GUEST POST: Damned if you do and damned if you don't by Rosie Garland

This is the second in my short series of guest posts exploring the somewhat controversial subject of women and body hair. Links to the other posts in the series can be found at the end of this post.

I am very pleased to welcome today's guest writer, Rosie Garland.

Born in London to a runaway teenager, Rosie Garland has always been a cuckoo in the nest. She has an eclectic writing and performance history, from singing in Goth band The March Violets, to twisted cabaret and electrifying poetry as Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen, to conference presentations in the UK and overseas. As well as four solo collections of poems, her short stories and articles have been widely anthologised. She has won the DaDa Award for Performance Artist of the Year, the Diva Award for Solo Performer, and a Poetry Award from the People’s Café, New York. She is also the winner of the 2011 inaugural Mslexia Novel Competition with The Palace of Curiosities, a picaresque literary novel inspired by the life of Victorian Hairy Woman Julia Pastrana.

I’ve had an interest in the fraught female relationship with body hair since I started growing it anywhere but on my head. Years before I discovered feminism or any broader questioning of why women should present hairlessness to be acceptable.

I was the class geek. There was always one, sitting at the edge of school photos sporting a done-at-home haircut and a bewildered expression at just how unpopular a girl could be. Surrounded by pretty classmates wearing the right length skirt, the right size knot in the school tie (small one term, huge the next). Along with my mother, they gave out messages about hair. Basically, if it wasn’t on my head, it was gross and should be removed. Especially leg and underarm sproutings.

I resisted the pronouncements. I didn’t want to do it. It was just one item on the long list of things that made me an outsider, part of the same mindset that made my classmates obsessed with perfume, body spray and ‘feminine’ deodorant (you know, the stuff that brings on toxic shock). From where I stood, it seemed to be about spending a fortune on products that promised to hide the fact you were female.

No, I didn’t see myself as a rebel, but it struck me as overwhelmingly illogical (yes, I identified with Mr. Spock in Star Trek). For a start, it was such a mess: applying smelly cream, waiting for it to melt the hair away (never as successful as the adverts with their hysterically cheerful actors). If you didn’t use cream, there were cuts from shaving. Ouch. It was also a waste of time – the damn stuff grew back immediately, stubbly and far more noticeable than the soft fronds that covered my legs if I left them alone.

Being of an enquiring mind, I asked my mum why I needed to get rid of something that was occurring quite naturally, like my second set of teeth or the beginnings of breasts (I wasn’t being asked to get rid of them). She replied that body hair wasn’t ‘ladylike’. This confused me further. I was a ‘lady’, or at least one in miniature. Therefore if I was growing hair, then it was of or pertaining to the state of being a lady. I asked if I needed to shave the new growth on my vulva and was told to stop being rude. I didn’t get why it was supposed to be such a no-no.

Sure, hair or no hair can be personal taste. If you live in a culture where there is a modicum of choice then yes, you can choose to wax yourself to a standstill and ‘still be a feminist’ (whatever ‘still’ means). I don’t have a direct association of feminist = unshaved woman, which is the stereotype. If I choose to be unshaved, which I do, it goes back far earlier. I’m not of the Reductio ad absurdum opinion that intelligence evaporates with the removal of hair, in a female version of Samson being stripped of his strength when Delilah shaved him.

However. What does that ‘choice’ really mean when faced with a familial / societal / media barrage of ‘eeew’? Day in, day out, from the onset of the first spindly hair till we die – the message that it (and by extension we) = unhygienic / unladylike / unfeminine / dirty / messy / taboo and god damn it, ugly.

And don’t get me started on patriarchal / male reaction to women’s body hair. I’d need a dozen blogs for that. Feminism or not, I can still not get past this simple bottom line: the only females who are naturally free of hair under their arms, on their legs and on their pubis are children. The only acceptable females in porn are hairless. I do not need to say a word about how fundamentally this creeps me out. Let alone how mentally and socially infantilising it is. Sexual fixation on hairlessness in adult females is creepy. Go bloody figure.

Deep breath. I watched with interest as I grew into a world where nice girls depilate. Except the stuff on our heads which is our ‘crowning glory’. Just how integral these tresses are to being seen / read as female came home to me with a body blow when I got throat cancer, underwent intensive chemotherapy and my hair fell out.

I assumed that it would loosen its moorings overnight, in one go. But it left my body in a slow, piecemeal moulting which I found sufficiently distressing that I got a set of clippers and shaved my head. I chose to ‘go bald’ rather than wear the prescription wig. The wig felt all wrong, like I was trying to pass for human and ‘well’ when that was the last thing I felt like. I was not ashamed of having cancer. My hairlessness was part of the reality. Sod this, I thought. I shall not pretend, nor hide my cancer from the world, just to spare the healthy world’s collective delusion that no-one gets ill and no-one dies. As a signifier of our shared mortality, baldness is terrifying. People crossed the road so that I wouldn’t talk to them about ‘it’.

At this point I want to stress that this was my individual response to cancer. I am not suggesting it as a template. Others choose to engage with the illness differently, and each person’s response is as valid as the next.

To bolster a sense of self, I searched for positive images of bald women with shaved or bald heads. I repeat, positive. I was not interested in images of punishment, dehumanisation, imprisonment or torture. It was bloody hard work finding anything. I scraped together a meagre handful, and the first hits were from science fiction. Alice Krige as the Borg Queen in Star Trek First Contact, Persis Khambatta as Lieutenant Ilia in Star Trek The Motion Picture, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien 3. All of them created as attractive, intelligent, ass-kicking or all three.

All of the above informed the creation of Eve, the central character in my upcoming debut novel The Palace of Curiosities (HarperCollins, forthcoming March 2013). I took the concept of female hairiness to its logical (that word again) extreme. Eve has hypertrichosis, a condition where the entire body is covered in a thick mat of hair. The novel is set in 1850s London, and in it I explore how Eve makes her way in a world where she is the only one of her kind. Her ‘difference’ is overwhelmingly visible, yet she is determined to get by on her own terms. She does not shave herself to pass for human. She fends off exploitation, discovers fulfilment, self-expression and self-reliance.

I’ve been told that Eve’s hairiness can be seen as an interesting analogy for being queer in a heteronormative world. I’m happy if she makes one person think about what it means to be female and have body hair.

If you would like to whet your appetite for The Palace of Curiosities in anticipation of its release next year, you can find Rosie's story, 'Cut and Paste', in the Hic Dragones Wolf-Girls anthology.

Read the other posts in the Body Hair blog series:

On Making and Publishing The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein

On Body Hair, by LJ Maher

Female Werewolves, Fur and Body Hair, by Carys Crossen

GUEST POST: On Making and Publishing The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein

This is the first post in a series, so here's a little intro from me...

Working on, and reading about, female werewolves as much as I do, you become used to dealing on a daily basis with subject matter that most people find a little odd. Hyper-sexual creatures, brutal violence, animal transformation and the supernatural/occult all seem quite normal to me. Even conversations about anthropophagy and cannibalism are fairly routine for me, though these subjects tend to raise more eyebrows when I start talking about them at parties, and the subject of maternal cannibalism (the central theme of perhaps the most controversial of the stories in Wolf-Girls, an anthology I recently edited) is still something of a taboo.

