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.
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
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
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
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.
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:
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
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
Thursday, 30 August 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
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.
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.
CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Urban Popcultures
Sunday 12th May – Tuesday 14th May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues related to urban life. The project will promote the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and alternative cultural movements that comprise urban popcultures and subcultures. In particular the conference will encourage equally theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural and political contexts within which alternative urban subcultures are flourishing.
Presentations, papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
1. Urban Space and the Landscape of the City
Urban Aesthetics and Architecture, Creative Re-imagining and Revitalization of the City. Brown Fields Reborn. The Metropolis and Inner City Life: Urban Boredom vs. Creativity.
2. The City as Creative Subject/Object
Urban Life and Urban Subculture Considered in Music, Literature, Art and Film, Urban Fashion and Style. Mobile Gaming. Alternate Realities. Urban Visual Styles, Street Art, Graffiti and Tagging. City Festivals.
3. Urban Codes
Alternative Popular Culture and Ideology, Politics of Alternative Popcultures, D.I.Y, Alternative Ethics of the City. Urban Religion and Religious Expressions. The Language and Urban Slang. The Avantgarde and Urban Codes.
4. Alternative Music Cultures
Histories, Representations, Discourses and Independent Scenes. Popular Music Theory. The Visual Turn. Urban and Alternative Classes, Intertextualities and Intermedialities. Postmodernity and Beyond. Clubbing and Scenes. Hip Hop and Rap. Dark Wave Scenes – EMO, Post-Gothic, and Underground Electronica.
5. The Urban Underground
The Rise and Fall of the Experimental Subcultures, Scenes, Fashions and Styles. Alternative and Underground Dance, Electronica, Hip Hop, and Punk and Post-Rock Scenes.
6. Queer Theory and Urban Alternative Cultures
Gendered Music and Fashion. The Role of the City in Gendered Freedom and Libertine Lifestyles. Pride Parades.
7. The City, Fashion, and Identity
Identity Creation. Style and Branding. Politics of Cool. Pretties, Freaks and Uglies.
8. Visions of Alternative Sound Cultures in Massmedia
The Visual Aspects of Alternative Entertainment. The Evolution of Music and Thematic Television. Media Structure of Music Video. Explicit TV and Censorship. Urban Styles and Extreme Sports.
9. Urban Subcultures in Online World
Urban Identity and Global/Glocal Membership. Globalization/Localisation of Underground Music Experience. Copyright/Copyleft. The Role of Internet in the Transformation of Music Industry. The Impact of User-generated Content.
What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. 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 the 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: Urban Popcultures 3 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
Jordan Copeland
Daniel Riha
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ 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.
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues related to urban life. The project will promote the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and alternative cultural movements that comprise urban popcultures and subcultures. In particular the conference will encourage equally theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural and political contexts within which alternative urban subcultures are flourishing.
Presentations, papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
1. Urban Space and the Landscape of the City
Urban Aesthetics and Architecture, Creative Re-imagining and Revitalization of the City. Brown Fields Reborn. The Metropolis and Inner City Life: Urban Boredom vs. Creativity.
2. The City as Creative Subject/Object
Urban Life and Urban Subculture Considered in Music, Literature, Art and Film, Urban Fashion and Style. Mobile Gaming. Alternate Realities. Urban Visual Styles, Street Art, Graffiti and Tagging. City Festivals.
3. Urban Codes
Alternative Popular Culture and Ideology, Politics of Alternative Popcultures, D.I.Y, Alternative Ethics of the City. Urban Religion and Religious Expressions. The Language and Urban Slang. The Avantgarde and Urban Codes.
4. Alternative Music Cultures
Histories, Representations, Discourses and Independent Scenes. Popular Music Theory. The Visual Turn. Urban and Alternative Classes, Intertextualities and Intermedialities. Postmodernity and Beyond. Clubbing and Scenes. Hip Hop and Rap. Dark Wave Scenes – EMO, Post-Gothic, and Underground Electronica.
5. The Urban Underground
The Rise and Fall of the Experimental Subcultures, Scenes, Fashions and Styles. Alternative and Underground Dance, Electronica, Hip Hop, and Punk and Post-Rock Scenes.
6. Queer Theory and Urban Alternative Cultures
Gendered Music and Fashion. The Role of the City in Gendered Freedom and Libertine Lifestyles. Pride Parades.
