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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Panel Proposal - Console-ing Passions, 2022
Dr. Jackie Pinkowitz & Dr. Lucia Palmer
Panel Proposal: Bodily Transgression in Gothic TV
The recent boom in horror films and scholarship testifies to the rich generic, thematic, and formal spaces the gothic provides for engaging what scares, horrifies, and haunts us. As seen in films like Get Out (2016) and The Invisible Man (2020), horror and gothic texts have particular power to speak, especially in the current moment, to marginalized, oppressed, and Othered subjectivities. However, the self-versus-other gatekeeping and disciplinary taste cultures which long excluded the horror film from gothic studies, and which dismissed the gothic itself as a monstrously hybridized, corrupted form, continue to neglect the televisual. This panel seeks to redress such erasures by interrogating the surge in horror and gothic TV over the last decade, including series like American Horror Story, Penny Dreadful, The Haunting of Hill House, Sharp Objects, and Lovecraft Country.
As with older cinematic and literary forms, such recent television confirms the centrality of the body to the gothic, which has long spectacularized bodily transgressions, bodily transformations, and body horror. As Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) demonstrates, the gothic encompasses and exposes the uncanny experience of being a body vulnerable to mutilation, pain, and death as well as the way corporeal fears and anxieties about transgressive bodies/bodily transgressions are connected to social constructions of the normative body. The body gothic, Reyes argues, explores the body’s expectations and limits, and the promise and horror of its breaching. This panel explores the themes and politics of bodily transgression which has been configured as, and in relation to, the gothic -- with particular attention to gendered, raced, sexed, and national bodies -- in recent horror/gothic television (or television incorporating horror/gothic elements).
Paper Proposals:
Border Crossing and the Body Gothic in Queen of the South (2016-2021)
Queen of the South (USA, 2016-2021) is framed in industrial discourses as a crime drama and thriller, but frequently expresses drama and suspense through gothic and horror themes. In particular, the series features moments of what Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) calls the “body gothic,” which explores the “nightmare of the inescapability of corporeality.”
An English-language adaptation of the Spanish-language telenovela La Reina del Sur (Telemundo, 2011-present), Queen of the South is fundamentally structured through a logic of crossing national, linguistic, and cultural borders. The series revolves around Teresa Mendoza, a female cartel leader from Mexico who establishes an international drug business rooted in the United States. Thus, the text provides ample opportunities for tapping into anxieties about transgressing borders of gender, nation, and the human body.
The body gothic is manifested in Queen of the South through themes of vulnerable bodies, bodily breaches, and the terrifying sublime of transgressing bodily borders. Two key moments from the series are notable for their gothic themes in relation to borders and bodies: (a) the imprisonment of female drug mules whose bodies are rendered abject by the parcels they swallow, and (b) Teresa Mendoza’s bloody and hallucinatory transcendence of her own body’s limits through sacrificial ritual in a Bolivian coca cult. A gothic analytical lens applied to abject bodies and drug-induced bodily transcendence reveals how the show expresses anxieties of an eroticized, feminized, and savage Other transgressing U.S. national borders from the South.
Author Bio: Lucia M. Palmer is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Middle Georgia State University. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Studies in Popular Culture, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Her interests primarily revolve around the intersections between media and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality. Currently, her research focuses on struggles over meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration, and expressions of fears and anxieties around citizenship, national identity, and limits of the human.
Contact: lucia.palmer@mga.edu
The Racial/Body Gothic: Bodily Transformation, Passing, and Transgression in Lovecraft Country (2020)
Like the gothic, Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020) is preoccupied with the transgression and dissolution of boundaries. While blurring generic delineations between fantasy, action-adventure, and multiple horror subgenres, the series’ most striking boundary disruptions occur around racialized and gendered bodies, and by extension, the seemingly inviolable categories of race and gender those bodies appear to represent. Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), an African American woman, repeatedly transforms into a white woman through a serum developed by the mysterious Christina, who is white (and also using the serum to transform in to a man). Ruby’s transformations literalize both the sexualized racial mixing enacted since slavery and racial passing. Prevalent throughout Jim Crow, the latter enabled light-skinned African Americans to access the privileges of the dominant group, as Ruby does when she gets the sales job long denied her as a (visibly) Black woman. Thus, her transformations not only transgress racial and bodily categories and limits, but dissolve the color line itself.
