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This article argues that the modern music video at the dawn of the MTV era embraces a logic of the Gothic fragment. Mobilizing an archive of gothic archetypes of haunting and monstrosity, the music video of the early 1980s confronts anxieties about its unshaped aesthetic character and discursive placelessness and its strained connections to absent textual wholes, performance cultures, and marginalized histories. Through a close reading of four seminal music videos from this time period – The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star (1979), David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes (1980), Blondie's Rapture (1981), and Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983) – I argue that the early music video incarnates a tradition of production, circulation, and decoding that I want to call Music Video Gothic. This tradition expresses latent concerns about the music video's aesthetic borders and intertextual relations with cultural and career narratives.

This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary children's and young adult gothic works, focusing on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events and Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. It argues that because of the upsetting nature of the issue and the numerous myths surrounding it, cultural production often uses the gothic figure of the monster who preys on children to address CSA indirectly, and identifies this strategy in the above series. It reveals a distinctly sexual charge to the monsters' victimisation of the children in both sets of narratives and explores their tendency to perpetuate CSA myths such as that of the perpetrator as a monstrous stranger. In conclusion, it considers how these narratives also challenge CSA myths and offer models of resilient child survivors, and it draws on cognitive cultural theory to theorise potential reader/viewer responses. Through its metaphorical imbrication of real-world brutality and dark fantasy, the Gothic is ultimately theorised as potentially affording more scope than realist treatments for touching on issues of transgression for wider and younger audiences, and sometimes in affirmative ways that move beyond merely recirculating myths and panic.

The most prominent monster in Khmer horror cinema, the ap, is originally a creature of folklore and is traditionally depicted as a woman's glowing head connected to exposed, floating entrails. I begin with an overview of the ap's historical origins in Khmer folktales about female transgression and witchcraft. I then discuss the ap's reemergence in Gothic horror film following the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–1979. In film, unlike in folklore, the ap is depicted as an innocent woman who was violated and then denied justice from her insular rural society; her assumption of a monstrous spectral body serves to make visible and undeniable the otherwise invisible violence exacted upon her. In staging dramas of reckoning and unburial, I argue, ap film in twenty-first-century Cambodia performs the typically Gothic work of using folklore and the supernatural to speak about otherwise unspeakable past trauma.

This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.

This roundtable brings together scholars and artists working with the monster and the monstrous. It took place between December 2017 and June 2018 via email. Participants responded to an initial em ...

In the monster novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973), one of Thomas Pynchon's many disappearing characters prophetically announces: ‘somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom’ (p. 394). Then, if anything it is ‘the wasted’, ‘the passed over’, and ‘the preterite’ that hold Pynchon's scattered narrative together. This essay focuses on the devastating proliferation of waste, the rise of technology in human affairs, and their relationship to the idea of salvation in Pynchon's work. To reflect on this link, it investigates the Calvinist rhetoric of preterition (nonelection to salvation) and its influence on contemporary US culture through Pynchon's work. First, it studies Calvin's concept of preterition and how it becomes connected to the wasted (disregarded, passed over, or used up); and second, based on Calvin's conception of preterition, it goes on to explore how the proliferation of waste in the contemporary America portrayed by Pynchon is the outcome of the capitalist economic system and its reliance on technology that converges with secularization and modernity.

This paper examines a key trope within much contemporary paranormal romance: the absence, or ineffectiveness, of the father. The first part of the essay develops an analysis of this aspect of the genre (in the Twilight Saga especially) through the work of René Girard, Luce Irigaray, and Juliet MacCannell. Of particular importance here is the extent to which Twilight and similar narratives stage female self-sacrifice as a pre-condition for the redemption of the hero and the restoration of patriarchal bonds initially compromised by some crisis in the effective functioning of paternal authority. The second section extends this analysis to consider ways in which paranormal romances featuring werewolves and vampires shift away from this conservative and reductivist romance paradigm so as to affirm and contest heteronormative, paternalistic models of masculinity and sexual desire.

This article explores and discusses Tim Burton's film Edward Scissorhands by applying a Georg Simmel/Ernst Bloch (Simmelean/Blochian) analysis. Aside from each of the philosophical approaches serving as insightful analyses of the symbolism and narrative of the film, it is also theoretically useful to compare and unpack the similarities and differences in aspects of both Simmel's and Bloch's philosophical ideas and metaphors, influenced by their collaboratory experiences; Bloch became associated with Georg Simmel in 1908. The association and friendship with Simmel lasted until 1911; at this time Bloch became increasingly disillusioned with Simmel's apparent inability to commit to any particular philosophical position. Correspondence finally drew to a close when Simmel openly supported the war policy of Imperial Germany in 1914. The influences of many of Simmel's ideas in relation to the development of Bloch's philosophy are implicitly noticeable in the cross-referencing of similar ideas, metaphors and themes. This article will suggest and tentatively work through aspects of some similarities and differences. The aim of this comparison and contrast of Simmel in relation to Bloch via Edward Scissorhands , will also serve to highlight Bloch's philosophical departure from Simmel's fragments. By exploring and discussing Simmel's essays 'The Aesthetic Significance of the Face', 'The Ruin' and 'The Stranger,' in the context of Edward Scissorhands , I will suggest that the film can be seen as a particularly poignant and effective cultural metaphor of not only the problematic nature of human ideals, but also urban ennui and disconnectedness. By comparison, the Blochian treatment of Edward Scissorhands will emphasise the Gothic, the radical stridency of Youth, and, potential utopian possibilities that are, so far, 'Not-Yet'. These frameworks will suggest that Edward Scissorhands be understood as a beautiful-monster, a cultural refraction of the utopian incognito of Not-Yet articulated future possibilities.