7. The City, Fashion, and Identity
Identity Creation. Style and Branding. Politics of Cool. Pretties, Freaks and Uglies.
8. Visions of Alternative Sound Cultures in Massmedia
The Visual Aspects of Alternative Entertainment. The Evolution of Music and Thematic Television. Media Structure of Music Video. Explicit TV and Censorship. Urban Styles and Extreme Sports.
9. Urban Subcultures in Online World
Urban Identity and Global/Glocal Membership. Globalization/Localisation of Underground Music Experience. Copyright/Copyleft. The Role of Internet in the Transformation of Music Industry. The Impact of User-generated Content.
What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. 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 the 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: Urban Popcultures 3 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
Jordan Copeland
Daniel Riha
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ 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.
CFP: 11th Global Conference: Violence
Thursday 9th May – Saturday 11th May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This conference is one of a continuing series that aims to bring together people from a wide range of disciplines to focus on Violence. Our intention is to contribute to the body of thought which seeks to understand the nature and causes of this endemic feature of society. Such a complex phenomenon has many faces, a multitude of contexts (real or imagined), and many possible explanations in relation to causation and to the role Violence has played and still plays in societies all over the world and at every stage of development. Perpetrators may be states, political or religious factions within states, military groups, state or private institutions, communities, gangs, families or individuals. The range of possible victims is equally diverse and possible explanations range across historical, cultural, political, ethical, literary, functional, psychological, criminological, sociological, biological and economic sources. We therefore invite contributions from any and all of these disciplinary areas.
Our inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach seeks to do justice to the richness of this theme at a conference where fruitful dialogue between and across disciplines is highly valued.
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.
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 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: Violence 11 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.
Joint Organising Chairs:
Diana Medlicott
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries 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.
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This conference is one of a continuing series that aims to bring together people from a wide range of disciplines to focus on Violence. Our intention is to contribute to the body of thought which seeks to understand the nature and causes of this endemic feature of society. Such a complex phenomenon has many faces, a multitude of contexts (real or imagined), and many possible explanations in relation to causation and to the role Violence has played and still plays in societies all over the world and at every stage of development. Perpetrators may be states, political or religious factions within states, military groups, state or private institutions, communities, gangs, families or individuals. The range of possible victims is equally diverse and possible explanations range across historical, cultural, political, ethical, literary, functional, psychological, criminological, sociological, biological and economic sources. We therefore invite contributions from any and all of these disciplinary areas.
Our inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach seeks to do justice to the richness of this theme at a conference where fruitful dialogue between and across disciplines is highly valued.
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.
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 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: Violence 11 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.
Joint Organising Chairs:
Diana Medlicott
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries 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.
CFP: 4th Global Conference: Experiencing Prison
Sunday 12th May – Tuesday 14th May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference marks the continuation of a project dedicated to the study of the experience of imprisonment.
Imprisonment has become the dominant form of punishment in most societies across the world. It may occur prior to trial, or as a result of sentencing by a properly constituted court. Imprisonment without trial or due process occurs in various forms in most societies across the world, mostly sanctioned by the state itself, sometimes used as a political strategy by military, ideological, political or religious groups within a state, or by groups desirous of becoming a state.
We welcome contributions about the experience of incarceration across the entire range of perspectives, including legal, criminological, historical, fictional, phenomenological, biographical and autobiographical. Contributions are welcomed from former prisoners, detainees, incarcerated asylum seekers, former prisoners of war, political prisoners or those detained because of nationalist, religious or other convictions. All genres and media will be considered, in order to examine the widest possible range of representations, past and contemporary, which communicate the experience and nature of imprisonment. Contributions will be welcome from those who are involved with the delivery of incarceration, as well as those who seek to ameliorate incarceration by providing therapeutic drama, literacy, education, counselling, religious support and other services.
Presentations will also be considered on any related theme.
What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4 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 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Prison 4 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
Diana Medlicott
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries 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.
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference marks the continuation of a project dedicated to the study of the experience of imprisonment.
Imprisonment has become the dominant form of punishment in most societies across the world. It may occur prior to trial, or as a result of sentencing by a properly constituted court. Imprisonment without trial or due process occurs in various forms in most societies across the world, mostly sanctioned by the state itself, sometimes used as a political strategy by military, ideological, political or religious groups within a state, or by groups desirous of becoming a state.