Yet Ruby’s transformations are also horrifying, and presently explicitly as body horror. Her skin splits and rips apart; tearing sounds accompany her physical distortions as her insides become outsides and her outsides fall off; sheets of skin slide off in viscous, bloody heaps. Such gothic invocations of racial (and, for Christina, gender) transformation signal the horror which passing conjures for epistemological systems of racial and gender difference: the failure of the racialized and gendered body to “tell” its identity, and thus, its position within social hierarchies. As made especially clear in Ruby’s gory transformations, the horror lies in her body’s transgression of the visual and embodied signifiers of race – namely, skin color – and gender. It lies in her spectacular and grotesque revelation that the two identities linked most strenuously to the body and notions of the biological and unalterable, are fluid, flexible, and unbounded. Thus, Lovecraft Country conjoins the gothic, the abject, and the body to deconstruct American systems of race and gender, ultimately dissolving the bounds of difference itself.
Author Bio: Jacqueline Pinkowitz is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Mercer University. Her research and teaching center on African American film and media; intersectional representations of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixing; southern imaginaries and histories in media and culture; and exploitation and genre film. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Global South, and several edited collections and digital platforms. She is working on a book manuscript titled Screening Civil Rights: Race, Region, and the American Film Industry during the Black Freedom Struggle (1955-1975).
Contact: pinkowitz_jm@mercer.edu
Gothic Latex: BDSM Inversion and the Rubber Man
BDSM is characterised by the way in which its participants roleplay -- or perform -- complex power relationships through sadomasochism, dominance-submission, and bondage-discipline. “Scenes” of BDSM often involve elaborate dramatising, exaggerating, and parodying of power dynamics through use of careful production staging combined with mise-en-scène, props, and costuming, while incorporating similar technologies to torture -- such as the widely recognisable motifs of hooding, bondage, and black site-resembling spaces. Torture, it should be noted, is a unique institution in and of itself, distinguishable, according to Elaine Scarry, from all other types of pain. In contrast, BDSM is “RACK” – risk-aware/accepted consensual kink. Sexuality in Gothic fiction largely functions as an oppressor – feared, rather than welcomed. An example of this is the black latex suit in American Horror Story: Murder House (2011), which passes from the human/humane space of Chad Warwick (Zachary Quinto) and his partner Patrick (Teddy Sears) into the supernatural inhuman/inhumane space of Tate Langdon (Evan Peters). In doing so, the latex suit transforms from a tool of consensual sex to the motif of the “Rubber Man” and inverts of the realities of BDSM into torture, turning sexuality into a weapon of terror that mirrors Gothic tradition.
Author Bio: Alexx Apicella is academically fascinated by the hard-to-watch and the unwatchable. They received their B.A. in five majors – Black World Studies, Classical Humanities, English Literature, Latin American, Latino/a, & Caribbean Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies -- from Miami University of Ohio in 2019, where they focused on global revolutionary movements, modern and historic fascist action, social justice, and queer existence. Apicella received their M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA in 2020. Their MA thesis involved a queer deconstruction of the Final Boy trope in 1980s slasher films, with a focus placed on graphic depictions of rape and sexual assault on male bodies. Their research interests have further developed to expand outside of fictional horror and into non-simulated depictions of horror, extremism, and pornography as they work towards their PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.
Contact: alexx.m.apicella@gmail.com
Creative Destruction and the Body in Hannibal
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013-2015) is a show that is itself transgressive, with many calling it one of the greatest TV shows of all time. One of the most unique things about the show is its depiction and treatment of bodies. Bodies in Hannibal, specifically the ones at crime scenes, are contradictory in that they are treated like art, making it easy at times to forget that we should logically be horrified. Using Loa Beckenstein’s ‘On Hannibal Lecter, Transness, and Creation Through Annihilation’ (2001) as a starting point, I will develop the idea that destruction is viewed as a positive force in Hannibal – namely that some transformations can only occur if something is first destroyed.
To develop this idea of creative destruction I will be using Bahktin’s theory of the grotesque and looking specifically at how well this can be applied to Hannibal. I will then link this to transness with the view of arguing for more diverse narratives for trans embodiment beyond that of the ‘stuck in the wrong body’ trope that we are always presented with. Given the nature of the show, I will also use Susan Stryker’s ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’ (1994) to provide insight from a trans studies theorist on how darker types of media specifically can be used to depict trans people in an empowering way
Author Bio: Jamie MacGregor (they/them) is an MLitt student of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where they also completed their MA in English Literature. They are planning to apply for their PhD with the view of commencing study in 2022. Jamie has varied research interests depending on when you ask them, but they are primarily interested in the horror genre across media, queer and trans theory as well as representation in media, fan studies, medical humanities, and the overlap of philosophy and media. They are spending their year between studies submitting papers to journals and conferences.
