[Commlist] Call For Papers Nº 26 (Summer 2026): Touch Screen. Imaginaries of Hapticity in Audiovisual Media

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

https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/240 
<https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/240>

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: thinkers such as Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi 
understand affects as intensive forces that dismantle the hegemony of 
reason in the construction of subjectivity, opposing a discursive logic 
in which language crushes any possibility of circulation of perception. 
Films such as /Here/ (2023), by Bas Devos, /Gunda/ (2020), by Viktor 
Kossakovsky, or /Wuthering Heights /(2011), by Andrea Arnold, propose 
different versions of a gaze impregnated with a fusion of the affective 
and the haptic.

* The phenomenology of perception and memory: Filmmakers such as Naomi 
Kawase (/Ni Tsutsumarete /[1992], /Katatsumori/ [1994], /Tarachime/ 
[2006]), Chantal Akerman (/No Home Movie /[2016]) or Agnès Varda (/Les 
glaneurs et la glaneuse/ [2001]) have constructed their documentary 
discourse on the basis of haptic visuality, which conjoins an embodied 
manifestation of perception with the construction of memory. The eyes 
can touch; the skin of a film “offers a metaphor to emphasize the way 
film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between 
perceiver and object represented” (Marks 2000, xi).

* The cinema of the body: Sobchack demonstrates that “the film 
experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of 
our bodies” (Sobchack 2004, 60). Haptic visuality supposes, then, a 
return to the body as a repository of visual thinking: a thinking 
“incarnated” in the intimate register of bodies (/Beau Travail/ [1999], 
/L’intrus/ [2002], /High Life/ [2018], by Claire Denis; /Crimes of the 
future/ [2022], by David Cronenberg), and also attentive to the skin of 
the image, understanding film as a body that beats and vibrates (/La vie 
nouvelle/ [2002], /White Epilepsy/ [2012] and /Malgré la nuit /[2015], 
by Phillippe Grandrieux) or a body that can be traversed as a cavern, a 
world to discover (/De Humanis Corporis Fabrica/ [2022], by Verena 
Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor).

* The cinematographic evocation of the senses beyond the tactile:/In The 
Skin of Film /(2000), Marks transcends the visual representation of 
sensorial acts (eating, smelling, touching) and examines, as does the 
work of Terrence Malick or Lynne Ramsay, the possibility of mobilizing 
hapticity through audiovisual resources such as shifts in focus, or 
blurring or darkening the image, among others. Furthermore, Marks 
proposes the idea of a “haptic identification”, a form of suture between 
the audience and the characters that is moved by the proximity and 
familiarity with which both experience the world.

* Intersections between haptic cinema and gender technologies: If, as 
Teresa de Lauretis states, gender is a social construction produced by 
cultural technologies, among them film, hapticity then produces gender 
subjectivities that go beyond heteropatriarchal control. There is no 
intention of dominating the actor's body through /mise-en-scène/ but to 
show its vulnerability, its frailty (such as in the films by Barbara 
Hammer and Carolee Schneemann), its instability, and, of course, its 
capacity to rebel (/Raw/ [2016] and /Titane/ [2021], by Julia Ducournau).

* Intersections between haptic cinema, queer theory and the feminist 
critique of an ocularcentric cinema: Breaking with the hegemony of the 
visual implies a /mise-en-scène/ of difference. One that can construct 
alternative spaces of meaning through Otherness (the sexual-Other, the 
racial-Other, the animal-Other…). This enables a displacement of the 
anthropocentric gaze towards a more holistic dimension of perception. 
Projects such as /Leviathan/ (2012), by Paravel and Castaing-Taylor, or 
the ecocinema of Isabelle Carbonell contribute to this new gaze.

* Experimental cinema focused on the sensory: In looking for the 
physical dimension of our surroundings, some manifestations of 
experimental cinema have proposed ways of thinking and presenting 
nature, bodies, and matter with attention to the miniscule and anodyne, 
while also attempting to develop a cinema of skin and organs. From the 
films by Bill Morrison to the cinema of Stan Brakhage, this focus on 
materiality has even touched the celluloid as a medium with a malleable 
physical existence, creating, thus, a cinema that can see and touch itself.

* Hapticity and sound studies: If the optical has ceased to define the 
full scope of the perceptual, then the auditory, which is 
omnidirectional, has taken over. The ear sees, makes a synesthetic 
experience possible, and its very prominence proposes a hermeneutic 
model that cancels empirical ocular verification as a source of 
cognitive data in order to privilege “factors such as the sense of 
balance or equilibrium, organized not around the frame, but around 
duration, location, interval and inter-action” (Elsaesser and Hegener, 
2015, 10), (/Memoria/ [2021], by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; /Tres/ 
[2021], by Juanjo Giménez; /Sorda/ [2025], by Eva Libertad).

* Screen cultures and hapticity (virtual reality, 3D): Digital 
technology has turned our bodies into extensible prostheses of cameras. 
It’s difficult to say where the body begins and where the mobile phone 
ends. On the one hand, consuming images now means touching them, 
caressing them, scrolling through them; on the other, virtual and 
augmented reality techniques, such as 360-degree panoramas, are intended 
to create immersive sensory experiences.

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 
<https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema>. Sending preliminary 
proposals to the editors ((comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu) 
<mailto:(comparativecinema /at/ 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).


*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
Contact: (comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu) <mailto:(comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu)>
https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema 
<https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema>

/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.

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