This essay explores theatre's power to take an audience beyond the veil of civilization into an encounter with the human as monstrous. Through the mythology and theatre of the Greeks, through Shakespeare, and into contemporary plays and productions by Bond, Albee, Osborne, and Bejart, the figure of the ‘overreacher’ emerges as a common thread. In extraordinary performances in his own Talbot’s Box and Double Cross, Kilroy traces the role of the actor in exteriorizing the disturbing paradox of the monster as violation and as beauty.

In 1844, when Daniel O’Connell and a number of other leaders of the Repeal Association were tried for sedition, the role of music in promoting social disorder was a matter of heated debate. In his opening speech for the prosecution, the attorney general argued that through the newspaper The Nation, the association had published the ‘poem’ ‘The Memory of the Dead’. This ‘poem’, which long predated its publication in The Nation, was a popular folk song that asked young men to commemorate the dead who fell in the Rebellion of 1798 by rising in their stead. During the course of the prosecution, it was argued that such seditious songs were handed out at the Monster Meetings, during which temperance bands marched along with the public to a set place where O’Connell would address the crowd. Mr Whiteside for the defence denied that the music played at such events was seditious, arguing that ‘O yes! These Temperance bands did conspire, confederate, combine and agree to murder harmony’, but that the harmony disturbed was musical! He continued: ‘Oh, say the Crown prosecutors, these fellows will not get drunk and break each others’ heads; they will not go to jail ’. In doing so, Whiteside alluded to a key tension that arose from the attendance of temperance bands at ‘seditious’ events – temperance bands were intended to tame the

This article examines the somatechnics of the monstrous anger and intense feelings that move, wave-like, through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Susan Stryker's ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’. Throughout, I examine how these feelings diffract through nodes in the texts and map out not only important differences between them, but also larger diffraction patterns that touch and move their readers: monstrous genders, language as a tool for resistance to abjection, queer kinships that lead to transformation, and a monstrous fury that reconfigures language. Taking up Karen Barad's notion of ‘intra-action’, I argue that the somatechnics of bodily feelings that move through these texts and push at their readers interpellate those of us who are open to thinking with Stryker into new and different understandings of language, materiality, and gender.

Human attraction to monsters is such that we could almost characterize Homo sapiens as ‘the species that loves monsters’. In fact, there is hardly a single human culture that finds itself indifferent to monsters; human culture either responds to monsters with fear or feeds on them joyously. This fascination is somewhat suspect and worth explaining. In this essay, I argue that Homo sapiens is a ‘monster’s animal’ just as we often speak of a ‘ladies’ man’.1

This article considers the increase in media representations of zombies during the first decade of the 2000s. It argues that a connection can be read between the new preoccupation with zombies and anxieties over the apparent threat posed by those without rights attempting to enter Western countries. The article sets up a theoretical argument using the work of Giorgio Agamben. Taking on board Agamben's discussion of ‘bare life’, the article follows Agamben in making a link between this idea and the Muselmann, the Jew reduced to the walking dead in the concentration and death camps. For Agamben, bare life is central to the functioning of the modern state. The article suggests that bare life is a way of connecting the Muselmann with the zombie as that monster has been elaborated in films since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Indeed, where Agamben argues that the werewolf was the characterising monster of the premodern era, this article argues that the zombie is the characterising monster of the modern era. The article goes on to make the connection between bare life, Muselmänner, zombies and displaced people, most commonly understood as asylum seekers.

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way. First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind. Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.

Alexa Wright’s Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture does precisely as its subtitle suggests and sets out to trace a history of human monsters through visual representations... Wright builds her study around a series of case studies, looking at how various ‘monsters’ have been represented and presented to the public gaze: wild people and feral children, the Monster of Ravenna, freaks, Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’), Jack the Ripper and Myra Hindley and, lastly, Ted Bundy and Anders Breivik...

On the origin of the cinematic odyssey Kubrick remarks: \'I do not remember when I got the idea to do the film. I became interested in extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, and was convinced that the universe was *full* of intelligent life, and so it seemed time to make a film\'. But as to the confusion surrounding the film upon its release, and in particular many thinking Floyd had gone to the \'planet\' Clavius he said: \'Why they think there\'s a planet Clavius I\'ll never know. But they hear him [Floyd] asked, \'Where are you going?\', and he says, \'I\'m going to Clavius\'. With many people -- *boom* -- that one word registers in their heads and they don\'t look at fifteen shots of the moon; they don\'t see he\'s going to the Moon\'. At the same time he rhetorically asked: \'How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: \'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover\'. This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don\'t want this to happen to _2001_\'.