Lancaster University, 8th–10th August 2019
Flesh and Bone is an eight part mini-series from 2015 following Claire, a troubled ballet dancer who runs away from her hometown to audition for a New York ballet company. This series is a Gothic exploration of the female body as a source of commodity even now in the 21st century, and the battle Claire …
In this paper I will analyse the trope of the pinioned fairy seen in both one of the world’s oldest surviving ballet La Sylphide and Disney’s Maleficent (2014) feature film. I will interrogate how men trusted as lovers in these tales in James and Stefan choose to take the wings from their fairy inciting trauma …
Slow Lacerations: Time in Tissue Transfer Fantastika How do we show history, money, and surgical and pharmacological change intersecting with bodies? How do we express the times of transplantation, the temporalities of its many dimensions impacting human tissue and flesh and kinship? This paper considers recipient experience and of harvestee vulnerabilities and networks of predation that can feed …
“So he made us, demi-gods, to stand beside him… The mere fact of me frightens me sometimes.” (Abnett, Horus Rising, p134-135) Over the past 30 years, Games Workshop’s iconic ‘Warhammer 40,000’ setting has centred around a key narrative conflict set in the 31st millennium: the era known as the Horus Heresy, involving two sides of …
Filmed versions of classical ballets have been consistently popular since the screening of Don Quixote in 1973. In contrast, the “ballet movie” that follows the staging of a ballet comes in and out of fashion. One of the earliest examples is The Red Shoes (1948), staring Moira Shearer as the ballerina preparing for her first …
As in many ghost stories, the spectres which haunt Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris are birthed from trauma and loss. However, unlike traditionally non-corporeal spectres, the visitors that haunt Solaris possess a frightening physicality; a physicality closely tied to the workings of trauma theory. As such, this paper argues that these figuresare physical embodiments …
The 2018 cinematic adaptation of Annihilation, written and directed by Alex Garland, received criticism for changes it made to the narrative of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 source novel. However, change should not be surprising as both works are concerned deeply with the impact of change and, specifically, change that is perceived to be deviant. Through this …
Through dissolving human-machine boundaries, the ‘cyborg’ challenges traditional conceptions of embodiment. Thus, identifying a singular conception of what it means to be human may become increasingly impossible within a contemporary, cyborg-infused reality. The term cyborg has been appropriated within a mixture of utopian and dystopian accounts to describe various hybrid bodies; Haraway’s (1991) visions of …
One side effect of twentieth century modernity has been the decentering of the human body as a critique of humanism. From Kafka’s vast bureaucracies to Celine’s industrial war machine, this critique has been stripping the human body of its privileged status as (a marker of) the measure of all things. While much of popular culture …
The tentacled monster is a recognisable staple in the work of fantasy, horror and science fiction writers as a metaphor and motif for an invading “otherness” upon our established status quo. They simultaneously remind us of the wonders of our natural world but also defamiliarise it as something which is still significantly incomprehensible to us. …