We welcome contributions about the experience of incarceration across the entire range of perspectives, including legal, criminological, historical, fictional, phenomenological, biographical and autobiographical. Contributions are welcomed from former prisoners, detainees, incarcerated asylum seekers, former prisoners of war, political prisoners or those detained because of nationalist, religious or other convictions. All genres and media will be considered, in order to examine the widest possible range of representations, past and contemporary, which communicate the experience and nature of imprisonment. Contributions will be welcome from those who are involved with the delivery of incarceration, as well as those who seek to ameliorate incarceration by providing therapeutic drama, literacy, education, counselling, religious support and other services.
Presentations will also be considered on any related theme.
What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4 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 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Prison 4 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
Diana Medlicott
Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries 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.
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
GUEST POST: Andrew Quinton (Wolf-Girls Blog Tour)
As part of the Hic Dragones Wolf-Girls blog tour, I'm happy to host a guest post from Andrew Quinton, one of the book's contributors...
Hello! I’m Andrew Quinton, Wolf-Girls contributor and writer of The Librarian. I find it difficult to write about myself, so for the purposes of this article, I’ve asked Alexis LaPierre — werewolf, peer-pressured vegetarian and protagonist of The Librarian — to conduct an informal interview with me. This interview makes some oblique references to scenes in the story, but contains no spoilers.
Alexis LaPierre: Really? Interviewed by your own character? I’d love to cite some examples illustrating just how gimmicky this is, but I can’t think of any other cases where a writer was shy enough to try it. I’ll find something when I’m back at work.
Andrew Quinton: Do you think you’ve still got a workplace to go back to? You took some unannounced time off, didn’t you? A long weekend that sort of –
AL: I don’t want to talk about it. Besides, I wasn’t strictly responsible, given how hard you worked to put me in that situation.
AQ: Well, yes, I did guide you there, but I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. I thought you were going to end up on Grouse Mountain in the middle of the night. I didn’t know much at all, really. Your story is the first piece of fiction I’ve completed since high school. That was in 1999. I haven’t had any formal writing instruction at all since then, so this story just carried me along with it. I didn’t think you were going to miss any time at work. I know that’s important to you.
AL: I’m the creation of someone who got a B+ in Creative Writing 12? How fortunate for both of us. Being relatively new to it, then, I take it that you don’t have a set process for writing?
AQ: For The Librarian, it was more of an anti-process. When I really started work on it, there were less than seven weeks before the submission deadline, so I was in a hurry. Most of the first two drafts were written on an iPod Touch or an iPhone, using WriteRoom and Dropbox to keep things organized. I wrote in little sprints, 5 minutes here, 20 there. On the bus, standing in line at a hockey game, in bed, once even during a meeting at work (not smart).
AL: Everything you’re telling me is making me feel like a child born healthy despite the fact that her mother drank and smoked through the pregnancy.
AQ: Yeah, it wasn’t ideal, but I made it work. It was convenient, being able to pull out a device and start writing wherever I was. Working like that also removed the framework of habits that I think a lot of rookie writers like me get tangled in. No rituals, no lucky coffee cups or special pens.
AL: Was it difficult to concentrate, writing like that? I often find it… difficult… to concentrate.
AQ: Headphones were the key. Every word of your story was written to music. Anything that takes places in the woods was written to Loscil’s gorgeous, glacial “Coast / Range / Arc”. For the non-flashback scenes, I listened to Cliff Martinez’s “Solaris” score, all tranquil bells and pensive strings.
AL: I see. What about the climax of the story?
AQ: Just one song, on repeat. “Demon Seed”, by Nine Inch Nails. I think that’s your theme song in this story. Particularly the last 90 seconds of it.
AL: “Demon Seed”? Are you sure you’re not still in high school?
AQ: Hey, it worked for you.
AL: That “my theme” can be expressed by such a song is profoundly disturbing on a number of levels. Next question. What made you want to write something — and then submit it for publication, which was a first for you — after over a decade of inactivity?
AQ: In early 2010 I set myself a few self-improvement goals, and one of them was to finish a piece of writing and have it accepted for publication before my 30th birthday, in May 2011. I wound up ignoring that writing goal in favour of the other things I’d set out to do, but when I heard about the Wolf-Girls anthology in January 2011, I knew I’d never find a better excuse to get started writing again. Dark short stories about female werewolves? To my family and friends it probably sounded like a vanity project I made up for myself.