However, there is one aspect of the female werewolf that is far less openly discussed. Female werewolves are hairy. They have body hair and they don't, on the whole, seek to remove it (apart from in Mattel's Monster High series, but that's another story...) And yet, we don't talk about this. This facet of the female werewolf is discreetly side-stepped or euphemized in (most, though not all) fiction. The silence, distaste and disgust surrounding female werewolves' body hair is not surprising, given that there is a silence, distaste and disgust surrounding all female body hair. It is something to be removed, reviled and certainly not spoken of in polite company. The hairy girl is, at best, an oddity, at worst, an aberration.

So, given my predilection for talking about subjects that are normally surrounded by silence, distaste and disgust, it gives me great pleasure to host guest posts from four female writers on the subject of female body hair. For the first post in the series, I welcome Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, editor of the only academic collection on female body hair, The Last Taboo.

Karín Lesnik-Oberstein is Professor of Critical Theory and Director of the ‘Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL)’ in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, in Reading, UK. Karín’s research interest is in transdisciplinary critical theory, and she has published monographs on Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (1994) and On Having an Own Child: Reproductive Technologies and the Cultural Construction of Childhood (2008), as well as several edited volumes on critical theory and identity, focussing on gender primarily in The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (2007, republished in paperback 2011).

I thought of my (edited) book The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair in the early 1990s, very early on in my academic career, both because of my personal experiences with body hair and through discussing this as an issue with one of the very first students I taught (an American exchange student), in my first academic post as a Junior Research Fellow. I was discussing a personal decision I made in my early twenties no longer to remove my body hair with this student, and she told me in turn that she, like me, also had very dark and long body hair growth, according to her because of her Albanian ancestry. This student also told me she was training to be a contemporary ballet dancer (and, in fact, she became a very successful dancer), and that although contemporary ballet prided itself on breaking all kinds of taboos, for instance having dances danced in the nude, she was required to remove all the hair from her body. That was not up for question!

It was during this discussion that I decided to write a book on this whole topic, especially when I then discovered during subsequent research that nobody had done so already. There were a very few articles on the topic, psychological in orientation, examining ideas of femininity, gender and the body, but I discovered even feminist writers and academics had very little to say about why women remove their body hair; primarily, they discuss women’s body shape and weight. They either did (and do) not mention body hair at all, or, if they did, they only briefly advocated not practicing hair removal in order to return to a ‘natural’ body, or they celebrated hair removal as part of an idea of an enjoyment of beautification. In my book I did not want either to advocate hair-removal or to defend it, but try to understand more why it was done: what it meant.

This is also why I ended up not writing the whole book myself, but having different chapters written by different experts, although they all follow the theoretical framework I worked out in relation to body hair in my own introductory chapter, which is to see body hair and the body more widely (any kind of body, not just ‘female’ or ‘human’) as culturally constructed, not as ‘biologically’ determined. In terms of this approach, I was following (as I continue to do in all my work) my interest in critical and cultural theory, inspired by specific interpretations of the implications of psychoanalysis based on the work of, for instance, Jacqueline Rose, Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler. Having a range of different expertise also allows the book to illuminate the meanings of hair-removal across a range of fields and practices: literature, film, art, psychology, advertising, anthropology, and so on.

In the end it took me twenty years to get the book published. I wrote to over forty publishers during those years, but most of them either said the subject was too trivial to write about at such length and in an academic book, or they said that society was no longer interested in what they called ‘extreme feminism’. Interestingly, these responses in and of themselves completely supported the argument of the book and were predictable from what my contributors and I examine in the book, which is that body hair is an instance of how issues can be defined as socially, culturally or historically too silly and trivial to be discussed, on the one hand, whilst on the other they are simultaneously seen as too dangerous, mad and monstrous to be considered, and we argue throughout the book that this is in fact how social and cultural power acts itself out. This can be compared, for instance, to what literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar classically called the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in terms of the marginalisation and vilification of women as writers in nineteenth-century English literature and culture.

It was remarkable to see the kinds of comments publishers (from the UK and USA, as this is where I contacted academic publishers) made, even in the case of initially enthusiastic and supportive commissioning editors: one editor from a self-defined ‘radical’ academic press told me her sales team would not accept the book as they saw it as ‘too feminist’ to be able to sell. On the other hand, self-defined feminist presses such as Virago and The Women’s Press had no interest in the book at all and rejected it out of hand. Another publisher who initially did want to publish the book finally rejected it when a review-reader said they thought it should primarily be about men and body hair, not women (although, in fact, the book argues these are not separate issues). In another case, a publisher wanted me to change the title because they said that The Last Taboo ‘made it sound like it was about sex’; apparently they thought body hair had nothing to do with sexuality! Yet another publisher told me the book should not be theoretical, as there was nothing important theoretically about women and body hair, but that it should be written as a ‘sociological’ study.

My contributors and I were thrilled when the book was finally published by Manchester University Press in 2007. I worked on this book longer than on any other in my academic career, and making it not only was part of my own stubborn belief that this issue mattered, whatever many of the other publishers thought, but also confirmed to me that much of academia (and academic publishing), no matter how much it claims to be about original thinking, is often just as much in thrall to ideas of the acceptable and the valuing of ‘fashion’.

For more information about The Last Taboo, visit the Manchester University Press website, or Amazon.

The Body Hair blog series continues:

Damned if you do and damned if you don't, by Rosie Garland

On Body Hair, by LJ Maher

Female Werewolves, Fur and Body Hair, by Carys Crossen

CFP: 4th Global Conference: Storytelling

Tuesday 21st May – Friday 24th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations

Human life is conducted through story, which comes naturally to us. Sharing stories is arguably the most important way we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and fears; about what we value and what we don’t. We learn about and make sense of our lives by telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other lives by listening to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the influence of the culture in which we are immersed, we live our lives in ways that try to create the stories we want to be able to tell about them.

Members of many professions, including medicine, nursing, teaching, the law, psychotherapy and counseling, spend a great deal of their time listening to and communicating through stories. Story is a powerful tool for teachers, because it is a good way of enabling students and other learners to integrate what they are learning with what they already know, and of placing what is learned in a context that makes it easy to recall. Story plays an important role in academic disciplines like philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology, history as well as literature Narrative methods for the collection of data are increasingly used in research in the social sciences and humanities, where the value of getting to know people in a more intimate and less distant way – almost as if we are getting to know them from the inside, begins to be viewed as having some value. Some academics have begun to realise the value of storytelling as a model for academic writing.

Most of us have lots of experience of relating to other lives through narrative forms, including the nursery stories we encounter as children; the books we read and the movies we watch. When we are moved by a play or a film or by a novel, we are moved because we begin imaginatively to live the lives of the characters that inhabit them. If we are lucky we will encounter as we grow up, fictional stories that stay with us like old friends, throughout our lives that we will revisit again and again as a way coming to terms with and responding to experiences in our own lives.

Storytelling: global reflections on narrative, will provide a space in which stories about story can be told, and in which the use of stories in the widest possible range of aspects of human life, can be reported. Abstracts are invited for individual contributions and for symposia of three closely related papers. They may address any aspect of story or narrative, including, for example:

Story as a pedagogical tool in academic disciplines such as history; anthropology, psychology, theology, cultural theory, medicine, law, philosophy, education, and archaeology.

Narrative and the gathering of stories of lived experience, as a research approach in any area of academic, professional and public life.

The place of story and storytelling in the practice of journalism; PR advertising; conflict resolution; architecture; religion; tourism, politics and the law, and in clinical contexts such as medicine, psychotherapy, nursing and counseling.

