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.