AL: And yet you didn’t actually start writing the story until late February.
AQ: Yeah, despite the self-improvement kick, I’m still a consummate procrastinator.
AL: Clearly. Were you at least able to make your “accepted for publication by 30” deadline?
AQ: I got the acceptance email less than 12 hours before I turned 30. That was a good night.
AL: I’m so happy for you.
AQ: Really?
AL: Maybe. Moving on. I have a clear sense of my own history, but I can sense faint echoes of “previous versions” of myself. I get the feeling that I was iterated a few times during the writing process.
AQ: That’s right. I did quite a lot of re-writing. Originally you were going to be a court reporter, but I decided that you being a part of the justice system would create a premise too much like Showtime’s “Dexter”. I think Dexter Morgan is a terrific anti-hero, but he’s comfortable in his disguise. You’re never truly comfortable, are you? Even after seven years of relative domesticity.
AL: Let’s talk about something else, please. You run Werewolf News, and you’ve also created the SRA, a fake government agency that tracks “non-human” entities, including lycanthropes. Why do werewolves hold such fascination for you?
AQ: The short answer is that werewolves are awesome. The longer, more articulate answer is that I’m intrigued the concept of metamorphosis, especially when it’s mixed up with the construction of one’s personal identity. If you ignore how long a werewolf stays in either shape, how would you be able to tell which is his or her “real” body?
AL: How nice that you have the luxury of pondering that as an intellectual exercise. I know precisely which is my “real” body, thank you very much.
AQ: See, that’s why I usually go with the short answer.
AL: Speaking of “real” bodies… since I’m a character you made up, are you visualizing me as being physically there, across from you, asking these questions?
AQ: When we began this interview I tried to visualize you, yes, but the mental image of you sitting across from me on this train is very much at odds with the last scene of The Librarian. The latter keeps bleeding into the former. No pun intended.
AL: That pun was absolutely intended, and for that reason, we’re done here.
AQ: Hey, am I going to get to write about that other secret you have? The one I cut from the story becau–
AL: WE’RE DONE HERE.
Read 'The Librarian' in Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny, edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones.
Hello! I’m Andrew Quinton, Wolf-Girls contributor and writer of The Librarian. I find it difficult to write about myself, so for the purposes of this article, I’ve asked Alexis LaPierre — werewolf, peer-pressured vegetarian and protagonist of The Librarian — to conduct an informal interview with me. This interview makes some oblique references to scenes in the story, but contains no spoilers.
 |
| Illustration by Tandye Rowe |
Alexis LaPierre: Really? Interviewed by your own character? I’d love to cite some examples illustrating just how gimmicky this is, but I can’t think of any other cases where a writer was shy enough to try it. I’ll find something when I’m back at work.
Andrew Quinton: Do you think you’ve still got a workplace to go back to? You took some unannounced time off, didn’t you? A long weekend that sort of –
AL: I don’t want to talk about it. Besides, I wasn’t strictly responsible, given how hard you worked to put me in that situation.
AQ: Well, yes, I did guide you there, but I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. I thought you were going to end up on Grouse Mountain in the middle of the night. I didn’t know much at all, really. Your story is the first piece of fiction I’ve completed since high school. That was in 1999. I haven’t had any formal writing instruction at all since then, so this story just carried me along with it. I didn’t think you were going to miss any time at work. I know that’s important to you.
AL: I’m the creation of someone who got a B+ in Creative Writing 12? How fortunate for both of us. Being relatively new to it, then, I take it that you don’t have a set process for writing?
AQ: For The Librarian, it was more of an anti-process. When I really started work on it, there were less than seven weeks before the submission deadline, so I was in a hurry. Most of the first two drafts were written on an iPod Touch or an iPhone, using WriteRoom and Dropbox to keep things organized. I wrote in little sprints, 5 minutes here, 20 there. On the bus, standing in line at a hockey game, in bed, once even during a meeting at work (not smart).
AL: Everything you’re telling me is making me feel like a child born healthy despite the fact that her mother drank and smoked through the pregnancy.
AQ: Yeah, it wasn’t ideal, but I made it work. It was convenient, being able to pull out a device and start writing wherever I was. Working like that also removed the framework of habits that I think a lot of rookie writers like me get tangled in. No rituals, no lucky coffee cups or special pens.