Contact: jaymacg97@gmail.com
Bodily Transgression in Gothic TV
Panel Proposal - Console-ing Passions, 2022
Dr. Jackie Pinkowitz & Dr. Lucia Palmer
Panel Proposal: Bodily Transgression in Gothic TV
The recent boom in horror films and scholarship testifies to the rich generic, thematic, and formal spaces the gothic provides for engaging what scares, horrifies, and haunts us. As seen in films like Get Out (2016) and The Invisible Man (2020), horror and gothic texts have particular power to speak, especially in the current moment, to marginalized, oppressed, and Othered subjectivities. However, the self-versus-other gatekeeping and disciplinary taste cultures which long excluded the horror film from gothic studies, and which dismissed the gothic itself as a monstrously hybridized, corrupted form, continue to neglect the televisual. This panel seeks to redress such erasures by interrogating the surge in horror and gothic TV over the last decade, including series like American Horror Story, Penny Dreadful, The Haunting of Hill House, Sharp Objects, and Lovecraft Country.
As with older cinematic and literary forms, such recent television confirms the centrality of the body to the gothic, which has long spectacularized bodily transgressions, bodily transformations, and body horror. As Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) demonstrates, the gothic encompasses and exposes the uncanny experience of being a body vulnerable to mutilation, pain, and death as well as the way corporeal fears and anxieties about transgressive bodies/bodily transgressions are connected to social constructions of the normative body. The body gothic, Reyes argues, explores the body’s expectations and limits, and the promise and horror of its breaching. This panel explores the themes and politics of bodily transgression which has been configured as, and in relation to, the gothic -- with particular attention to gendered, raced, sexed, and national bodies -- in recent horror/gothic television (or television incorporating horror/gothic elements).
Paper Proposals:
Border Crossing and the Body Gothic in Queen of the South (2016-2021)
Queen of the South (USA, 2016-2021) is framed in industrial discourses as a crime drama and thriller, but frequently expresses drama and suspense through gothic and horror themes. In particular, the series features moments of what Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) calls the “body gothic,” which explores the “nightmare of the inescapability of corporeality.”
An English-language adaptation of the Spanish-language telenovela La Reina del Sur (Telemundo, 2011-present), Queen of the South is fundamentally structured through a logic of crossing national, linguistic, and cultural borders. The series revolves around Teresa Mendoza, a female cartel leader from Mexico who establishes an international drug business rooted in the United States. Thus, the text provides ample opportunities for tapping into anxieties about transgressing borders of gender, nation, and the human body.
The body gothic is manifested in Queen of the South through themes of vulnerable bodies, bodily breaches, and the terrifying sublime of transgressing bodily borders. Two key moments from the series are notable for their gothic themes in relation to borders and bodies: (a) the imprisonment of female drug mules whose bodies are rendered abject by the parcels they swallow, and (b) Teresa Mendoza’s bloody and hallucinatory transcendence of her own body’s limits through sacrificial ritual in a Bolivian coca cult. A gothic analytical lens applied to abject bodies and drug-induced bodily transcendence reveals how the show expresses anxieties of an eroticized, feminized, and savage Other transgressing U.S. national borders from the South.
Author Bio: Lucia M. Palmer is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Middle Georgia State University. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Studies in Popular Culture, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Her interests primarily revolve around the intersections between media and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality. Currently, her research focuses on struggles over meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration, and expressions of fears and anxieties around citizenship, national identity, and limits of the human.
Contact: lucia.palmer@mga.edu
The Racial/Body Gothic: Bodily Transformation, Passing, and Transgression in Lovecraft Country (2020)
Like the gothic, Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020) is preoccupied with the transgression and dissolution of boundaries. While blurring generic delineations between fantasy, action-adventure, and multiple horror subgenres, the series’ most striking boundary disruptions occur around racialized and gendered bodies, and by extension, the seemingly inviolable categories of race and gender those bodies appear to represent. Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), an African American woman, repeatedly transforms into a white woman through a serum developed by the mysterious Christina, who is white (and also using the serum to transform in to a man). Ruby’s transformations literalize both the sexualized racial mixing enacted since slavery and racial passing. Prevalent throughout Jim Crow, the latter enabled light-skinned African Americans to access the privileges of the dominant group, as Ruby does when she gets the sales job long denied her as a (visibly) Black woman. Thus, her transformations not only transgress racial and bodily categories and limits, but dissolve the color line itself.
