and self-consciousness. An underlying presence of the supernatural and the unspeakable quality of many anxieties facilitate revelations that often remain implicit to a complex narrative structure. Gothic narratives are populated by devil figures and dreamlike sequences that blur the line between the conscious and the unconscious. The conflicts permeated by gothic modes tackle the unresolved battle between good and evil, the tension between the body and the psyche, the passage from childhood to adulthood, and the transgression of social and moral codes. The gothic panoply includes spatial tropes (isolated places, Medieval monasteries, caves, graveyards, ruins, family houses, etc.); claustrophobic urban settings or overwhelming wilderness; scientific experiments that challenge divinity and defy the boundaries of knowledge; allegoricalnon-human entities; anxieties toward the future and technocratic realities; and ambivalent stances toward the past that oscillate between fear and attraction, and are fueled by the instability of memories.

In recent years, many popular culture artifacts outside of the usual terrain of horror and the Gothic have exploited Gothic modes to reveal the terrors of everyday life. Sophisticated narratives have employed gothic modes to take on disruption, questioning reality, as well as challenging the boundaries of conformity and raising issues related to xenophobia, death, social anxieties, alienation, displacement, and self-consciousness. Because of the versatility and diversity of gothic modes and their—more or less subtle—exploitation across media and popular culture products, we call for contributions fitting the thematic lines described below.

 

This is a call for presentations that will be organized thematically in different sessions, as detailed below. However, the analysis of any type of popular culture products across media is welcome. We invite presentations on gothic modes in film, (web)tv series, comics and graphic novels, video games, animation, products aimed at children and young adults, genre fiction, and theatrical performances.

Each session will be composed of a talk with a keynote speaker (30 min. approximately) followed by panels, each organized as a sequence of short presentations (each 12-15 min. maximum) and a moderated discussion among participants. Scholars at any stage of their career are welcome, and the panels will be organized accordingly.

Panels will be pre-recorded in their entirety: the presenters and moderators will agree on a date for the pre-recording, with a limited public composed of PopMeC editors. The session will be post-produced and uploaded to the PopMeC YouTube channel and social media platforms, according to the series’ calendar (to be defined, starting early April with an introductory session and streaming a new session every week). The participation in the sessions is free of charge.

 

PopMeC accepts presentation proposals (300-350 words approx.) about any aspect related to the call. The proposals will be peer-reviewed and selected on a rolling basis by our editorial team and external collaborators, who will get back to you as soon as possible. Please, send your proposal to popmec.call@gmail.com, attaching your text, inclusive of a short bio (100-120 words), name, affiliation, and email contact in a single file (.doc, .docx, .odt).

Organizing committee: Anna Marta Marini (PopMeC chief editor), Mónica Fernández (board editor), and associate editors Laura Álvarez, Paula Barba, Trang Dang, Michael Fuchs, Sofía Martinicorena.

 

THEMATIC SESSIONS:

 

1. THE HOUSE AS GOTHIC LOCUS + THE UNCANNY AND THE US FAMILY

Ever since the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839, the house as a locus of all sorts of personal, sexual and spatial tensions has been a preeminent site for the Gothic in US popular culture. In a country that had purportedly left the aristocracy of the Old World and its decaying ruins behind, the ordinary site of the family house became the favored space where gothic narratives and modes could be channeled, giving rise to a long-standing tradition that explores the perils lurking in the realm of the familiar. Gothic modes have been exploited to tackle the spatial dimension, especially in relation to the idea of home and family, family trauma, the destabilization of the domestic, the uncanny, and the idea of home as a metaphor for the nation.

Deadline for presentation proposals: February 28, 2021

 

2. GOTHIC AND THE ETHNIC OTHER + BODIES AND BOUNDARIES

Gothic narratives revolving around invading non-humans and unspoken anxieties related with the assumed dangers of “racial intrusion” have been used to elaborate more or less overtly on ethnic otherness. The contact and confrontation with the ethnic other have been linked to the unwanted blurring of both metaphorical and material boundaries. The ethnic minority body has been perceived as the unsettling product of a physical and cultural miscegenation, an unstable blend evoking ambiguous representations transgressively exotic and immorally, savagely inferior altogether. At the same time, Gothic narratives protagonized by ethnic minority subjects have been created, giving voice to their own anxieties and perceptions of ethnic boundaries and xenophobic terrors. 

Deadline for presentation proposals: March 7, 2021

 

3. ECOGOTHIC

American culture has maintained a strained relationship with nature and the environment ever since the arrival of the first settlers. The vast lands that they encountered were conceptualized simultaneously as a bountiful Garden of Eden that would facilitate the colonial experience, and as a “howling wilderness” that threatened the first, precarious settlements. Environment-related anxieties have permeated into all cultural forms, often through Gothic imagery. More recently, environmental concerns have more to do with the durability of the planet and the increasingly worrying consequences of human activities upon it, often resulting in (post)apocalyptic narratives. 

Deadline for presentation proposals: March 14, 2021

 

4. BODIES AND BOUNDARIES + GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE GOTHIC

Body-related anxieties have often been connected to gender, sexuality, and physical otherness, as fears and struggles intrinsic to the wish for liberating repressed, unconventional, or assumedly immoral desires. Socially imposed boundaries blur, connecting with feelings of guilt, degeneration, excess, disruption. The corporeal “other” becomes the image of transgression, depravity, and the breaking of taboos related to the body in all its forms. Themes related to sexual pleasure, physical abjection, body transformation, and gender become at the same time stigmas and boundaries to cross in order to express and face one’s own true self.

Deadline for presentation proposals: March 21, 2021

 

5. CHILDREN AND YA GOTHIC STUFF

Children and YA gothic narratives have dealt with anxieties related with development, a growing awareness of the self and one’s own sexuality, the transformations within the family environment, the increasing necessity to cope with external contexts. The creation of gothic worlds—belonging to either an alternative reality or the characters’ imagination—has also been exploited as a means to represent the complex passages between different stages of life, coming-of-age experiences, and conflicts internal to the characters’ everyday life as children.

Deadline for presentation proposals: March 28, 2021

 

6. AUTOMATA, CYBER TERROR AND TECHNOCRATIC REALITIES

The extent of contemporary human reliance on technology has stirred up new embodiments of the uncanny elements found in traditional gothic horror. As a response to the fear of technological advances, anxieties about the future and parasocial relationships, robots and automata have replaced the ghouls of our nightmares. Similarly, in lieu of a haunted mansion or a labyrinth, we come to find the liminal space of our technological anxieties represented in our immaterial existence in the online realm. 

Deadline for presentation proposals: April 4, 2021

 

Presenters will be welcome to submit an article related to their presentation topic, to be peer-reviewed and published on our platform (https://popmec.hypotheses.org ISSN: 2660-8839) as part of a special section dedicated to the subject. According to the feedback and participation the series raises, we will consider proposing the publication of an edited volume collecting selected contributions.

 

You can find this call published here: https://popmec.hypotheses.org/3576

 

Last updated January 12, 2021
.