AL: Was it difficult to concentrate, writing like that? I often find it… difficult… to concentrate.
AQ: Headphones were the key. Every word of your story was written to music. Anything that takes places in the woods was written to Loscil’s gorgeous, glacial “Coast / Range / Arc”. For the non-flashback scenes, I listened to Cliff Martinez’s “Solaris” score, all tranquil bells and pensive strings.
AL: I see. What about the climax of the story?
AQ: Just one song, on repeat. “Demon Seed”, by Nine Inch Nails. I think that’s your theme song in this story. Particularly the last 90 seconds of it.
AL: “Demon Seed”? Are you sure you’re not still in high school?
AQ: Hey, it worked for you.
AL: That “my theme” can be expressed by such a song is profoundly disturbing on a number of levels. Next question. What made you want to write something — and then submit it for publication, which was a first for you — after over a decade of inactivity?
AQ: In early 2010 I set myself a few self-improvement goals, and one of them was to finish a piece of writing and have it accepted for publication before my 30th birthday, in May 2011. I wound up ignoring that writing goal in favour of the other things I’d set out to do, but when I heard about the Wolf-Girls anthology in January 2011, I knew I’d never find a better excuse to get started writing again. Dark short stories about female werewolves? To my family and friends it probably sounded like a vanity project I made up for myself.
AL: And yet you didn’t actually start writing the story until late February.
AQ: Yeah, despite the self-improvement kick, I’m still a consummate procrastinator.
AL: Clearly. Were you at least able to make your “accepted for publication by 30” deadline?
AQ: I got the acceptance email less than 12 hours before I turned 30. That was a good night.
AL: I’m so happy for you.
AQ: Really?
AL: Maybe. Moving on. I have a clear sense of my own history, but I can sense faint echoes of “previous versions” of myself. I get the feeling that I was iterated a few times during the writing process.
AQ: That’s right. I did quite a lot of re-writing. Originally you were going to be a court reporter, but I decided that you being a part of the justice system would create a premise too much like Showtime’s “Dexter”. I think Dexter Morgan is a terrific anti-hero, but he’s comfortable in his disguise. You’re never truly comfortable, are you? Even after seven years of relative domesticity.
AL: Let’s talk about something else, please. You run Werewolf News, and you’ve also created the SRA, a fake government agency that tracks “non-human” entities, including lycanthropes. Why do werewolves hold such fascination for you?
AQ: The short answer is that werewolves are awesome. The longer, more articulate answer is that I’m intrigued the concept of metamorphosis, especially when it’s mixed up with the construction of one’s personal identity. If you ignore how long a werewolf stays in either shape, how would you be able to tell which is his or her “real” body?
AL: How nice that you have the luxury of pondering that as an intellectual exercise. I know precisely which is my “real” body, thank you very much.
AQ: See, that’s why I usually go with the short answer.
AL: Speaking of “real” bodies… since I’m a character you made up, are you visualizing me as being physically there, across from you, asking these questions?
AQ: When we began this interview I tried to visualize you, yes, but the mental image of you sitting across from me on this train is very much at odds with the last scene of The Librarian. The latter keeps bleeding into the former. No pun intended.
AL: That pun was absolutely intended, and for that reason, we’re done here.
AQ: Hey, am I going to get to write about that other secret you have? The one I cut from the story becau–
AL: WE’RE DONE HERE.
Read 'The Librarian' in Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny, edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones.
Monday, 6 August 2012
CFP: Devils and Dolls: Dichotomous Depictions of 'The Child'
Wednesday 27 March 2013
University of Bristol, Graduate School of Arts and Humanities
Confirmed plenary speaker: Professor George Rousseau, (Magdalen College, University of Oxford) Co-Director of the Oxford University Centre for the History of Childhood.
Second plenary to be confirmed.
An inter-disciplinary conference open to both postgraduates and academics at any stage of their career, seeking to examine the contrasting images and representations of children as angels or devils, innocent or evil, light or dark in fiction and culture and the field of Humanities. Why are children offered little dimension in representations? What is the significance of representing the child either as innocent or evil – to both the originating discourse and in a wider context? Is such polarization detrimental to our understanding of what it means to be a child and how we respond to real children?
