[Commlist] Spotting Red Flags Symposium CfP

Please see this call for abstracts for the following one-day symposium, 
taking place on Monday, June 9, 2025, at King’s College London. We are 
very grateful to BAFTSS for their support in making this symposium possible.

Organizers: Victoria K. Pistivsek (King’s College London), Dr. Sarah 
Lahm (University of Leeds, York St John University), Dr. Matthew Hilborn 
(University College Dublin)

*Spotting Red Flags Symposium: Toxic Screen Romance in the Feel-Bad Era*

Date: June 9, 2025

Location: King’s College London

Keynote: Prof. Mary Harrod (University of Warwick)

A few months before finalizing her divorce from Kayne West in 2022, Kim 
Kardashian remarked on Instagram: “Girls can see the difference between 
200 shades of nude lipstick but they can’t see red flags.” Though the 
ambivalent umbrella term of the ‘red flag’ has long and widely been in 
circulation, the idiom’s recent predominance, especially in 
English-language social media discourses, has emerged as a contentious 
flashpoint, used as an increasingly pervasive shorthand with which to 
identify and label unhealthy, toxic, and abusive personality traits and 
relationship dynamics. Often signified by or alongside its emoji, the 
term operates across various personal, cultural, and political contexts, 
spanning a socially contingent spectrum from minor dating irritations 
and personality blemishes, such as ‘bad’ texting habits or 
‘questionable’ fashion taste, to the harmful rhetoric of ‘undesirable’ 
celebrities, politicians, and celebrity politicians.

Romance genre media, fictional or otherwise, have become one focal point 
in these online debates. Any number of ‘flawed’ individuals and 
‘complicated’ relationships on-screen are deemed ‘red flags,’ be it the 
heartthrob serial killers in /Saltburn/ (2023) and /You/ (Netflix, 
2018–), the dysfunctional ‘heroines’ of /Fleabag/ (BBC, 2016–2019) and 
/Joker: Folie à Deux /(2024), or the microcelebrity ‘villains’ in 
multinational reality TV franchises like /Love Island/ (ITV2, 2015–) and 
/Love is Blind /(Netflix, 2020–). Screen productions, and romance 
literature before that, have always addressed and played with tropes of 
romantic and sexual ‘wrongness,’ based on mutable social yardsticks of 
representation (Neale 1992; Mortimer 2010). Yet, in this current 
cultural moment marked by the purposeful (over)identification of ‘red 
flags,’ the tensions between danger and desirability, between genuine 
transgression and mere erotic friction (see the iconic 1999 rom-com /10 
Things I Hate About You/), have seemingly become exacerbated, and the 
slippery boundaries between the two blurred.

To explore these mediated developments, this symposium invites critical 
engagement with the popular term ‘red flag’ as a site of “cultural 
suspicion” (Banet-Weiser and Higgins 2024) and “heightened 
disorientation” (Honig 2021) in contemporary popular culture. As the 
2010s, particularly their latter half, became defined on a global scale 
by accelerating notions of crisis ordinariness (Berlant 2011) and 
neoliberal governmentality (Hargraves 2023; Hennefeld and Sammond 2020), 
‘red flags’ seemingly serve as omnipresent warning signs of these 
‘feel-bad’ times. As heightened social turmoil, violent politics, and 
overwhelming systemic precarities and inequalities herald and amplify 
broader cultural anxieties around the apparent ‘dangers’ of romance and 
dating today (e.g., Enten 2022; Machin 2022), the analytical lens of the 
‘red flag’ offers rich ground for interrogating the perceived ‘failures’ 
and ‘toxicities’ of (hetero)normative romance, politics, and identity in 
the present moment.

Building on scholarship exploring mainstream media’s (hetero)pessimistic 
(Seresin 2019), post-romantic turn (San Filippo 2021; Harrod et al. 
2022), this symposium encourages ‘seeing red’ to reflect upon the 
mediated threshold between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ romantic imaginaries, and to 
probe what is at stake in the difficult negotiations between the two, 
and the ‘death of romance’ itself. We invite papers which consider how 
romantic, gendered, sexual, affective, generic, and other norms are 
stabilized and/or challenged in popular screen media by way of complex 
ideological representations of so-called ‘red flags’ and, implicitly, 
their supposed ‘green’ counters.

Topics of investigation may include but are not limited to:

  * red flags and gender, e.g., toxic masculinity, ‘hysterical’
    femininity, incel culture, reactionary (post)feminisms
  * red flags and affect, e.g., unlikable characters and their
    discomforting romances
  * red flags and genre, e.g., revenge, thriller, or horror narratives
    vs. comedic or rom-com exaggerations
  * what it means to revisit beloved screen couples to ‘spot’
    retroactive red flags
  * negotiations of cancel culture, the ‘limitations’ of red flags, and
    the ‘dangers’ of green flags, e.g., social media backlash toward
    Blake Lively and/or Justin Baldoni, ‘Saint’ Luigi Mangione, or
    disgraced author Neil Gaiman
  * depictions of red flags through neoliberal individualism, emotional
    labor, or performative disaffiliation from compulsory coupledom
  * representations of ‘I can fix her/him/them’ discourses
  * queering red flags in heteropatriarchal media cultures
  * non-Anglo-American red flags, e.g., conservative gender politics in
    K-dramas and South Korea’s 4B movement
  * red flag identity politics and cultural taste, e.g., interest in
    ‘sigma males’ like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate or in the ‘tradwife’
    phenomenon

Please submit abstracts (c. 250 words) for 15-minute papers, along with 
brief bios (c. 50 words), to (_spottingredflags /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(spottingredflags /at/ gmail.com)>_ by _March 17, 2025_. We encourage 
submissions from scholars of all academic levels, from PGRs to 
professors, and especially from scholars that are typically 
underrepresented in the academy. The symposium is also free to attend 
and open to all. Do get in touch if you have any questions, and we look 
forward to hearing from you.


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