Finally abstracts may feature storytelling in any aspect of culture, including music (from opera to heavy metal, folk and sacred music); fine art; theatre; literature; cinema and digital storytelling.

Alongside traditional conference papers, participants are invited to propose presentations of other kinds including, for example, theatrical performance or song, or workshops aimed at engaging participants in active learning about story and its possibilities.

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013 Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: STORY4 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Gavin J Fairbairn 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Persons series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume. All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

For further details of the conference, please click here. 

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Responsible Living: Ethical Issues in Everyday Life

Saturday 18th May – Monday 20th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations

Taking their professional responsibilities seriously, practitioners of a wide variety of professions, including medicine, psychology and social work; journalism, tourism and the arts; architecture, civil engineering and the law, engage in reflection about ethical issues as part of their daily practice. Most professions have an ethical code with which its members are expected to comply. But ethical issues are not to be found only in the workplace. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all face ethical decisions every day. Or at any rate, each day we make decisions that have ethical significance – about, for example, what we eat; how we behave towards others, including strangers as well as family and friends; about the extent to which we are willing to share what we have with others who have less; about the energy we use in travelling and in heating our homes, and about where we should shop for food, clothes and the other essentials of modern life.

Probably the most talked about problems about the intention to live responsibly arise in relation to human induced climate change, which has provoked heated debate at every level, and global summits aimed at forging agreements about how to tackle the problems of global warming. As well as local and international regulation, reflection about the problems of climate change have led also to mountains of advice about what we can to do to limit our impact on the planet – from changes in the ways we produce and package goods, to how we build, heat and insulate our homes; and from the advantages of using locally produced food and other necessities, to those of recycling almost everything. Of course, global warming is not the only area of life in which ethical living has become a major focus for many people. For example, they are concerned also, about a wide range of other issues including:

The ethical realities that surround food production, such as the use of chemicals in farming and the introduction of genetically modified crops.
Corruption in public life.
The power of multi-national companies and of the media in changing the ways we think and live.
Ways of keeping children safe and allowing them to grow to their full potential, wherever they live.
Poverty in both developing and developed countries.
Whether to buy their clothes from cut price shops that source them from manufacturers that pay their workers such low wages that they are barely better off than slaves, or from swankier shops that they hope are more ethical.
The destruction of the rainforests and the depletion of the earth’s resources.

Living Responsibly: reflecting on the ethical issues of everyday life will facilitate dialogue about living more responsibly. It will be of interest to everyone who cares about living in ways that are respectful of others and respectful of the planet, whether they are lay people or, for example, ethicists, sociologists, theologians, anthropologists or psychologists who are interested in what it means to behave ethically, and in what motivates ethical behaviour.

Abstracts are invited about any aspect of ethical issues in everyday life, of which the following suggested topics and questions are merely exemplars:

FOOD

~What should we eat and where should we buy our food?
~Should concerns about animal welfare turn us into vegetarians, or persuade us only to eat meat from animals that have been reared humanely?
~Is it really morally better to eat organic, locally produced food?
~What’s more important – the air miles it takes to bring my mange tout here from Kenya, or the fact that the Kenyan farmer who grows them gets at least some money?
~Do organically fed, free range chickens really enjoy their lives more than factory made ones?
~Is eating organically grown beef really more ethical?

CLIMATE CHANGE and GLOBAL WARMING

~What should we do about the problem of global warming?
~Will it really make any difference if we recycle; consume less energy and take fewer foreign holidays?
~Should I pay the optional carbon offsetting charge every time I fly?
~What will we do when the oil runs out?
~Wind farms, nuclear power and the overuse of energy.

RELATING TO AND CARING FOR OTHERS

~What ethical demands do personal relationships with family or friends place on us?
~Does the role of ‘parent’ or ‘spouse’ create particular ethical responsibilities?
~How responsible are we for those who are less well off than we are?
~Should we give money to beggars in the street, even if we suspect they will use it for drugs and alcohol?
~Do we also have ethical obligations to strangers, whether they are from our society or more distant ones, that conflict with our obligations to friends and lovers?
~Must we donate to every global disaster fund, even if we believe that our money may not reach those who need our help?
~Should I feel guilty about the plight of folk in developing countries that are squandering their GDP on warfare?
~What special ethical considerations do sexual relationships involve?

BUSINESS

~What does it take for a business to be ethically sound?
~Should multinationals rule the world?
~What’s fair about ‘fairtrade’?
~Isn’t ‘Responsible and sustainable tourism’ just another way of capturing a share of the market from cyncial business people?
~Should we buy newspapers published by companies that have a track record of unethical behaviour?

Papers will be considered on any related theme. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: RL3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Gavin J Fairbairn 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Persons series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume. All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

For further details of the conference, please click here. 

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300-1800

The University of York
21-22 June 2013

Confirmed keynote addresses from:

Nicky Hallett (University of Sheffield)
Matthew Milner (McGill University)
& Chris Woolgar (University of Southampton)

Religion has always been characterised as much by embodied experience as by abstract theological dispute. From the sounds of the adhān (the Islamic call to prayer), to the smell of incense in the Hindu Pūjā (a ritual offering to the deities), the visual emblem of the cross in the Christian tradition, and the ascetic practices of Theravada Buddhism, sensation is integral to a range of devotional practices. At the same time, the history of many faiths is characterised by an intense suspicion of the senses and the pleasures they offer.

This international, interdisciplinary conference, to be held at the University of York from 21 to 22 June 2013, will bring together scholars working on the role played by the senses in the experience and expression of religion and faith in the pre-modern world. The burgeoning field of sensory history offers a fertile ground for reconsideration of religious studies across disciplinary boundaries. We welcome papers from anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, historians, literary scholars, musicologists, philosophers, theologians, and any other interested parties. Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

- Synaesthesia: how do religious rituals blur sensory boundaries, and challenge sensory hierarchies?

- Iconography and iconoclasm: how might we conceive the ‘rites of violence’ in sensory terms? How does iconography engage the non-visual senses?

- The senses and conversion: how are the senses used to elicit conversion?

- Material cultures of religion: what role do the senses play in mediating between bodies and sacred objects?

- The senses and gender: are sensing practices gender specific?

- The inner (spiritual) senses: how do they relate to the external (bodily) senses?

- Sensory environments: to what extent do environments shape devotional practices and beliefs, and vice versa? How do we use our senses to orient ourselves in space?

- Affect: what role do the senses play in the inculcation of religious affect?

Proposals (max. 300 words) for papers of 20 minutes are welcomed both from established scholars, and from postgraduate students. Applications from panels of three speakers are encouraged, as well as individual proposals.

They should be sent to conference organisers Robin Macdonald, Emilie Murphy, and Elizabeth Swann by 6pm on 5 November 2012.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies

Wednesday 15th May – Friday 17th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations:

What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic? From ‘Aristotelian’ spaces – as containers of monsters and the monstrous – to ‘Leibnizian’ spaces, where the monstrous emerges from the topological relation between events and localities, monstrous geographies have always haunted the human cultural imagination. From the Necropolis to the Killing Fields and from the Amityville Horror to the island of Dr. Moreau, geographical locations may act as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviours enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration. Whether actual or imagined, these places of wonder, fear and horror speak of the symbiotic relation between humanity and location that sees morality, ideology and emotions given physical form in the house, the forest, the island, the nation and even far away worlds in both space and time. They may engage notions of self and otherness, inclusion and exclusion, normal and aberrant, defence and contagion; may act as magnets for destructive and evil forces, such as the island of Manhattan; they are the source of malevolent energies and forces, such as Transylvania, Area 51 and Ringu; and they are the fulcrum for chaotic, warping energies, such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Pandemonium. Alongside this, there exist the monstrous geographies created by scientific experimentation, human waste and environmental accidents, creating sites of potential and actual disaster such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster, and the devastated coastline of Tohuku, Japan. These places raise diverse post-human quandaries regarding necessities in the present leading to real or imagined futures of humanity and habitation.