The “humanities” is intended as a fluid term; depictions from any period of history, any social or cultural context, fictional or media representations are encompassed. In light of this, submissions are invited from a range of disciplines and topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, depictions of the child as:
* A devil, demon, monster, wicked/sinful (for instance Heathcliff, Damien from The Omen, the child Sir Gowther)
* As angelic, child-saints or martyrs, innocent (paintings of putti, Romantic child figures, Little Nell)
* Contrasting images of the two in various fields; e.g. philosophical thought, religious doctrine
* The child as “uncanny”
* The child in art (Blake’s illustrations, Millett’s Bubbles, the Virgin and child)
* Televisual, cinematic or dramatic depictions
* The Freudian child as depicted by psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic readings of figures
* The child in horror/gothic fiction
* Monstrous births
* Supernatural children; vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies
* Contrasting images as represented in adult fiction and/or children’s literature * Children in Victorian chapbooks – models of religious virtue?
* The sexualised child – innocent or corrupt?
* The child in myths, fairy and folk tales
* The “foreign”, tribal, refugee or postcolonial child
* Media representations of children.
We invite abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute (previously unpublished) papers, sent in Word format to the conference convenors by Friday 31st August 2012 with the “subject” of the email as ‘Devils and Dolls abstract’.
Please ensure your abstract appears in the following format:
* Paper title
* 250 – 300 word abstract in plain text
* Name of author and affiliation
* Email address
* Up to ten keywords (these can be compound terms)
* Please also indicate whether, if required, you would be happy to chair a panel.
All abstracts will be acknowledged by email receipt, and you should therefore receive an acknowledgement within 5 working days.
Once the deadline has passed, a panel will review the abstracts anonymously and a draft conference plan will be constructed. We will reply to all submissions to offer both a decision and some feedback. If your paper is not selected at this time, we hope you are still able to attend the conference and contribute to the discussion.
Some papers may be selected to comprise a collection of essays in the first edition of the Bristol Journal of HARTS following the conference.
For more information about the conference, please click here.
University of Bristol, Graduate School of Arts and Humanities
Confirmed plenary speaker: Professor George Rousseau, (Magdalen College, University of Oxford) Co-Director of the Oxford University Centre for the History of Childhood.
Second plenary to be confirmed.
An inter-disciplinary conference open to both postgraduates and academics at any stage of their career, seeking to examine the contrasting images and representations of children as angels or devils, innocent or evil, light or dark in fiction and culture and the field of Humanities. Why are children offered little dimension in representations? What is the significance of representing the child either as innocent or evil – to both the originating discourse and in a wider context? Is such polarization detrimental to our understanding of what it means to be a child and how we respond to real children?
The “humanities” is intended as a fluid term; depictions from any period of history, any social or cultural context, fictional or media representations are encompassed. In light of this, submissions are invited from a range of disciplines and topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, depictions of the child as:
* A devil, demon, monster, wicked/sinful (for instance Heathcliff, Damien from The Omen, the child Sir Gowther)
* As angelic, child-saints or martyrs, innocent (paintings of putti, Romantic child figures, Little Nell)
* Contrasting images of the two in various fields; e.g. philosophical thought, religious doctrine
* The child as “uncanny”
* The child in art (Blake’s illustrations, Millett’s Bubbles, the Virgin and child)
* Televisual, cinematic or dramatic depictions
* The Freudian child as depicted by psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic readings of figures
* The child in horror/gothic fiction
* Monstrous births
* Supernatural children; vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies
* Contrasting images as represented in adult fiction and/or children’s literature * Children in Victorian chapbooks – models of religious virtue?
* The sexualised child – innocent or corrupt?
* The child in myths, fairy and folk tales
* The “foreign”, tribal, refugee or postcolonial child
* Media representations of children.
We invite abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute (previously unpublished) papers, sent in Word format to the conference convenors by Friday 31st August 2012 with the “subject” of the email as ‘Devils and Dolls abstract’.
Please ensure your abstract appears in the following format:
* Paper title
* 250 – 300 word abstract in plain text
* Name of author and affiliation
* Email address
* Up to ten keywords (these can be compound terms)
* Please also indicate whether, if required, you would be happy to chair a panel.
All abstracts will be acknowledged by email receipt, and you should therefore receive an acknowledgement within 5 working days.