Yet Ruby’s transformations are also horrifying, and presently explicitly as body horror. Her skin splits and rips apart; tearing sounds accompany her physical distortions as her insides become outsides and her outsides fall off; sheets of skin slide off in viscous, bloody heaps. Such gothic invocations of racial (and, for Christina, gender) transformation signal the horror which passing conjures for epistemological systems of racial and gender difference: the failure of the racialized and gendered body to “tell” its identity, and thus, its position within social hierarchies. As made especially clear in Ruby’s gory transformations, the horror lies in her body’s transgression of the visual and embodied signifiers of race – namely, skin color – and gender. It lies in her spectacular and grotesque revelation that the two identities linked most strenuously to the body and notions of the biological and unalterable, are fluid, flexible, and unbounded. Thus, Lovecraft Country conjoins the gothic, the abject, and the body to deconstruct American systems of race and gender, ultimately dissolving the bounds of difference itself.
Author Bio: Jacqueline Pinkowitz is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Mercer University. Her research and teaching center on African American film and media; intersectional representations of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixing; southern imaginaries and histories in media and culture; and exploitation and genre film. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Global South, and several edited collections and digital platforms. She is working on a book manuscript titled Screening Civil Rights: Race, Region, and the American Film Industry during the Black Freedom Struggle (1955-1975).
Contact: pinkowitz_jm@mercer.edu
Gothic Latex: BDSM Inversion and the Rubber Man
BDSM is characterised by the way in which its participants roleplay -- or perform -- complex power relationships through sadomasochism, dominance-submission, and bondage-discipline. “Scenes” of BDSM often involve elaborate dramatising, exaggerating, and parodying of power dynamics through use of careful production staging combined with mise-en-scène, props, and costuming, while incorporating similar technologies to torture -- such as the widely recognisable motifs of hooding, bondage, and black site-resembling spaces. Torture, it should be noted, is a unique institution in and of itself, distinguishable, according to Elaine Scarry, from all other types of pain. In contrast, BDSM is “RACK” – risk-aware/accepted consensual kink. Sexuality in Gothic fiction largely functions as an oppressor – feared, rather than welcomed. An example of this is the black latex suit in American Horror Story: Murder House (2011), which passes from the human/humane space of Chad Warwick (Zachary Quinto) and his partner Patrick (Teddy Sears) into the supernatural inhuman/inhumane space of Tate Langdon (Evan Peters). In doing so, the latex suit transforms from a tool of consensual sex to the motif of the “Rubber Man” and inverts of the realities of BDSM into torture, turning sexuality into a weapon of terror that mirrors Gothic tradition.
Author Bio: Alexx Apicella is academically fascinated by the hard-to-watch and the unwatchable. They received their B.A. in five majors – Black World Studies, Classical Humanities, English Literature, Latin American, Latino/a, & Caribbean Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies -- from Miami University of Ohio in 2019, where they focused on global revolutionary movements, modern and historic fascist action, social justice, and queer existence. Apicella received their M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA in 2020. Their MA thesis involved a queer deconstruction of the Final Boy trope in 1980s slasher films, with a focus placed on graphic depictions of rape and sexual assault on male bodies. Their research interests have further developed to expand outside of fictional horror and into non-simulated depictions of horror, extremism, and pornography as they work towards their PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.
Contact: alexx.m.apicella@gmail.com
Creative Destruction and the Body in Hannibal
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013-2015) is a show that is itself transgressive, with many calling it one of the greatest TV shows of all time. One of the most unique things about the show is its depiction and treatment of bodies. Bodies in Hannibal, specifically the ones at crime scenes, are contradictory in that they are treated like art, making it easy at times to forget that we should logically be horrified. Using Loa Beckenstein’s ‘On Hannibal Lecter, Transness, and Creation Through Annihilation’ (2001) as a starting point, I will develop the idea that destruction is viewed as a positive force in Hannibal – namely that some transformations can only occur if something is first destroyed.
To develop this idea of creative destruction I will be using Bahktin’s theory of the grotesque and looking specifically at how well this can be applied to Hannibal. I will then link this to transness with the view of arguing for more diverse narratives for trans embodiment beyond that of the ‘stuck in the wrong body’ trope that we are always presented with. Given the nature of the show, I will also use Susan Stryker’s ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’ (1994) to provide insight from a trans studies theorist on how darker types of media specifically can be used to depict trans people in an empowering way
Author Bio: Jamie MacGregor (they/them) is an MLitt student of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where they also completed their MA in English Literature. They are planning to apply for their PhD with the view of commencing study in 2022. Jamie has varied research interests depending on when you ask them, but they are primarily interested in the horror genre across media, queer and trans theory as well as representation in media, fan studies, medical humanities, and the overlap of philosophy and media. They are spending their year between studies submitting papers to journals and conferences.
Contact: jaymacg97@gmail.com
