[ecrea] CFP: Somatechnics: Cinematic Bodies

*Call for Papers:*

/Somatechnics/ special journal issue (Edinburgh University Press)

“Cinematic Bodies”

Co-edited by Cáel M. Keegan, Eliza Steinbock, Laura Horak


Submissions due: March 1st, 2017

Length: 6000 words + 200 word abstract + 150 word author biography

Submission email: (cinematicbodies /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(cinemabodies /at/ gmail.com)>

Journal submission details (incl. style): 
http://www.euppublishing.com/page/soma/submissions


This special issue of /Somatechnics/ invites contributions on the topic 
of cinematic bodies. Cinema, broadly construed, is ripe for a 
somatechnical approach. Derived from the Greek /soma/ (body) and 
/techné/ (craftsmanship), the term /somatechnics/ holds in view the 
lively enfleshment of /techné/ and the practices of embodying via hard 
and soft technologies. From the first actualities and trick films, human 
and non-human bodies have assembled in and around filmic events, 
producing powerful cine-social apparatuses with paratextual and 
intertextual appendages (e.g. fan cultures, remakes, “the oppositional 
gaze” [hooks 1999]). We thus invite scholars to approach “the cinematic” 
broadly, as a sensorial and temporal flow of interrelations around 
images and sound that governs and opens possibilities for various 
embodiments. What might it mean, now, to occupy a “cinematic body”?


We encourage submissions that develop an analysis of particular films or 
media texts, filmmakers, or film and media theories that are attentive 
to assemblages of cinematic bodies in their social, transformative, and 
transmorphing dimensions. We welcome contemporary and historical 
approaches to cinema’s specific political and aesthetic somatechnical 
qualities, but also scholarship in the speculative genre--what sort of 
sociality or apparatus could the cinematic body become?


Moreover, we petition contributors to reflect on how cinematic 
experiences might transition bodies in characteristically trans* modes 
of wayward gendering, inspired by definitions of transgender as “a 
movement away from an unchosen starting point” (Stryker 2008) and trans* 
as a “movement across vitality” (Hayward and Weinstein 2015). Is cinema 
paradigmatically /trans*/ in its somatechnical capacities? Reciprocally, 
does transgender phenomenology offer new modes for engaging with or 
imagining cinematic aesthetics? We invite authors to employ a trans* 
rubric to investigate cinematic bodies and to ask how are bodies like 
cinema.


We offer the following provocations and jumping off points:

  * What new theories do we need to understand new trans* media and
    cultural production?
  * How might trans* offer us a way to map changes in the “cinematic
    bodies” of the 21st century, both locally and globally?
  * Do media formats attend to gender differentially? If so, which seem
    most amenable to trans viewing practices, or practices of
    transformative embodying?
  * “Transsexual is to celluloid as transgender is to digital.” (Susan
    Stryker, in conversation)
  * Through the cinematic aestheticization of collective life, there are
    bodies upon which the cultural imaginary inscribes “what can appear”
    and “what is likely to become perceptible.” Could the “cinematic
    body” name the process by which the life of images drives the shape
    of phenomenal embodiment?
  * Might Steven Shaviro’s anti-psychoanalytic assessment of film’s
    affective, non-binary generation of on- and off-screen bodies in
    /The Cinematic Body/ (1992) inspire a somatechnical theory of film?
  * Has Eugenie Brinkema’s polemical assessment of film theory’s absent
    center in /The Forms of the Affects/ (2014) advanced a call to
    decapitate the Spectator-Theorist by insisting we trace the folds of
    affect embedded in film form, rather than what it is to be affected
    or made-over into a cinematic body?
  * How could the phenomenological frameworks outlined by Vivian
    Sobchack (1992, 2004) and Jennifer M. Barker (2009) account for
    social categories of difference and patterning of stigma more
    satisfactorily?
  * Could Laura U. Marks’ (2000, 2002) theorization of the
    Deleuzo-Guattarian AND of assemblage kindle a feminist critical race
    analysis of cinematic bodies?
  * What room is there to resuscitate and repair spectatorship theories
    founded upon sexual difference that (wrongly) align
    masculine-feminine with male-female?
  * In /The Witch’s Flight/ (2007), Kara Keeling writes, “Neither
    cinematic perceptual schemas nor cinematic matter precedes the
    other. Together they constitute the cinematic, an assemblage that
    might also be referred to as ‘twentieth-century reality’ because we
    neither posit nor access ‘reality’ except via these processes, which
    were perfected by film” (12). What are the embodied stakes of living
    in an age when digital and information-based processes have
    supplanted the “mechanical reproduction” of reality via celluloid?


Submission Process:

Complete submissions are due March 1st, 2017. Submissions must:

  * Be approximately 6000-8000 words.
  * Employ the Harvard Author–date reference system.
  * Be saved as either a Word .doc or or .rtf file
  * Include a separate title page, including author name, institutional
    affiliation, contact information, and biography (150 words or less)
  * Be accompanied by an abstract of between 200–300 words, as well as
    between 4–6 research keywords.
  * Be typed double-spaced with left justification and all pages numbered.


Note: Author name(s) should not appear on the article manuscript itself.


Submit by March 1st, 2017 to (cinematicbodies /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(cinematicbodies /at/ gmail.com)>.


We invite potential contributors to email us at the above address to 
discuss their submission ideas.Following the deadline, guest editors 
will review the manuscripts and determine those to be sent for full peer 
review.


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