The Textuality of Contemporary (Body) Horror

Despite its long and varied history, the infamous subgenre of body horror didn’t gain critical currency until the 1986 January/February volume of the journal Screen. Indeed, it was in this special issue on the “textuality of contemporary horror” that body horror emerged as an object worthy of scholarly attention. We now find ourselves with nearly forty years of distance from this moment in horror criticism, all the while body horror has remained as a key subgeneric tendency within the horror genre with exciting new and (un)timely directions having been explored by directors and authors such as Julia Ducournau, Jordan Peele, and Brian Evenson. In light of both the stretch of time between body horror’s coming to critical consciousness and the ongoing exploration of body horror’s possibilities in literature, film, videogames, and other artistic and popular forms, this panel asks what re-reading body horror today can tell us about our contemporary moment and/or what aspects within the subgenre account for its lasting appeal. That is, we ask whether the sustained interest in body horror by creators and consumers – granted that within the sphere of the literari body horror tends to attract artists more than critics – results from some distinct formal, thematic, or erotic qualities inherent within the subgenre (or mode depending on whom you ask); or, if body horror’s continued popularity instead indexes its capacity to effectively sublimate some of the crises which characterize our contemporary moment? Given these broad stakes, this panel does not exclusively restrain itself to submissions dealing with recent examples of the subgenre nor to submissions which exclusively treat body horror as a subgenre or mode. Instead, we are interested in submissions which speak to the following topics: (1) submissions which address the ways in which body horror mediates the social contradictions of the first quarter of the 21st century, (2) submissions which look at any crystallizing moments in the subgenre’s long history from the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du Libertinage to Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, (3) submissions which read body horror as a transgressive mode, rather than subgenre, that disrupts non-horror narrative patterns or fulfills some other modal task beyond horror as such, and (4) submissions which treat body horror as a theoretical problem, stance, or framework rather than as a subgenre. Ultimately, this panel seeks to reopen a discussion of the “textuality of horror” by taking body horror as an organizing concept which is both worthy of sustained critical consideration on its own terms and, we wager, a useful point of entry for understanding our contemporary moment.
Abstract submissions should be between 250-400 words, include a tentative paper title, the author’s name, professional title, and institutional affiliation.
[email protected]
[email protected]