Call For Papers for Somatechnics 16.1

Eco-horror’s Minor Intimacies: Affective Embodiments, Ecological

Desires

Issue editors: Lynn Kozak and Alanna Thain (McGill University) Publication date: Winter 2026

Horror is an affect, genre and epistemology relevant to our current condition, signaled by a resurgent interest in horror media in popular culture and in high art. A re-coding in horror’s language is widely perceptible across media that serve as a site for commentary and intervention

around contested social issues. Beyond their capture in genre, horror affects and tendencies increasingly modulate our relation to the social and environmental crises of our day. For this special issue of Somatechnics we propose a focus on minoritarian eco-horror, asking how horror’s complicated affects and intimacies allow for critical reworkings of negative experiences to tell other stories: of persistence, mutation, adaptation or survivance. This approach uniquely foregrounds dynamics of power that are obscure(d), relational, temporally unruly and entangled with the legacies of colonialism, exploitation, technology and questions of scale, from the long arc of the cosmos to the intimacy of every breath. Beyond the oppositional framework that sees nature as a site or source of exploited, vengeful, or sensationalist horror, how might minoritarian eco-horror operate along other axes of relation, intimacy and otherness?

Attending to eco-horror affects amplifies two tendencies of genre media that are especially relevant for considering the unevenly shared and embodied risk that is at the heart of eco-horror’s concerns. First, it foregrounds how horror media "does things to bodies." Horror's exceptional ability to foreground immersive, leaky, and pervasive relations of bodies and spaces produces a critical and alternative epistemology of sensations. Second, genre films produce temporal plurality through recirculation, where genre’s narrative or structural logic of the same is wound up with an unruly thread of differential repetition. Reading the horror genre through its mobilizing tendencies brings out this aspect of minor difference too often dismissed, taking seriously qualitative changes of feeling, sensation and other metrics beyond “progress”. Eco-horror affects tell other stories of social and environmental crisis, shifting the enervations of media fatalism to different spectrums of activism, ambiguous agency and affective encounters.

We seek work that attends to the risky business of eco-horror and the relations it animates. We welcome work that addresses media and performance, fiction and documentary, platforms and content, from perspectives that foreground minoritarian lifeworlds. Our key question is: what does embodied survival look and feel like in minoritarian eco-horror?

Abstracts due: June 30, 2024 to corerisc@gmail.com, subject line ECOHORROR. Full Papers du:e Jan 15, 2025
Expected publication: Winter 2026

Editors: Lynn Kozak is an associate professor at McGill University. Recent work includes book chapters and articles on contemporary North American horror-hybrid television shows including Evil, Lucifer, Hannibal, Stranger Things, iZombie, and The Exorcist. Alanna Thain is associate professor of cultural studies and world cinemas at McGill University in Montreal, and former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. She directs the Moving Image Research Lab, dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media, as well as the research team CORERISC, on epistemologies of embodied risk. Her most recent projects include The Sociability of Sleep and Light Leaks: Outdoor Cinema and the Ecological Art of Encounter.

Kozak and Thain are both members of the research collective CORÉRISC (Collective for research on epistemologies of embodied risk), looking at minoritarian horror media and performance.