Hosting Identity: Boundaries, Bodies, and Belonging in Popular Culture
Who—or what—do we let in?

This panel invites papers that examine how identity in popular culture is shaped through the logics of hospitality: encounters structured by thresholds, boundaries, and negotiations of belonging. From the body to the home to the platform, popular media repeatedly stages identity as something that must be received, managed, or refused.

Hospitality is often imagined as an act of welcome, but it is equally a structure of control. To host is to set terms, to determine access, and to decide who belongs. Popular narratives make these dynamics visible through figures of the stranger, the outsider, the guest, and the intruder, as well as through bodies that become sites of encounter--open, vulnerable, and sometimes unwilling hosts to transformation, contagion, or technological integration.

This panel is particularly interested in how identity is negotiated across forms of encounter that blur the boundaries between self and other: social, cultural, bodily, and digital. Whether through stories of exclusion and assimilation, haunted or unhomed identities, participatory fandoms, or posthuman entanglements, popular culture offers a rich archive for thinking about how identities are hosted, contested, and remade.

We welcome work that engages questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, ability, and species, as well as work that considers how power operates through acts of invitation, reception, and refusal.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Outsiders, strangers, and figures of otherness in popular media
Inclusion, exclusion, and boundary-making in narrative worlds
The body as host: contagion, transformation, and posthuman identity
Fandom, platforms, and the politics of belonging
Adaptation and circulation as forms of “re-hosting” identity
Haunted, uncanny, or unhomed identities
Migration, displacement, and transience
Detection, interpretation, and access to knowledge as forms of hospitality
Biopolitics, immunity, and bodily governance
Digital identities, archives, and mediated forms of presence

We welcome papers on a wide range of media, including film, television, literature, digital media, video games, and other forms of popular culture.

 Plase submit abstracts to: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/