Call For Papers Nº 26 (Summer 2026)
"Touch Screen. Imaginaries of Hapticity in Audiovisual Media"

In the preface of The Address of the Eye (1992), Vivian Sobchack demands an opening towards phenomenology, a need to transcend the psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives that had dominated film theory until then, and that had “obscured the dynamic, synoptic, and lived-body situation of both the spectator and the film” (1992, xvi). Through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack led a cinematographic way of thinking focused on affect—and in consonance with the “affective turn” that has been bolstered by the Humanities since the 1990s—, in which the experience of looking, hearing and feeling a film gained protagonism. In her  denouncement of “the neglect of the body and embodied perception in film theory” and her claim to understand the skin as a “field of rich semantic references” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015, 111), Sobchack challenged the “ocularcentrism” and the disembodiment of theory, which positioned thinkers in the role of mere brains and eyes in a vat.

A decade after this book, Sobchack herself elaborated on her reflections in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004), in which the essay “What my fingers knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” stood out both as concretization of her most significant contributions, and as an illustrious example of phenomenological thinking in action. Through a handful of images from The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)—in particular, its beginning, through Ada’s fingers, and the moment where Baines touches her skin through a hole in her stocking—, the author works with images that touch the audience’s bodies in an affective way, or that make that body feel synesthetically, instead of merely adding to the mise-en-scène, characterization or stimmung of a film.

Following after Sobchack, Laura U. Marks developed The Skin of Film (2000) and Touch (2002), books that explore what the author termed “haptic visuality”—in contrast to “optic visuality”—,“a visuality that functions like the sense of touch”, in which images “engage the viewer tactilely and... define a kind of knowledge based in touch” (2000, 22). The audiovisual channels, image and sound, are capable of awakening the spectrum of the human sensorium even if they cannot interpellate it directly, resorting to affects moved by evocation. Marks, in her analysis of intercultural film, through works such as Measures of Distance (Mona Hatoum, 1988) or History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, 1991), condenses hapticity in a series of mostly visual resources such as the acts of smelling, eating, touching, close textural shots, whether of skin or objects, rack focus, lack of sharpness, darkened images and the materiality of celluloid. From Marks’ explorations, Jennifer M. Barker proposes, in The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, a “cinematic tactility” comprised of the haptic, now associated with skin (of living beings or of the film); kinesthetics, in relation to bodies that inhabit cinematographic spaces and their movements; and the visceral, which connects the rhythms of the body, its pulsations and tensions. Marks and Barkers’ works inaugurated a century dominated by the mutations of the haptic, which have contaminated contemporary audiovisual practice and analysis, affecting study fields as varied as feminism, queer theory, ecocriticism and new media, among others.

In order to continue contributing to this research line and its multiple intersections, Comparative Cinema invites authors to submit articles which analyze and reflect on hapticity in film and television. The articles, which must have a comparative methodology and an extension between 5.000 and 7.000 words —including footnotes but not references— can tackle, but are not limited to:

• The affective turn
• The phenomenology of perception and memory
• The cinema of the body
• The cinematographic evocation of the senses beyond the tactile
• Intersections between haptic cinema and gender technologies
• Intersections between haptic cinema, queer theory and the feminist critique of an ocularcentric cinema
• Experimental cinema focused on the sensory
• Hapticity and sound studies
• Screen cultures and hapticity (virtual reality, 3D)

For writing, Comparative Cinema recommends following a structure that includes: an introduction to the topic, a theoretical framework, a hypothesis and specific objectives, conclusions, and a list of bibliographical references. Potential contributors are also asked to adhere to the comparative methodology promoted by the journal and explained in our “About” section.

Full articles must be sent following the guidelines of the journal and through our RACO platform:https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema. Sending preliminary proposals to the editors (comparativecinema@upf.edu) is not mandatory but it is advisable.

Comparative Cinema accepts articles in English, Spanish and Catalan. Authors must not pay the journal any fees for the submission or processing of their manuscript (APCs).

Comparative Cinema (ISSN 2604-9821) is an open-access publication by Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) that analyzes film from a comparative perspective. The journal follows a double blind peer review process and does not charge any submission or processing fees to its authors.

Important dates

Submission of full text: January 30, 2026

Acceptance or rejection notifications: February 13, 2026

Peer-review process: February—March 2026

Submission of final revised version of the text: March—April 2026

Issue publication: Summer 2026

More information on the Call For Papers: https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/240

Contact Information

Sergi Sánchez and Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, co-editors of Comparative Cinema

comparativecinema@upf.edu