Queer Horror: A Companion
deadline for submissions: September 30, 2024
full name / name of organization: Michael Wheatley
contact email: michaeldavidwheatley@gmail.com
source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/06/18/queer-horror-a-companion
“To create a broad analogy, monster is to ‘normality’ as homosexual is to heterosexual” (Benshoff, 1997). This quote, well worn within the pages of academic criticism, speaks to how the connection between queer identity and the horror genre is now so established as to become indivisible. From Frankenstein’s Creature to Dracula, the Babadook to Jennifer Check, in fiction and in film these monstrous queers “live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted, they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived” (Machado, 2020). Kirsty Logan, in the Foreword to It Came From the Closet, suggests that “horror [never] gives us LGBTQIA+ people accurate representation. The best we can have is a reflection: an image mirrored, turned backwards; an image in shifting water, wavering and distorted” (2023). However, in The Celluloid Closet and beyond, the closeted monsters of the closeted text have now been routinely outed. Queer horror, too, is no longer the sole domain of monstrous metaphors, but a pluralistic space in which to thematise queer anxieties and to foreground non-hegemonic sexual identities, gender expressions and narrative approaches. Pitched as part of Peter Lang’s Genre Fiction and Film Companion series, Queer Horror: A Companion thus seeks to collate a diverse volume showcasing how the label of ‘queer horror’ transcends the trauma of its shadowed roots into an explicit exploration, vital resuscitation, and ultimate celebration of queerness itself. Following after New Queer Horror’s movement away from “a simplistic binarised negotiation of identification between normative (straight) protagonists and the non-normative (queer) monster” (Elliot-Smith & Browning, 2020), Queer Horror: A Companion looks to foreground explicit queer narratives (Chucky, Monstrilio) and the queer creators imbuing their works with queer sensibilities (Kyle Edward Ball, Carmen Maria Machado, Christopher Landon). Across new forms and mediums, such as video games and podcasts, queer horror moves towards intrinsically queer narratives of homophobic abuse (Femme), alienation (I Saw the TV Glow) and romance (Love Lies Bleeding). And, much as Pride has given way to Pride Progress, so too do works of queer horror emerge that centre underrepresented identities including intersex (Sorrowland), bisexuality (Jennifer’s Body), or explore unwritten narratives such as domestic abuse between partners of the same sex (In the Dream House). Queer Horror: A Companion thus seeks to channel this multiplicity into wide-reaching and inclusive analyses of the many modes and inflections that queer horror adopts today. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- of specific genres and sub-genres, especially those held to be traditionally exclusionary to queer narratives (e.g. Bodies Bodies Bodies and the slasher, or In the Dream House and the memoir).
- Representation of non-hegemonic queer identities, including asexual, intersex, trans, non-binary and non-white narratives (e.g. the works of Jane Schoenbrun, Sayaka Murata, or Rivers Solomon).
- International approaches to queer horror (e.g. Huesera: The Bone Woman, Climax, or Thelma).
- Relationship between queer horror and the mainstream, in relation to cross-medium adaptation (e.g. the alterations to Bill and Frank’s relationship in The Last of Us).
- Tracing the establishment, and development, of academic criticism toward queer horror (e.g. Harry M. Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet, or Michael William Saunders’ Imps of the Perverse).
- Queer horror in video games (e.g. Signalis, or The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories).
- Queer horror’s intersections with other theoretical disciplines (e.g. Masculinity Studies and Titane or All of Us Strangers, or Critical Disability Studies and Freaks).
- Performing queer horror on stage and screen (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Dragula).
- Queer horror as a way of mapping queer history (e.g. The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Labouchere Amendment, James Whale and the Hays Code, or American Horror Story: NYC and the AIDS crisis).
- Relationship between queer horror, exploitation cinema and pornography (e.g. Hellraiser, Knife + Heart, or the works of Billy Martin, writing as Poppy Z. Brite).
- Existence, or reclamation, of tropes and stereotypes (e.g. ‘Bury Your Gays’, or queer villainy).
- Classic works of queer horror (e.g. Carmilla, or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), or the queering of classic horror fiction (e.g. Murders in the Rue Morgue and New Murders in the Rue Morgue).
- Sapphic horror narratives (e.g. Our Wives Under the Sea, or Wilder Girls).
- Any forms not listed above, such as graphic novels or podcasts, or concerns such as queer aesthetics.
Finished chapters will be approximately 4000 words (exc. bibliography), adopting a primary text to discuss the broader topic of queer horror. Submissions should be accessible to new readers, while still articulating the individual elements that distinguish the chosen work. Please submit abstracts of 300 words, alongside a short biographical note (50–100 words), to Dr Michael Wheatley at michaeldavidwheatley@gmail.com by September 30th, with chapters expected in late 2025. Criticism on sexual identities and gender expressions marginalised in academia are particularly welcome.
Last updated June 24, 2024