Once the deadline has passed, a panel will review the abstracts anonymously and a draft conference plan will be constructed. We will reply to all submissions to offer both a decision and some feedback. If your paper is not selected at this time, we hope you are still able to attend the conference and contribute to the discussion.
Some papers may be selected to comprise a collection of essays in the first edition of the Bristol Journal of HARTS following the conference.
For more information about the conference, please click here.
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Culture, Disability, Theory - Encounters Between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies
University of Cologne, October 25 – 27, 2012
In Cooperation with the English Seminar of the University of Cologne, Institute for American Literature and Culture, Prof. Hanjo Berressem.
Disability Studies conceptualizes disability as a social and cultural construction that can be traced throughout a multiplicity of cultural practices. Cultural Studies, however, has yet to fully incorporate disability as an object of inquiry and a framework for critical analyses. A continuing dialogue between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies paves the way for insightful resonances and demonstrates ways to critically consider the conceptual pair of normalcy and disability with respect to strategies of cultural interpretation and production.
The systematic understanding of disability as ‘naturalized construction’ promises insights not only for those who are currently subsumed under the label ‘disabled.’ How is cultural knowledge about embodiment and subjectivity produced, transformed and reinforced? What are the political consequences for an analysis of ‘disability’ that arise from a critique of neoliberal mechanisms of differentiation and exclusion? How are individual and social identities, self-conceptions, and body-images (trans-)formed through the reflection of cultural representation? Which theoretical frameworks of contemporary cultural criticism can be employed to rethink disability in terms of an affirmative conceptualization of socio-cultural difference?
This conference brings together scholars who are working at the interface of Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Presentations will be complemented with comments by researchers and graduate students of, among others, sociology, literature, art history and philosophy based at the University of Cologne. The conference will address the multitude of possible overlaps between both disciplines and aims to contribute to the thriving discourse of ‘Cultural Disability Studies.’
Confirmed keynote speakers are:
•Dr Ria Cheyne, Liverpool Hope University
•Professor Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago
•Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University, Atlanta
•Professor Dan Goodley, Manchester Metropolitan University
•Katerina Kolarova Ph.D., Charles University, Prague
•Professor Robert McRuer, George Washington University, Washington DC
•Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff, University of New York, NYC
•Dr Heike Raab, University of Innsbruck
•Professor Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University
•Professor Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
There is no conference fee, but registration is necessary (until October 10, 2012). Please fill out the registration form. For any other inquiries send an email to the conference organizers.
In Cooperation with the English Seminar of the University of Cologne, Institute for American Literature and Culture, Prof. Hanjo Berressem.
Disability Studies conceptualizes disability as a social and cultural construction that can be traced throughout a multiplicity of cultural practices. Cultural Studies, however, has yet to fully incorporate disability as an object of inquiry and a framework for critical analyses. A continuing dialogue between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies paves the way for insightful resonances and demonstrates ways to critically consider the conceptual pair of normalcy and disability with respect to strategies of cultural interpretation and production.
The systematic understanding of disability as ‘naturalized construction’ promises insights not only for those who are currently subsumed under the label ‘disabled.’ How is cultural knowledge about embodiment and subjectivity produced, transformed and reinforced? What are the political consequences for an analysis of ‘disability’ that arise from a critique of neoliberal mechanisms of differentiation and exclusion? How are individual and social identities, self-conceptions, and body-images (trans-)formed through the reflection of cultural representation? Which theoretical frameworks of contemporary cultural criticism can be employed to rethink disability in terms of an affirmative conceptualization of socio-cultural difference?
This conference brings together scholars who are working at the interface of Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Presentations will be complemented with comments by researchers and graduate students of, among others, sociology, literature, art history and philosophy based at the University of Cologne. The conference will address the multitude of possible overlaps between both disciplines and aims to contribute to the thriving discourse of ‘Cultural Disability Studies.’
Confirmed keynote speakers are:
•Dr Ria Cheyne, Liverpool Hope University
•Professor Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago
•Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University, Atlanta
•Professor Dan Goodley, Manchester Metropolitan University
•Katerina Kolarova Ph.D., Charles University, Prague
•Professor Robert McRuer, George Washington University, Washington DC
•Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff, University of New York, NYC
•Dr Heike Raab, University of Innsbruck
•Professor Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University
•Professor Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
There is no conference fee, but registration is necessary (until October 10, 2012). Please fill out the registration form. For any other inquiries send an email to the conference organizers.
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