Encompassing the factual and the fictional, the literal and the literary, this project investigates the very particular relationships and interactions between humanity and place, the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and sees a multitude of configurations of human monstrosity and evil projected, inflicted, or immanent to place. Such monstrous geographies can be seen to emerge from the disparity between past and present, memory and modernity, urban and rural and can be expressed through categories of class, gender and racial difference as well as generational, political and religious tensions.

Presentations, papers, reports, performances, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

Monstrous Cartographies
~Terra incognita
~Real and Mythic lost lands: eg., Atlantis, D’yss, and Shangri-La
~Utopias/Dystopias, future cities in time and space
~Malevolent regions: eg., Lemuria, Bermuda Triangle, Transylvania
~Sublime landscapes
~Bodies as maps and maps as bodies, eg. Prison Break

Monstrous Islands
~As sites of experimentation. Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park etc As a beacon for evil: eg., Manhattan in Godzilla and Cloverfield
~As site of ritual evil and incest: eg., Wicker Man, Pitkin Islands, Isle of the Dead
~Imperialist intent and construction: eg., Prospero’s Island, Hong Kong, Hashima

Monstrous Cosmographies
~Evil planets and dimensions
~Comets, meteorites and beings from unknown worlds
~Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
~Planets and alien landscapes that consume and mutate earthly travelers

Monstrous Environmental Geographies
~Polluted lakes and landscapes
~Landfills, oil spills and mining sites
~Melting icecaps and landforms at risk from global warming
~Land impacted by GM crops and associated experimentation
~Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
~De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands

Monstrous Religious Sites & Ritualistic Monstrosity
~Armageddon, Apocalypse and final battlegrounds
~Hell, the Underworld and Valhalla
~Eden, Purgatory, Paradise, El Dorado, Shangri La
~Sites of religious ritual, sacrifice and burial
~Houses and haunts of murderers and serial killers

Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict
~The land of the enemy and the other
~Sites of attack and retaliation
~Sites of revolution and protest
~Concentration camps, prisons and other sites of incarceration
~Sites of genocide, battlefields and military graveyards
~Border crossings
~Ghettos, shanty towns and relocation sites
~Urban and rural, cities, towns and villages and regional and national prejudice
~Minefields and sites of damage, destruction and ruin
~Arsenals, bunkers and military experimentation

Uncanny Geographical Temporalities
~Old buildings in new surroundings
~Buildings with too much, and those without, memory
~Soulless Architecture
~Ideological architecture, palaces, museums etc
~Places held in time, UNESCO sites and historical and listed buildings
~Old towns and New towns, rich and poor
~Appearing and disappearing towns/regions, eg., Brigadoon, Silent Hill

Monsters on the Move
~Contagion, scouring and infectious landscapes
~Monsters and mobile technologies: phone, video, cars, planes, computers etc
~Fluid identities, fluid places
~Touring Monstrosities, dreamscapes and infernal topologies

Architectural Monstrosity
~Mazes and labyrinths (with or without the Minotaur)
~Unsettling/revolting geometries (E.A. Abbot’s Flatland, H.P. Lovecraft’s City of R’lyeh)
~Monstrous/abject building materials (bones, concrete, excrements, the corpse in the wall)
~The architecture of death (hospices, death row, funeral homes, slaughterhouses)

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f0 up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Monstrous Geographies 2 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Jessica Rapson 

Rob Fisher 

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here. 

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Evil, Women and the Feminine

Saturday 18th May – Monday 20th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations:

"A wanton woman is the figure of imperfection; in nature an ape, in quality a wagtail, in countenance a witch, and in condition a kind of devil."

(Nicholas Breton, 1615)

Despite the attempts of feminists the conjunction between evil and the feminine seems unbroken. Established as secondary, derivative and hence inferior, women have been long suspected of being the source of human (though more often masculine) miseries, always in cahoots with the forces of evil and destruction. Paradoxically, at the same time, some have also been put on the pedestal and lauded as ideals of purity and dedication, yet these paragons only proved the rule that, on average, the feminine/woman equals imperfect and transgressive. Mischievous, beguiling, seductive, lascivious, unruly, carping, vengeful and manipulative – these are only a few of the epithets present in cultures and literatures across the world. In grappling with our understanding of what it is to be and do ‘evil’, the project aims to explore the possible sources of the fear and hatred of women and the feminine as well as their manifestations and pervasiveness across times, cultures and media.

This interdisciplinary project invites scholars, artists, writers, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, historians, etc. to present papers, reports, work-in-progress, art pieces and workshops on issues related but definitely not limited to the following themes:

~ Evil Women and Feminine Evil: Vices and Sins of Women

~ Representing and Misrepresenting the Female; Evil Women 'Talking Back'

~ Motherhood; Monstrous Motherhood; Infertility and its Meaning across Cultures

~ Monstrous Births and Infanticide

~ Matriarchy/Matricide/Spouse Murder

~ Devious Sexuality and Feminine Perversions

~ Women and/as the Abject; Unnatural Women/Femininity

~ Menstruation, Castration

~ Fears and Myths: Feminine Blood, Witchcraft, Vamp(ires)s, Sirens, Harpies, Lamias, etc.

~ Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on Evil Feminine and Femaleness

~ The Evil Woman in Literature, Religion, Medicine, Law across Times and Cultures

~ Psychoanalytic Perspectives: 'Vagina Dentata,' 'the Wandering Womb,' 'Poisonous Look' etc.

~ Sexualizing the Female or Evil Objectification

~ Trans-Cultural Conceptualisations of Femme Fatale vs the Perfect Woman

~ Women and (Misuse of) Power

~ Evil Beauty; the Meaning of Hair and Make-up

~ Evil, Feminine in Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Horror, Thriller

~ Evil, Feminine in Mythologies and Religions across the world

~ Case Studies: Evil Women on the Agenda

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday15th February 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: EWF5 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Natalia Kaloh Vid 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Call for Submissions: Monsters and the Monstrous Journal

Volume 3, Number 1, Themed Issue on Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity

This issue is concentrating on spaces that are considered monstrous or are themselves capable of producing monstrosity. these spaces can be actual or authored, real or imaginary. Spaces of violence and murder, social taboo, ideological excess and human depravity from the past, present or future. Equally spaces natural or supernatural, earth found or star bound that produce, spawn or inevitably return to monstrosity in all its many human, cultural and temporal forms.

The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:

● Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict: Genocide, battle zones, imprisonment, execution, torture

● Monstrous Environments: Biological experimentation, nuclear fallout, GM crops

● Monstrous Temporalities: Other dimensions, spirit worlds, mythical places

● Monstrous Cosmographies: Outer Space, Alien worlds, Terra Incognita, space craft, parallel universes

● Monstrous Religious Spaces: Hell, Hades, Purgatory, Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Samsara, Paradise

● Monstrous Ideological Spaces: Society, Politics, Difference, Gender, Colonial, Post Colonial, Disabilities

Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 8th March 2013 at the latest.

Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.

For Further Information, please visit the journal's website.

Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: “Monstrous Beauty/The Beauty of Monstrosity.”

We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.

All accepted articles, artworks and prose pieces will receive a free electronic version of the journal.

Length Requirements:

Articles – 5,000 – 7,000 words.

Reflections, reports and responses – 1,000 – 3,000 words.

Book reviews – 500 – 4,000 words.

Other forms of contributions such as artworks, photographs, poetry, prose and short stories are welcome.

In the case of visual work and images we ask that all copyrights to publication are either obtained or owned by the author/artist.

Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line:

'Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/…): Author Surname'

Submissions E-Mail Address 

Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.

Review: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt (Bold Strokes Books, 2010)

This is the fourth of four reviews of recent female werewolf fiction. You can read the others here:

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Nearly a year ago, I ran a poll on this site for readers to vote for their favourite female werewolves. One werewolf – L.L. Raand’s Sylvan Mir – got far and away more votes than any other contender. I’ll repeat what I said at the time, this was not the result of spamming or any other dodgy practice, but rather an outpouring of support from Raand (aka Radclyffe)’s very loyal fans. With an endorsement like that, I had to read the books.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Midnight Hunt (the first book in Raand’s Midnight Hunters series). I was a little trepidatious. The book has been described as both erotica and erotic romance – two genres that I’m not hugely enamoured with. In the comments left by Raand’s fans, her alpha werewolf Sylvan was most often described as “hot”, and I was worried that this meant sexy, but one-dimensional. Still, I began the book with an open mind, keen to see why it was so popular…

… and I’m really glad I did. I was very pleasantly surprised, and now understand why I recently heard Radclyffe described as “the rock star of lesbian romance”.

The Midnight Hunt is set in a world in which “Weres”, vampires and other “Praetern” races live uneasily alongside human beings. Though the human and supernatural creatures have long co-existed, the latter have recently come out into the open, leading to a troubled cohabitation that is, at the start of The Midnight Hunt, very much a work-in-progress.

Sylvan Mir is the alpha “Were”, attempting to protect her species in the face of human antagonism and uneasy alliance with the other Praeterns. In addition to this, young female werewolves are being attacked, and a disease called “Were fever” is infected both humans and werewolves. When one of Sylvan’s wolves is infected, she is thrown into the path of human doctor Drake McKennan, who risks her own life to treat a werewolf.

To complicate matters further, a (human) investigative reporter named Becca Land is determined to get to the bottom of recent events, which means her working with, or at least trying to work with, Jody Gates, a vampire detective. I’m guessing I don’t need to note, here, that all four of these women are very sexy and each pair feel a powerful (and dangerous) attraction to each other… it is an erotic romance after all.

So, what was it that made The Midnight Hunt stand out from the crowd? What was it that surprised me? The first thing was the quality of writing. The book is very readable, and very well-paced. The sex scenes – notoriously difficult to get right – are sexy. A good balance is drawn between detail and euphemism, which I thought was a real strong point of Raand’s writing style.

But the main reason why I enjoyed this book was the characterization, especially that of Sylvan Mir. As I said above, I was half-expecting Sylvan to be nothing more than a ‘hot’ female werewolf, and I’ve read enough of those. But Sylvan, though definitely sexy, has a depth and plausibility to her character that was very engaging. Attempting to balance being a leader with her own emotional needs, trying to work with the other Praeterns and exist with the humans, Sylvan was conflicted, isolated and, sometimes, brutal. And I make no secret of the fact that this is how I like my she-wolves. This also meant that her developing relationship with Drake was more believable – as well as allowing for the requisite obstacles for the romance storyline.

There is also more to the plot of The Midnight Hunt than just romance and sex – though, don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of sex. I liked the world that Raand had sketched out, and think that her decision to set the book shortly after the “Exodus” of the Praetern races, rather than during it, was a good one. It was an interesting angle to take on the humans/supernaturals living alongside one another, and, if anything, I would have liked to have seen more of this world. I hope it will be developed further in the subsequent books.

If I have a criticism of the world-building, it would be that Raand’s “Weres” are much more compelling than her vampires. Not that vampires need to be the central creatures in a fantasy world (and I hope the focus of my blog shows that I don’t think that!), but rather that the vampires in The Midnight Hunt are a little underdeveloped beyond their hypnotic, polymorphous sexuality. This was a little frustrating, as Raand’s vampires do have some unusual aspects that differentiate them from the current mass of vampires – I wanted more of these.

I suppose this is a good point to talk about the sex. As I’ve said, the sex scenes are well-written and strike a good balance of the erotic and the romantic. I am not a huge erotica fan, so occasionally found myself waiting a little impatiently for the sex to finish so Sylvan could go out and hunt again, or get back to investigating what has been happening to her pack. Raand’s werewolves and vampires are hypersexual by their very natures, but, to her credit, she does give some good discussions of the consequences and implications of this – as well as some pretty steamy set-pieces. I felt the ending of the book also focused more on the resolution of the sex/romance plot than the investigation of “Were fever”, though this is to be expected given the genre. It’s also worth noting that this is the first book in a series, so some loose ends are necessary to carry through to the next instalment.

In conclusion, The Midnight Hunt is a great start to a series. Its ‘alpha’ female is a really creation, and I was fully invested in Sylvan and her development through the book. It is an erotic romance, which might not appeal to everyone. The sex outweighs the violence and horror by a wide margin, and I know this may not be to everyone’s tastes. However, there is much more to this book than sex, and I think it has a wider appeal than simply its genre.

If you are a fan of paranormal erotic romance, then The Midnight Hunt is a must-read. But, like I’ve said, I’m not normally a fan of the genre, but still enjoyed the book immensely and am looking forward to reading the rest of the Midnight Hunters series. If you like your female werewolves hot and sexy – but also fierce and protective, conflicted and spiky – then you will like Sylvan Mir. Now you can take my word for it, as well as the legion of Raand fans who voted in my poll.

For more information about the Midnight Hunters series, see the publisher’s website.

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Review: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe (Allison Moon, 2011)

This is the third of four reviews of recent female werewolf fiction. You can read the others here:

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

Cover image Lunatic Fringe is a debut, self-published novel by Allison Moon. It tells the story of a young, naïve girl named Lexie Clarion, who leaves home to study at Milton College (in “rural Oregon”). As soon as she starts at university, she is confronted by an apparent werewolf threat, invited to join “The Pack” (a self-styled radical feminist group), and finds herself attracted to a mysterious woman named Archer. Lexie’s loyalties are divided when she realizes Archer and the Pack have a troubled history.

Archer’s supernatural status is signalled early on – the genre trope of oddly coloured eyes is deployed to this end – and there is no ambiguity about the type of supernatural creatures peopling Lunatic Fringe. So, it’s not difficult to work out that Archer is a werewolf. This is not a criticism, however, as I think we’ve all reached saturation point with the ‘guess what type of supernatural being the sexy stranger is’ plot. I liked knowing where I stood with Archer.

The werewolves in Lunatic Fringe are of a somewhat confused type. As is common in contemporary fiction, they are a mixture of European tradition and pseudo-shamanism. In a rather exposition-heavy passage, Archer explains the origin story of the werewolf. This origin had real potential, as it sought to weave together ideas of lycanthropy with gender construction. Unfortunately, this potential was not exploited fully, and the resultant explanation was rather implausible and very US-centric (i.e. there appears to have been no history and no werewolves until the colonization of the Americas, which jars a little if you are familiar with the history of werewolf literature and lore).

