ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

Cultural History / Studies, Disability Studies, Film and Film History, Literature, Popular Culture Studies

While describing our “dysphoric and revolutionary” present (16), Paul Preciado in Dysphoria Mundi creates a type of writing that is intentionally out of joint to embody the issues we encounter today: the “collective theatricalization of everyday” (171), the homogenization of the body, the chaos of subjectivity, necropolitics, the invasion of AI, and the disappearance of freedoms, including but not limited to that of thought. Indeed, amidst the post-COVID space where the subject is no longer an individual but an “un-dividual” (Preciado 154), it seems the tangibility, carnality, and reality of the body are lost, as these new subjects of technopatriarchal societies...“do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands” (Preciado 154). In our current milieu, inundated by bodiless LLMs and AI forcefully pushed upon every layer of labor and living, where social media edits feeds from a non-corporeal space, this seminar asks: how do we interrogate this collective dysphoria encountered at the site of the body and its representation?

Hence, this seminar invites us to center this dysphoria mundi and turn toward spaces inhabited by queer and weird bodies, specifically through the New Weird, science fiction, speculative film, and digital media. If contemporary technopatriarchal systems enforce an ethereal, skinless ghosthood, then weird embodiment can perhaps open a hypervisceral movement through the excess of bodies and knowledge of them. For example, Dempow Torishima’s Sisyphean foregrounds the body in its excess; Rivers Solomon reminds us of its excessive fragility and strength; Karin Tidbeck pushes the body to rethink oppression. One way or another, against the untouchable body of the current conjuncture, the excesses of these works, alongside others, such as Claire Denis, Jeff VanderMeer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Marie Darrieussecq,  or Julia Ducournau, are not afraid to be out of joint, breaking free from old epistemologies to build new ones. Here, the bodily, the fungal, and the weird create moments where we no longer ask what we are but, as Preciado underlines, “what we are going to become” (21). Rather than fleeing the body, how can we imagine a perhaps epistemologically uncomfortable, tactile proximity to unstable becoming?

By staging a conversation between Preciado’s planetary diagnostic and the mutated flesh of New Weird SF, film, and media, this seminar investigates the friction between algorithmic disembodiment and radical corporeal mutation. We ask: Which bodies are sanctioned by our current order? What dysphorias emerge when the body is rendered invisible by technology, yet hyper-visible by speculative fiction?

We welcome proposals across science fiction literature, body horror cinema, social media , animal studies, ecocriticism, and speculative theory exploring the skinless, the monstrous, queer/posthuman somatics, and the weird.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Dysphoria in film, cinema, and Television
• Body, body horror, dismantling of body in cinema, literature, TV and media
• gender, gendering of the body
• Queer, weird, transforming bodies in film, TV , media and literature
• New Weird bodies and their dysphoric moments
• Ecocritical approaches to the body and its untenability
• Animal body, becoming animal, and animal instability in TV, Film, and Literature
• Body and its discontents in SF
• Racial body, decolonial body and its destabilizing force
• Monstrosity and its posthuman bifurcations
• Fungal bodies, fungal turns
• Critical disability approaches to the body. 

Please submit directly to the ACLA link by clicking " Propose a Paper for this Seminar by September 22, 2027. 

Please note that this is for the ACLA virtual seminar, hence this will not be the in-person. The virtual seminar will take place May 15 & 16, 2027 online.