Horrors at Hallmark

Hallmark always has great stuff for Halloween, including the following items for this year.


itty bittys® The Walking Dead Plush, Collectors Set of 4 (https://www.hallmark.com/gifts/stuffed-animals/itty-bittys/itty-bittys-the-walking-dead-plush-collectors-set-of-4-1KDD1306.html)

and

itty bittys® Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas Jack Skellington and Sally Stuffed Animals, Set of 2 (https://www.hallmark.com/gifts/stuffed-animals/itty-bittys/itty-bittys-tim-burtons-the-nightmare-before-christmas-jack-skellington-and-sally-stuffed-animals-set-of-2-1KDD1366.html)

CFP Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (1/11/2016)

CFP, Collection of Essays on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, abstracts due Jan. 11, 2016
Discussion published by Dawn Keetley on Saturday, August 29, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/80322/cfp-collection-essays-race-gender-and-sexuality-walking-dead

RACE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WALKING DEAD FRANCHISE

The Walking Dead franchise has become a popular culture juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite its soaring popularity, there has been a longstanding critique that the franchise, in both its comic book and television incarnations, advocates an explicitly patriarchal and predominantly white world order. Zombie narratives have shown themselves to be uniquely qualified to deconstruct the many illusions (and injustices) of our social order, so why have so many felt that The Walking Dead has only hardened the conventional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality? Nonetheless, in all its forms, The Walking Dead is an evolving narrative—and many would argue that, specifically in its representations of what women and men of all races may become, the franchise is working toward more utopian possibilities.

All four of the collections of essays on The Walking Dead—James Lowder’s Triumph of the Walking Dead (2011), Wayne Yeun’s The Walking Dead and Philosophy (2012), Dawn Keetley’s “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (2014), and Travis Langley’s The Walking Dead Psychology (2015)—cover a wide swathe of topics, and take up gender, sexuality, and race only fleetingly. We think it’s time for a collection addressed squarely at these issues, so crucial to the franchise’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

To that end, we are currently accepting chapter proposals for an edited volume exploring the interlinked representations of gender, sexuality, and race in all The Walking Dead franchises. This edited volume will explore the many ways in which all three crucial identity categories are constructed/deconstructed on television and in the comic book series. Because our intention is to present a highly diverse collection, we are interested in chapters exploring all facets of race, gender, and sexuality related to the television shows and comic books, as well as in tie-ins and connected materials (e.g. the AMC webisodes, Walking Dead Specials, etc.).


Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The relationship between undeadness and race/gender politics in The Walking Dead
• The role a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment plays in shaping gender and race construction in The Walking Dead
• How race, gender, and sexuality intersect in The Walking Dead
• Queer visibility and gender in in The Walking Dead
• How The Walking Dead reflects/challenges the traditional depiction of gender and race in its predecessor zombie narratives
• How either the comics or the TV series has evolved in its representations of women, men, and people of color
• How fan conversation on the internet (on blogs, for instance) has critiqued and potentially shaped the ways race, gender, and sexuality are depicted in the franchise.

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short biography to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu) and Elizabeth Erwin (eerwin@lccc.edu) by January 11, 2016. We anticipate a tentative due date of August 1, 2016, for full essays. We will be more than happy to respond to any and all queries in the meantime.

3rd Global Conference: Apocalypse: Imagining the End (Oxford, UK 7/5-7/14)

Sorry to have missed this before:

3rd Global Conference: Apocalypse: Imagining the End
Location: United Kingdom
Conference Date: 2014-07-05 (in 24 days)
Date Submitted: 2013-11-13
Announcement ID: 208511

3rd Global Conference: Apocalypse: Imagining the End

Saturday 5th July – Monday 7th July 2014, Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom


Call for Presentations:
From Christian concept of the ‘Apocalypse’ to the Hindu notions of the Kali Yuga, visions of destruction and fantasies of the ‘end times’ have a long history. In the last few years, public media, especially in the West, have been suffused with images of the end times and afterward, from the zombie apocalypse (the AMC series The Walking Dead) to life after the collapse of civilization (the NBC series Revolution.) Several popular television series and video games (Deep Earth Bunker) are now based on preparing for and surviving the end of the world. Once a fringe activity, ‘survivalism’ has gone mainstream, and a growing industry supplies ‘doomsday preppers’ with all they need to the post-apocalyptic chaos. One purpose of the conference is to explore these ideas by situating them in context — psychological, historical, literary, cultural, political, and economic. The second aim of the conference is to examine today’s widespread fascination the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic thought, and to understand its rising appeal across broad sections of contemporary society around the world.