There’s always a danger of confusion when writers bring together too many different traditions in werewolf fiction – the same is true for vampire fiction. The disparate ‘types’ of shapeshifting don’t always gel particularly well together. Unfortunately, this is true of Lunatic Fringe. While some werewolves are ‘infected’ (and I will give a big thumbs up for the method of ‘infection’ – no spoilers, but it’s a piece of Northern European lore that is rarely used in twenty-first-century fiction), others are born werewolves, and yet others are the ‘original’ werewolves. These creatures are all so different that Moon has to insert numerous ‘lessons’ imparted to the heroine, and this becomes rather confused and almost incoherent in places. That one group of werewolves are called the “Morloc”, with the apparently unintentional resonances, added to the problem.

Sadly, ‘confused’ is probably the best adjective I can think of to describe Lunatic Fringe. Plot-wise, there is far too much going on. The story jumps between a coming-of-age tale, an erotic romance, a thriller, a horror story. Each of the threads would have made a good plot for a werewolf story, but they have become rather tangled together. The ending is very rushed, bringing the disparate storylines together in a hurried denouement that does not completely make sense and seems to contradict some things that have come before.

One of the problems with the ending, without giving too much away, is that, while I was invested in Moon’s Archer, I really did not like her heroine Lexie. I said above that Lexie is naïve, but I’m not sure she’s not just ignorant. I found her views on gender and sexuality to be a bit unappealing, if I’m honest, especially her insistence on calling every ‘butch’ woman she meets ‘he’. The first time this happens is in a flashback to Lexie’s childhood, in which she remembers “Wes” her father’s colleague in the forestry service. Wes wears flannel shirts and “rough work pants”, so Lexie calls her by male pronouns – even when corrected by Wes’s friends and colleagues. As a young student, Lexie encounters “the second of such women”, Mitch, and insists on calling this woman by male pronouns as well.

When Lexie enters in a sexual relationship with Archer, she assumes the role of the old-fashioned romance heroine, lying back and being ‘awakened’ by her lover. In the consummation of their relationship, the reader is given page after page of Archer doing things to Lexie (some of which is very graphic, which jars a little with the tone of the rest of the book), but we never get to see Archer’s perspective. We never see Archer having an orgasm (though Lexie reflects on Archer’s enjoyment and her own ability to give her partner orgasms later) and the lack of mutuality in their relationship makes Lexie’s final decision seem cruel to say the least.

Of the supporting cast, the male characters are underdeveloped and veer towards stereotypes; however, it is the “Pack” that are more frustrating. Referring to themselves as “feminists” and all, without exception, lesbian and promiscuous, this group of women are, in fact, caricatures of female sexuality. Their version of feminism is misandrist essentialism, and their version of lesbianism is more reminiscent of heterosexual porn than lesbian erotica. At the first “Pack” party that Lexie attends, for example, the young women discuss whether or not to play “Truth or Dare”. Renee doesn’t want to: “The whole point of Truth or Dare is to mack on the people at the party. I’ve already slept with all of you. Where’s the excitement in that?” (p. 62)

Nevertheless, I will say that the presentation of the “Pack” did redeem itself in Chapter 11. In this chapter, the women’s pretence at being a feminist group slips, and they carry out a brutal murder. I thoroughly enjoyed this chapter, and would have happily read a whole book with this version of the characters. I could not get behind the “Pack” as a group of spoilt and entitled rich kids claiming moral high ground, but I was very taken with them as a bunch of sadistic and sociopathic killers (yes, yes, I’m aware that reveals a lot about me and my tastes…)

Perhaps I would have enjoyed Lunatic Fringe more if I had liked the central character more. If I had found Lexie more sympathetic, the plot tangles would have been easier to engage with. I did, nevertheless, like the character of Archer. The presentation of this character hinted at much more complexity and, as a result, she elicited more sympathy from me. In a novel of this type, which is character-driven, it is very difficult to enjoy the plot when you dislike the heroine. The same story, told from Archer’s point of view, might have felt very different.

Much as I wish I could say differently, Lunatic Fringe is not the greatest werewolf novel I have read. It lacks the punch and coherence of many of its peers, and its central character left me cold. However, it is not the worst either. Fans of werewolf fiction might enjoy the version of lycanthropy presented, and there is plenty of sex and violence for those who require that in their fiction. It’s a fast read, with a twist ending, and – whether or not you like her – a genuine dilemma for the heroine.

For more information about Lunatic Fringe, please visit the author’s website.

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

Review: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris (S.J. Bell, 2012)

This is the second of four reviews of recent female werewolf fiction. You can read the others here:

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

Bonds of Fenris is a self-published novel by S.J. Bell. It tells the story of Talia Thornwood, a young woman who has recently been ‘infected’ with lycanthropy and is seeking a way of coming to terms with her new life. She lives with her ‘pack’ – Bo, Leroy, Pierce and Marlene, also young ‘infected’ werewolves – and meets Corwin, a werewolf who can apparently control his lycanthropic side. Talia, keen to be free of her ‘wolf’ and her uncontrollable, bestial transformation at each full moon, allows Corwin to mentor her and teach her more about what it means to be a werewolf.

The novel’s plot falls into two distinct halves – the first being Talia’s life with the ‘pack’ in their “rental on the edge of the woods” (p. 6). The young werewolves squabble amongst themselves, hunt on a monthly basis and try to hold down jobs and go to college. This section of the book was by far the stronger part and had real potential for development. However, tragedy strikes and (to coin a hackneyed phrase), life will never be the same for Talia and her friends.

It’s at this point that the narrator seeks assistance from the mysterious werewolf Corwin, who has apparently found a way to overcome the involuntary transformation occasioned by a full moon. He and Talia retreat to a cabin in the woods, so that he can teach her the important lessons of control that a werewolf must learn.

Sadly, the book loses its momentum at this point. As Corwin begins to mentor Talia, the narrative becomes very exposition-heavy, and the final revelation of what Talia must learn is pretty obvious from the start (if you have read much recent werewolf fiction), meaning that the ‘lessons’ feel overly-dramatic and onerous. I was left unsure as to why Corwin felt the need to put Talia through such an ordeal, and why she submitted so readily.

For fans of werewolf fiction, though, this book has a lot to recommend it. The werewolves are of a recognizable late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century type – infected by a bite from another werewolf, controlled by the full moon, subject to bone-popping, painful metamorphosis, and filled with angst and remorse at what their ‘wolf’ does. Like much recent werewolf fiction, there is a lot of discussion of control, balance and harmony, and lots of reference to two beings inhabiting one skin; however, though the title misleadingly suggests some connection with Northern European legend, the successful werewolf must actually embrace teachings more reminiscent of Eastern philosophy.

There are some interesting passages early in the novel, and some particularly poignant examples of the young ‘pack’ trying to integrate themselves into ‘human’ society – using peppermint soaked rags to disguise the smell of human flesh, for instance. Unfortunately, though, the book suffers from the (sadly) typical under-editing of a self-published novel, and never quite lives up to the potential of its idea.

