Monsters: Theory, Translation, Transbiology

Type: Call for Publications
Date: August 15, 2016
Location: United Kingdom
Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Film and Film History, Humanities, Popular Culture Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

From the enduring popularity of narratives such as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) to current television series such as American Horror Story (2011-), world cultures appear to be obsessed with bodies and psyches deemed “monstrous.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor of the collection of essays Monster Theory: Reading Culture, proposes that monster’s body is a cultural body, a body that cannot be categorically confined, but exists to problematize and to escape any categories we may create.  In their 2012 text Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology, editors Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and John Edgar Browning contend that the monstrous is “always already global,” because it can and does escape national borders and notions of universality. Jack Halberstam, in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and Technology of Monsters, similarly posits that monsters’ bodies are “[...] mobile, permeable and infinitely interpretable [...]” and that the monster is an “economic form in that it condenses various racial and sexual threats to nation, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie in one body.” Elsewhere, Halberstam asserts that monsters of contemporary fiction and film could be productively read as “transbiological” due to their assemblage of human, animal, and machine. This issue of Monsters and the Monstrous starts from relatively broad questions: what is monstrous? How do monsters permeate cultures and national borders? How might monstrosity be translated? Can monstrosity be translated? We welcome interdisciplinary papers that explore facets, elements, and assemblages of the “monstrous,” from B.C.E. texts and art to works in the twenty-first century. Article submissions should be 5,000-9,000 words in length. Please use the journal’s style templates for formatting your article; they can be found at this link:  http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/resources/for-authors. Then, you can click the “Chapter Template 2016” link. The due date for the articles is August 15, 2016. Please send submissions to monstersjournal@inter-disciplinary.net.