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 FRAME 36.1 “Dying Wor(l)ds” (Spec. Issue, proposals by 12/7/2022)

FRAME 36.1 “Dying Wor(l)ds”

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/31/frame-361-%E2%80%9Cdying-worlds%E2%80%9D

deadline for submissions:
December 7, 2022

full name / name of organization:
FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies

contact email:
info@frameliteraryjournal.com



In “Land Sickness”, Nikolaj Schultz describes how he goes on vacation to “detach from the material consequences of [his] existence,” but upon arrival on a French island, he is once more faced with the material reality of existence, as the island’s coastline is eroding, caused by rising sea levels and the pressure of foreign tourism. He writes: “Neither Pareto, Marx or Bourdieu died in vain, but none of them offer a language sufficient to articulate the geo-social struggle for territory that unfolds on the island. I myself lack a language to understand what is happening.” How indeed, does one think and write about the world that is disappearing under our feet?

FRAME’s next issue is titled “Dying Wor(l)d’s” and accordingly focuses on questions of death and dying, in our world and our language. The understanding of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch has highlighted humanity’s ineffable impact on the planet we inhabit, but simultaneously, the Anthropocene continually draws attention to humanity’s inability to act upon that understanding. The cultural apathy that arises in discussions about the planet and our future illustrates our inability to think and write about such matters. We would like to invite scholars of literary studies and related fields to consider the (textual) implications of dying worlds and dying words. What happens when we, like Nikolaj Schultz, find ourselves without the vocabulary to express the loss we experience around us? Is literature able to narrate such complex matters, or is the environmental crisis also an illustration of the limits of literature—or indeed, the death of literature, brought about by the ‘poisonous gift’ that Bruno Latour titled the Anthropocene? And yet, there is a promise of global survival. Anna Tsing writes, while landscapes globally are dying, “[i]n a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin” (6). How can we react to wor(l)ds dying?

Themes and topics related to these questions might include, but are not limited to:

• The death of animal species and ecosystems
• The use of death as narrator in literature
• Cultural mediation of disasters
• The human as destructive agent
• Gothic literature and its anticipation of disaster
• Cultural representation of good and evil
• The death of literature, including increased illiteracy or the death of the physical book
• (Eco)mourning
• Posthumanism or the death of the human
• The Great Dyings
• The death of Indigenous and minority languages

The above questions and concerns are only a few of the many themes that could be explored in the upcoming issue. However, we would like to stress that while FRAME encourages interdisciplinary and creative approaches, every proposal/article should show a clear connection to literary studies, as we are a literary journal first and foremost.

If you are interested in writing for FRAME, please submit a brief proposal of max. 500 words before 7 December 2022. Proposals should include a thesis statement, general structure and a preliminary reflection on the theories and discourses in which the argument will be situated. On the basis of all abstracts, contributors whose proposals are accepted will be notified by 15 December 2022, and asked to submit a draft version of the paper before 11 January 2023. Be mindful that we hold the right to reject draft versions to ensure consistency and coherence across all contributions to the issue. The deadline for the article’s first full version will be 26 February 2022, after which the editing process will begin. A regular article has a word limit of 6000 words, including bibliography and footnotes. For our Masterclass section, graduate and PhD students are invited to write up to a maximum of 4000 words. Please feel free to contact us at info@frameliteraryjournal.com, should you have any questions. More information about our journal, as well as our submission guidelines, can be found on our website: www.frameliteraryjournal.com.




categories
cultural studies and historical approaches
ecocriticism and environmental studies
journals and collections of essays
theory
world literatures and indigenous studies

Last updated November 3, 2022

CFP Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century (11/30/2019)

CFP: Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century
In CFP On September 5, 2019
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2019/cfp-not-dead-but-dreaming-reading-lovecraft-in-the-21st-century/

Edited Volume CFP

Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century

In the one hundred and twenty-nine years since his birth, H. P. Lovecraft’s reputation has grown beyond all expectation. Not only has he influenced generations of readers, but he has also influenced scores of people in areas such as filmmaking, television, comics, music, and literary theory. Because interest in Lovecraft continues to grow, our intention is to explore some of the reasons why he has become so influential—and so indispensable—since the early 1990s. From his stories of human degeneration that started with “The Tomb” and “Dagon” to the cosmic horror that culminated in The Shadow out of Time and “The Haunter of the Dark,” the less than 20 years that Lovecraft devoted to a career in fiction produced narratives that remain popular among a growing number of readers who follow his work from multiple areas of interest. Additionally, Lovecraft’s literary production in general has also become increasingly relevant from an academic perspective since at least the 1990s. In this volume, we want to reflect on the possible reasons for Lovecraft’s expanding popularity and the significance of his legacy as we entered the digital age. Consequently, we are interested in research that focuses on the significance of Lovecraft’s work from the 1990s to the present day.

Possible topics to explore in the work of Lovecraft and its connection with the 1990s to the present might include, but are not limited to:

• The Anthropocene
• Influence in videogames
• Lovecraft Adaptations, including his influence on film and art in general
• Lovecraft’s philosophical thought
• Lovecraft’s poetry
• Lovecraft related RPGs and LARs
• Lovecraftian families
• Object Oriented Ontology
• Posthumanism
• Postmodernism

Please send a proposal of about 500 words, for chapters of 6000-7000 words, and a short biography to Tony Alcala antonio.alcala@tec.mx or Carl Sederholm csederholm@gmail.com, by 30 Nov 2019.

Contributors can expect to be selected and notified by 15th December 2019. The deadline for submission of completed articles will be 30 May 2019.

CFP Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction (7/16/2018)

Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/22/edited-collection-on-young-adult-gothic-fiction

deadline for submissions: July 16, 2018

full name / name of organization: Dr Michelle Smith and Dr Kristine Moruzi

contact email: Michelle.Smith@monash.edu



Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction

The twenty-first century has seen a marked increase in the Gothic themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality in fiction for young adults. While Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008) is the most well-known example of Gothic young adult fiction, it is part of a growing corpus of hundreds of novels published in the genre since the turn of the millennium. During this period, the Gothic itself has simultaneously undergone a transformation. The Gothic monster is increasingly presented sympathetically, especially through narration and focalisation from the “monster’s” perspective. In YA Gothic, the crossing of boundaries that is typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her “type”. In addition, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human, particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity, contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are also being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

Yet the Gothic also operates within young adult fiction to enable discussions about fears and anxieties in relation to a variety of contemporary concerns, including environmentalism, human rights, and alienation. Catherine Spooner suggests that the Gothic takes the form of a series of revivals. In the proposed collection we seek to explain what the current Gothic revival in YA fiction signifies and call for papers engaging with any aspect of Gothic fiction published for young adults since 2000.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• The Gothic and the posthuman
• The paranormal romance
• The monstrous feminine
• The adolescent body
• The evolution of canonical monsters including the vampire, the werewolf, the witch
• Postfeminism and the Gothic
• The Gothic and race
• Gothic spaces
• Gothic historical fiction

The editors are currently preparing a proposal for a university press Gothic series, in which the publisher has already expressed preliminary interest.

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and a biographical note of up to 150 words to both Dr Kristine Moruzi (kristine.moruzi@deakin.edu.au) and Dr Michelle Smith (michelle.smith@monash.edu) by 16 July 2018.

Full papers of 6000 words will be due by 1 December 2018.