Characterization, in particular, is a weakness. The protagonist, Talia, is not convincing. Her submission to the males around her was a source of frustration to me throughout the book. One early example sees her in an argument with Marlene, the other female member of the pack. This is interrupted by Leroy who says: “Girls, girls […] Chill out, okay?” Rather than react or respond to this patronizing tone, Talia (the first-person narrator) describes him as speaking “diplomatically” (p. 9). Elsewhere, Talia is the victim of physical assault by Pierce (who wants to have sex with her) and intense emotional blackmail by Bo (who also wants to have sex with her). Her reaction to both is to lock herself in her bedroom and decide that the men might have a point and muse on whether or not she should sleep with one of them. Not only is this an unusual reaction for a woman, it is almost completely unheard of for a female werewolf – the tradition of ‘she-wolves’ avenging sexual assault is a long one, but, seemingly, not one to which Talia belongs.

As a side note, I would also say that small, frustrating details seem to undermine Talia’s presentation. For instance, though she is apparently twenty-one, she uses a mobile phone that is a “beaten-up relic of the late 1990s” (p. 28) (i.e. she is still using the same phone that she had when she was seven). I don’t wish to come across as being pedantic or overly critical, but rather to offer an example of under-editing that had an impact on character. A robust critique prior to publication would have tidied up these minor inconsistencies.

Perhaps (and I always like to be self-aware in my reviews), this is also down to my own tastes. Talia was a little too submissive and hopeful for my liking. I like my female werewolves in the mould of Emson’s Laura Greenacre or Miller’s Kalix MacRinnalch. Hell – I think Leah Clearwater was Meyer’s finest creation, and was genuinely pleased when she ended the Twilight series still brooding, angry and isolated. As a result, I was much more drawn to Bell’s grumpy, intellectual Marlene than Talia, and would love to see this character developed further in future books. I think my favourite part of Bonds of Fenris was when Marlene explained just how stupid Corwin’s lessons were!

For a self-published, debut novel, Bonds of Fenris is a decent read. It is certainly head and shoulders above some self-published works.* There are few grammatical or spelling errors, and the paragraphing and chapter divisions are well done. This indicates to me that Bell is a proficient writer who is in the process of developing his craft – and I will look forward to seeing this development as he progresses. I wouldn’t normally bring what I know of authors personally to a review, but I have to admit that I know Bell is a huge werewolf fan, and I think this enthusiasm shows in his writing. Bonds of Fenris is a book about getting to know werewolves from the inside out, and Bell’s strong knowledge and passion for all things lycanthropic give him a good starting point for this.

In conclusion, then, Bonds of Fenris is a recommendation for werewolf fans. It is the work of a novelist at the start of his career, and there are some teething problems, but it will definitely appeal to fans of the lycanthropic, and I will certainly look forward to seeing where he goes in his next book.

For more information about Bonds of Fenris, please see S.J. Bell’s website.

Part 1: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

*Please don’t take this the wrong way – I really, really want to like self-published novels, and always approach them with optimism and an open mind. However, I am inundated with books for review that were published way before they were ready, and it’s weakening my resolve a little.

Review: Catherine Lundoff, Silver Moon (Lethe Press, 2012)

Since I haven’t reviewed any female werewolf fiction for a while, I thought I would do a bumper quadruple review today. This is Part 1, but you can also read:

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

I’ll start, though, with Catherine Lundoff’s recent title, Silver Moon.

Published by Lethe Press, Silver Moon promises to be the first in a new series, and tells the story of the werewolves of Wolf Point – a small US town. The main character, Becca Thornton, discovers that she is becoming a werewolf, that many of her neighbours are also werewolves, and that their town is under threat from hunters.

While this may sound fairly standard lycanthropic fare, Lundoff’s book offers an interesting twist on the formula. In fact, it was the unusual concept that drew me to the book in the first place.

Becca Thornton is not a teenaged girl going through puberty, nor has she recently been bitten. She is a middle-aged women going through the menopause. The book starts with her experiencing a hot flash, and other changes follow… but not all of her symptoms can be so easily explained. She discovers that she is also becoming a werewolf. For Becca, then, the change really is the change. As she says herself “some days it was hard to say which change was worse”. (p. 83)

I really enjoyed this idea. When you read as much female werewolf fiction as I do, the lycanthropy = puberty metaphor gets old really quickly. Lundoff’s menopausal werewolves were a really refreshing change. More than this, the book is a paranormal romance/adventure – a genre that rarely places middle-aged women on centre stage. If anything, Lundoff’s creations seemed to make more sense than teenaged werewolves. Her descriptions of lycanthropy (which are not so dissimilar to those found in other werewolf texts) seemed to resonate more clearly with menopause than with menarche:

“Despite her fears, she could feel that same wildness building in her. Something was clawing its way to the surface inside her, racing beneath her skin and preparing to break through. She wanted to run and hunt and feel the wind outside. It made her impatient and her feet and hands tapped the floor and the chair in time to her pulse.” (p. 24)

So an A+ to Lundoff for concept – but how is the execution?

The book’s plot revolves around Becca’s transformation into a werewolf, and the revelation that Wolf Point has long been protected by a band of female werewolves – all ‘women of a certain age’. There is some indication that the town’s foundation was the result of a mingling of Native traditions and the magic of white colonizers. It’s a somewhat utopian fantasy of the best of both worlds, but it allows for a mixing of European werewolf traditions and shamanistic magic without too much jarring.

After discovering her lupine/earth magic heritage, Becca also finds that Wolf Point is under threat from a group of hunters, who are both aware of, and hostile to, the werewolf presence in the town. She must work with her fellow she-wolves to keep the town safe from these interlopers.

Without revealing too much about the plot, the arrival of these hunters stirs up old tensions and rivalries. The promise of a ‘cure’ to werewolfism is given, and Becca finds herself playing a dangerous game, never totally sure who she can trust.

The plot, in this respect, was reasonably engrossing. My investment in the central characters (and more on that in a moment) was strong enough for me to care about what happened to them. However, I didn’t feel the same engagement with the ‘villains’, and, in one case in particular, this was a shame. I felt that I could’ve done with more of them, to heighten the complexity of the choices Becca had to make. As it was, there never seemed to be any real suggestion that Becca would turn her back on the ‘pack’, and I would’ve liked a little more uncertainty here.

The final climactic showdown, too, was something of a disappointment. This is not because of what happened, but rather because it didn’t feel pacy enough. The strength of this novel lies in its characters, but the denouement is led more by the ritual they enact, and I felt it dragged a little. I would’ve liked it to be tighter – and possibly shorter. [Self-aware disclaimer] The shamanistic ‘earth magic’ element added to a lot of (mostly North American) werewolf fiction is not generally to my taste, so this criticism says as much about me as a reader as Lundoff as a writer.

Nevertheless, the book as a whole had me gripped, and this was down to Lundoff’s creation of character. Becca Thornton is engaging and likable. Though her relationship with her ex-husband – who has left her for a younger women, and now wants to sell their house to provide for his new family – threatened to become a bit ‘First Wives Club’, Lundoff’s writing avoids descending into cliché.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of the book was Becca’s blossoming relationship with her neighbour Erin, which was sweet and tender, but also believable. Becca finds herself attracted to her neighbour – an out lesbian – but doubts the basis for her feelings. With a light touch, Lundoff has her character muse on whether her attraction has been occasioned by her being menopausal, being a werewolf or being a lesbian. Her confusion and awkwardness is nicely summed up by Becca: “She tried to remember everything she’d ever seen about coming out on Oprah while a tiny voice inside screamed Not that too!” (p. 74)

Like the wolf ‘alpha’, Shelly, Erin is a well-drawn character. As I noted above, it is rare to get one middle-aged woman in a novel of this genre, let alone a sympathetic love interest and a strong supporting cast as well. I enjoyed the slow development of Erin and Becca’s relationship, and look forward to seeing more of this in the subsequent books in the series. I would have liked more of Shelly – I am always drawn to well-written and conflicted female ‘alphas’ – and I hope she will continue to play a role in future books.

