Hybrid format: in-person and virtual presentations welcome

This panel explores the volatile and seductive intersections of queerness, horror, and psychosexual cinema. Taking inspiration from the defiant slogan “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you,” we frame queerness not as static identity, but as a generative force of disruption, resistance, and cinematic disobedience.

We invite papers that engage with horror as queer methodology—where closets become crypts, gazes rupture the screen, and desire haunts both narrative and form. From the hyper-saturated satire of But I’m a Cheerleader to the cannibalistic yearning of Raw, the haunted eroticism of The Hunger to the fractured psyches of Mulholland Drive, this session is invested in the ways cinema renders queerness uncontainable—monstrous, ghosted, hysterical, dismembered, and sublime.

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that draw from queer theory, affect studies, visual culture, decolonial critique, and film philosophy. How can queer horror act as a radical force for world-unmaking or re-imagining? What bodies are made (or unmade) in these cinematic nightmares and erotic fractures?

Possible paper topics include (but are not limited to):

• Horror and psychosexual terror as queer methodology

• Desire as disturbance: repression, rage, rupture

• Haunted time: trauma, temporality, and the closet

• Queer embodiment, posthumanism, and body horror

• Decolonial interventions and racialized queer monstrosity

• Camp, affective excess, and the aesthetics of refusal

• Cinematic unpleasure, affective dissonance, and viewer discomfort

• Spectral queerness and visual haunting

This panel centers cinema as a site of queer disobedience—where form resists containment, affect exceeds genre, and monstrosity opens the door to erotic and political transformation. We invite work that sits with the discomfort, the grotesque, and the beautiful.

Proposals of 300–500 words and a short bio should be submitted through the NeMLA portal by September 30, 2025: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21643

Questions? Contact chair Mara Mbele at marambele.docx@gmail.com