CALL FOR PAPERS: Anthology on Zombies, Sex and Sexuality (deadline fro proposals: 9th November 2012

full name / name of organization: 
Steve Jones, Northumbria University

Apologies for cross-posting

CALL FOR PAPERS: Anthology on Zombies, Sex and Sexuality

Over the last decade, the zombie has become ever-more popular as a horror archetype. That renaissance has been accompanied by a surge of academic interest in the monster; a wealth of new scholarship that has offered new insights into the cultural, social and philosophical significance of the undead. However, few of those contributions have focused specifically on the issues of sex and sexuality. This is a surprising oversight given the rise of zombie pornography films such as Bruce LaBruce's L.A. Zombie and Rob Rotten's Porn of the Dead, sexually-themed zombie films such as Deadgirl and Zombie Strippers!, and undead romances such as Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love and Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. As one of the most distinctive innovations of the recent zombie boom, undead sexuality urgently requires dissection.
This anthology seeks to investigate zombie sexuality in all its forms and manifestations.

Topics that might be addressed include (but are not limited to):
• Zombies as a means of understanding sexuality beyond rigid category distinctions such as "homosexual", "heterosexual", and so forth
• Death-in-life in queer media cultures
• The history and rise of zombie sexuality
• Zombies, Otherness and racial fetishisation
• The relationship between undeadness and identity traits such as sexuality
• The boundaries between zombie-sex and necrophilia
• Global efforts to criminalize and punish (too often by death) queer peoples and public cultures
• The banality of contemporary sex cultures and undeadness
• Corpses as pornographic spectacles
• The "death" of sexuality and/or sexual desire
• HIV and sexual "contagion"
• Zombies as a symbol of (sexual) revolution and struggle
• Anthropophagism and/as erotic desire
• Sexual harm, sexual risk, and/or sexual monstrosity
• The relationships between sexual cultures, identity politics and zombiedom
• Impersonal sexual encounters, de-individualisation, and the living dead
• Love, romance, civil partnerships/marriages and un-mortality
• Zombies, sexuality and disgust
• Undeadness and sexual coercion and/or consent
• Zombies and sex as a biological instinct or unconscious drive
• Exhuming "extinct" forms of sexuality or sexual practices

Contributions may encompass:
• Any media: animation, graphic novels, film, television, literature, music, video games, and so forth
• Any genre: horror, pornography, comedy, romance, and so forth
• Any form of sexuality: queer, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, polysexuality, and so forth

Please send 150 word abstracts for proposed chapters and a short biographical statement to
zombiesexuality@gmail.com
by Friday November 9th 2012

Notification of acceptance: Friday November 30th 2012
Deadline for completed essays: Friday March 1st 2013

Kind regards,
Shaka and Steve

Dr. Steve Jones
Lecturer in Media
Department of Media
Northumbria University
Sandyford Road
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
NE1 8ST
England
www.drstevejones.co.uk

Shaka Paul McGlotten, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts
School of Film and Media Studies
Purchase College, State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road,
Purchase,
NY 10577