All in all, then, this is a strong recommendation. The concept is great – and a real antidote to all those adolescent she-wolves – and the writing, on the whole, is very strong. I will certainly be looking forward to future Women of Wolf Point books. And if the series lives up to its strong start, Becca Thornton will be high on my list of favourite female werewolves.

[Without wanting to be too self-promoting here, if you’re interested in the rise of the menopausal she-wolf, Helen Cross’s story ‘Fur’, in the Wolf-Girls anthology also uses this premise… though it is a quite different tale to Lundoff’s. Cross has written a blog post on female monsters and the menopause on the Playing God with Monsters blog.]

For more information about Silver Moon, please visit Catherine Lundoff’s website.

My female werewolf fiction reviews continue...

Part 2: S.J. Bell, Bonds of Fenris

Part 3: Allison Moon, Lunatic Fringe

Part 4: L.L. Raand, The Midnight Hunt

GUEST POST: J.K. Coi and Sarah Peacock on Wolf-Girls

Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny is a new collection of short stories about female werewolves. Edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones, this collection features seventeen new stories about dark, dangerous and (above all) female lycanthropy.

As part of the Wolf-Girls Blog Tour, I'm happy to host a joint guest post from two of the writers, J.K. Coi and Sarah Peacock, who talk about their experiences of writing female werewolf fiction...

JK Coi is the author of 'Run Wolf' — part of Wolf Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny, and the award-winning author of more than a dozen novels and short stories about dark, epically tortured characters. She also writes dark fantasy for young adults as Chloe Jacobs.

'Run Wolf' is a short story about a young female werewolf who’s been forced into the fight of her life. Kill or be killed, wolf. What’s it going to be? That’s the voice in her head, the one that won’t let up, won’t set her free, not until the sick humans’ game is over. Except that… the game is never going to be over.

I enjoyed writing this story so much, I still can’t get Gwen out of my head. Her strength and determination have inspired a greater storyline that I’m excited to start writing about soon.

But what is it that makes her such a compelling character? Why are werewolves so fascinating in fiction right now, and female werewolves in particular? Well, I think the great thing about seeing more books featuring female wolf protagonists is the fact that it’s fairly new and fresh. Sure, werewolves have been around about as long as vampires, but they’re usually male. Not all, but predominantly. And why is that? Because like vampires, werewolves are traditionally dark characters with lots of brooding badassery and baggage.

Personally, I would love to see more female werewolf characters. I think it’s about time that readers experienced strength and power from a female perspective! And you know what, I think the authors in Wolf Girls are the perfect ones to start writing those books!

Sarah Peacock's contribution to the collection is entitled 'Exiled'. Having a degree in Archaeology and Pre-history, Sarah now divides her time between writing and looking after her children. Fascinated by traditional tales of the supernatural, ‘Exiled’ was inspired by the mention of ‘cú glas’ (grey wolf) in the Ulster Cycle to describe a person wholly without ties, a foreigner, or someone who doesn’t belong.

In 'Exiled', Cassie isn't your normal everyday werewolf. But then again, I don't suppose any of the lycanthropes in 'Wolf Girls' are. For a start, they're all female. For me, the concept behind a woman transforming or becoming a werewolf is such a fascinating one to explore and one that I really enjoyed writing about.

The first time I came across a female werewolf was in the film 'Ginger Snaps' which portrays female lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty and female sexuality. I love this film; it's one of only a few films that I can watch over and over again. The women as werewolves are strong but remain human in many ways - it says so much about being female.

In 'Exiled', Cassie's transformation is psychological. She becomes a werewolf as she discovers her own strength, finds her own voice in a culture that expects women to behave and look a certain way. As a result she becomes an outsider, she doesn't follow other's expectations and she becomes 'Cǔ Glas' – Grey Wolf. I first came across the idea of the grey wolf in an 11th Century Latin poem – I was researching a novel at the time and looking into Iron age customs and traditions. In the poem 'De Mirabulis Hiberniae' it talks about how those outlawed from the tribe would assume the form of a wolf. This is also mentioned in the stories of Cu Chulainn.

Cassie's story essentially developed from that idea. It was, at first, just a scribbled note in my journal.

The story takes the theme of not belonging and explores what happens when Cassie begins refuses to fit in with the small minded expectations that the people around her have. Her anger is unleashed and so she becomes an outsider. In our culture, Women aren't supposed to get angry and there is an extra special stigma reserved for women who are violent or kill. They are seen as the worst of the worst – a far cry from their idealised roles as care givers and nurturers.

One thing that springs to mind is that Cassie's transformation is not clear – does she change purely because she finds her voice or was the potential for turning there already? I quite like that ambiguity.

What is refreshing about the stories in Wolf Girls is that they explore these themes and more. Female lycanthropy has, at times, been taken and subverted into something to be exploited – a cartoon like portrayal of woman as wolf, but these stories veer sharply away from that and do something much more intelligent. In female lycanthropy, we as writers can explore some fascinating avenues; female sexuality, the body, violence, anger and psychology. Of course, never forgetting that a good story should always be the focus. But then again, all stories, including my own have within them, a subconscious undercurrent, something we might not be quite aware of as we write, only visible from the outside later, themes, ideas, pieces of our own psychology.

Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny is available now in paperback from the Hic Dragones website. An eBook edition is coming soon.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Femininites and Masculinities

Tuesday 21st May – Friday 24th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations:

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic study on the issues of gender in its social and cultural contexts. Since its emergence from feminism, gender studies have become one of the most deliberated disciplines. The following project aims at an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and perspectives on the issues of femininity and masculinity in the 21st century. It invites ground-breaking research on a plethora of topics connected with gender, to propose an interdisciplinary view of the frontiers and to stake out new territories in the study of femininity and masculinity.

Papers, presentations, performances, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. Representations of Femininity and Masculinity

~ Femininity and masculinity in history and the history of gender
~ The representation of gender in culture, art, film, literature
~ The representation of gender in popular culture and media
~ Gender in the relation to politics, law and social studies

2. Gender Borders and Transgressions

~ Performativity of gender
~Female masculinities / male femininities
~ Androgyny
~ Transgender issues
~ The body and its transgressions

3. New Directions in Femininity and Masculinity Studies

~ New perspectives in masculinity and boyhood studies
~ Men in feminism
~ Third wave feminism, womanism
~ Postfeminism, post-feminism and postfemininity
~ Lesbian feminism
~ Eco-feminism
~ Cyberfeminism
~ Individual feminism
~ Feminist disability studies

4. Global and Regional Perspectives on Gender

~ Gender and race
~ Gender and nationality
~ Gender and (post)colonialism
~ Case studies of gender issues in local/regional/national perspectives
~ Global masculinity/ femininity

5. Gender in Relationships

~ Motherhood/fatherhood
~ Gender and family
~ Matriarchy/ patriarchy
~ Sororophobia and matrophobia
~ Misogyny and misandry
~ Female genealogy
~ Gender and maturity

6. Gender in Experience

~ Gender in visual and performance arts
~ Gender in advertisement
~ Gender mainstreaming
~ Gender in psychotherapy
~ Gender equality education
~ Gender in religion
~ Gender and NGOs

Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: FM3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Barbara Braid 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details of the conference, please click here. 

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.