Lancaster University, 8th–10th August 2019
Video games are full of objects; whether these are interactable items or the assets that make up the player’s avatar and the world that surrounds them, they are fundamental to the way that these virtual spheres are encountered. Likewise, objects are often associated with a ‘description’, a narrative method to taxonomically explain their relevance and …
Theodora Goss’s Athena Club series uses neo-Victorian monster mashup to interrogate contemporary identity politics. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), the first book in the series, chronicles the adventures of the daughters of famous ‘mad scientists’ from Victorian literature, and their eventual formation of the …
Chinese literature has an extensive history of conflating illness and national infirmity, beginning with the “Sick Man of Asia” stereotype promulgated by the West after the country’s forced opening and internalized by Chinese authors and individuals in the following decades. Waging a war against germs, the rural-based CCP portrayed itself as wielder of modern scientific …
Suspending Death, Reinventing Life My keynote argues that we are in the midst of a philosophical reinvention of what the idea of ‘life itself’ means in the context of biotechnology and its widespread commodification of biological entities and processes. This situation requires new biopolitical figures through which to theorize the social and political risks because …
Carnival laughter is a significant feature of American horror films from the late 1970s onward which is often overlooked. In this paper I address this critical gap by developing the concept of ‘failed carnival’. The failed carnival takes elements from Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of festive laughter and Linda Hutcheon’s theories on parody, elaborating them through …
‘Why so serious?’ asks Heath Ledger’s incarnation of The Joker, inviting us to not only look on the bright side of death but to join him and a whole clown-car of other cinematic and literary characters in their macabre revolution, their ruthful uprising, the infectious madness of their monstrous carnival. Concealing and revealing in equal …
Long established as a relocation of sexual intercourse, the bloody feeding of the vampire is obviously its most iconic and embodied behaviour. How then do the authors and directors of the ever-popular children’s vampire story negotiate the clear inappropriateness of such consumption? Examining a range of recent television and film texts, such as Count Duckula, …
Following the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), science fiction narratives focused on alien visitors to Earth become more popular and prolific than they had been since the 1950s. Invasion films experienced a particular resurgence, with many films borrowing their basic narratives from the science fiction films …
The zombie has proven itself not only as a powerful popular metaphor and a legitimate subject of pop culture scholarship, but also as a strong tool of critical thought in the field of biomedicine. This paper draws from research in my PhD thesis, in which I use the zombie as a modelling tool to critically …
Once I asked my father what he’d do if he found out I was a changeling. Without hesitating, he said “Kill you. Find my real daughter” This paper consists of a series of semi-autobiographical anecdotes, like the one above, interspersed with more direct analyses of the queerness and transhumanity of entities deemed non- or sub-human …