Abstract Deadline: Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Conference Dates: Thursday-Sunday, November 7-10, 2024 

Conference Location: Palm Springs, California

Format: In Person (no virtual option available!!) 

Submit abstracts to: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com 

Contact for inquiries: Noah Gallego @noahrgallego@gmail.com

Inspired by the emerging field of Critical Waste Studies, this panel invites scholars to bridge gothic and waste criticism in order to critique discarded, excreted, or transmuted material in gothic texts across multiple media (literature, film, tv, comics, music, art, etc.). Specifically, this panel encourages critical interrogations of the production, circulation, and transformation of excess material as they pertain to human/non-human bodies and the environment.

Whether it is the Bleeding Nun in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) or the infamous blood rave scene from Blade (1998), the Gothic has always been concerned with excess and transgression. Bridging this provocative tradition with the recent developments in the nascent field of Critical Waste Studies, such as the publication of Zsuzsa Gille and Josh Lepawsky’s The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies (2022), as well as the launch of the Discard Studies blog back in 2010, this panel seeks papers that interrogate the various reactions: disgust, pleasure, curiosity, or arousal waste elicits from viewers. From toxic sludge to bodily discharge (urine, semen, menses, mucus, feces, blood, vomit, pus, etc.), the world within and around us is preoccupied by waste and yet these images are often sanitized or screened from us. The Gothic, however, does not shy away from the horror and gore of it all. Thus, prospective panelists are expected to produce papers that critique the role waste, viscera, and corporeal or environmental transgression/excess plays in media and reveal the relationship between these materials and the world at large, especially in the age of the Anthropocene where so much of human activity and production has compromised the vitality of the planet.