Call for Book Chapters: "Monsters and Monstrosity in Media - Reflections on Vulnerability"

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals to be included in a forthcoming scholarly volume on "Monsters and Monstrosity in Media - Reflections on Vulnerability".

How might on-screen constructions of the monster and monsterity represent notions of difference, perceived (non)belongings, and disruptions of traditional identity markers? How do these constructions conceal various vulnerabilities and implicitly endorse violence towards the labelled Other?

As monstrous bodies on screen signal a wide range of subversive destabilization of the notions of identity and community, we especially ask what meanings do monsters and monsterity convey in relation to our recent circumstances shaped by neoliberalism and the pandemic that lead to the intensified tightening of border controls by nation-states, the intensive categorization of (un)identifiable bodies, and subsequent forms of isolations and detachments imposed by social distancing and the rapid transition of sociality from reality to virtual reality?

This edited volume thinks along the lines of the body and its representations as cultural text, together with popular or recent media productions that introduce various bodies that may be deemed monstrous as they cross conventionally held borders or stay in the liminal spaces such as between human vs. animals, human vs. machine, virtual bodies vs. ontological flesh, living vs. death and other permeable borders that (dis)allow vulnerable and untranslatable bodies.

Contributors are invited to re-explore the notion of monster and monstrosity through identity markers as well as through assemblages of human, animal, and machine, towards re-imaginings of vulnerability and community.

Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Media representations of monstrosity
• Living with monsters
• The healthy, the sick, and the unknown body
• The Monster as metaphor and/or as genre
• The Known Monster
• Monster in apocalyptic films, series, and literature
• Monsters and capitalism
• Monsters as (non)gendered beings
• Vulnerability and monstrosity
• Alternative bodies in the discourse of monstrosity
• Posthuman bodies
• Animal studies

The length of chapters generally varies from 5,000 to 9,000 words and ranges from 17 to 25 pages. Please send a title and a 300-word abstract to the editor Yeojin Kim (ykim214@binghamton.edu) by June 30, 2022. Authors of accepted proposals will be contacted soon thereafter and asked to submit full papers by August 31, 2022.