This interdisciplinary project welcomes proposals from all disciplines and research areas, including anthropology, psychoanalysis, political economy, psychology, area studies, communal studies, environmental studies, history, sociology, religion, theology, and gender studies.

Proposals for presentations, papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

-Decline, Collapse, Decay, Disease, Mass Death
-Survivalism and Doomsday Preppers
-Revolution
-Theories of Social Change
-Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, Global Warming, Economic Collapse
-The Second Coming/Millenarianism/Rapture
-The Hindu Kali Yuga
-Sex and Gender at the End of Time
-Ironic and/or Anti-Apocalyptic Thinking
-Utopia and Dystopia
-Intentional Communities as Communities of the End Times
-Selling the Apocalypse, Commodifying Disaster, and Marketing the End Times
-Death Tourism and Disaster Capitalism
-The Age of Terror
-Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
-Disaster Fiction/Movies/Video Games
-History as Apocalypse
-Remembering and Reliving the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire -Post- Apocalyptic conditions
-Positive aspects of an Apocalypse, including change and transformation

In order to support and encourage interdisciplinarity engagement, it is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues between the parallel events running during this conference.
Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between these groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between visions ofthe Apocalypse and Diasporas.

What to send:
Proposals will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th February 2014. If a proposal is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 16th May 2014. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Apocalypse3 Proposal Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Sheila Bibb: scbibb@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: apoc3@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All proposals accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit a proposal for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/apocalypse-imagining-the-end/call-for-papers/

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Priory House
149B Wroslyn Road
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1993 882087
Fax: +44 (0)870 4601132
Email: apoc3@inter-disciplinary.net
Visit the website at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/apocalypse-imagining-the-end/call-for-papers/

Keetley's Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human

“We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human

Edited by Dawn Keetley

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7628-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-1452-6
notes, bibliography, index
256pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2014
Price: $35.00

About the Book
This edited collection brings together an introduction and 13 original scholarly essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead. The essays in the first section address the pervasive bloodletting of the series: What are the consequences of the series’ unremitting violence? Essays explore violence committed in self-defense, racist violence, mass lawlessness, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of mourning, and the violence of history.

The essays in the second section explore an equally urgent question: What does it mean to be human? Several argue that notions of the human must acknowledge the centrality of the body—the fact that we share a “blind corporeality” with the zombie. Others address how the human is closely aligned with language and time, the disappearance of which are represented by the aphasic, timeless zombie.

Underlying each essay are the game-changing words of The Walking Dead’s protagonist Rick Grimes to the other survivors: “We’re all infected.” The violence of the zombie is also our violence; their blind drives are also ours. The human characters of The Walking Dead may try to define themselves against the zombies but in the end their bodies harbor the zombie virus: they are the walking dead.


Table of Contents

Preface  1
Introduction: "We’re All Infected" (Dawn Keetley)  3
Part I: Society’s End
The Zombie Apocalypse Is Upon Us! Homeland Insecurity (Philip L. Simpson)  28
Burying the Living with the Dead: Security, Survival and the Sanction of Violence (Steven Pokornowski)  41
Walking Tall or Walking Dead? The American Cowboy in the Zombie Apocalypse (P. Ivan Young)  56
Asserting Law and Order Over the Mindless (Angus Nurse)  68
Rest in Pieces: Violence in Mourning the (Un)Dead (Laura Kremmel)  80
Roadside "Vigil" for the Dead: Cannibalism, Fossil Fuels and the American Dream (Christine Heckman)  95
Mass Shock Therapy for Atlanta’s Psych(ot)ic Suburban Legacy (Paul Boshears)  110
Part II: Posthumanity
Apocalyptic Utopia: The Zombie and the (r)Evolution of Subjectivity (Chris Boehm)  126
Nothing But the Meat: Posthuman Bodies and the Dying Undead (Xavier Aldana Reyes)  142
Human Choice and Zombie Consciousness (Dawn Keetley)  156
"Talking Bodies" in a Zombie Apocalypse: From the Discursive to the Shitty Sublime (Gary Farnell)  173
Zombie Time: Temporality and Living Death (Gwyneth Peaty)  186
Afterword: Bye-Gone Days: Reflections on Romero, Kirkman and What We Become (Dave Beisecker)  201
Bibliography  215
List of Episodes  227
About the Contributors  229
Index  233


About the Author(s)
Dawn Keetley works in the department of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.