[Commlist] CFP Gothic Feminism 3: Technology, Women, and Gothic-Horror on-Screen

*Technology, Women, and Gothic-Horror On-Screen *

2 – 3 May 2019

University of Kent

*Keynote speaker: Dr Lisa Purse (University of Reading)*

**

*_CALL FOR PAPERS_*

**

Gothic and technology appear, on the surface, to evoke contradictory 
connotations. As David Punter and Glennis Byron highlight, the Gothic 
came to be a term associated with the “ornate and convoluted”, “excess 
and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world 
that constantly tended to overflow cultural boundaries” (Punter and 
Byron, 2004, 7). Technology, on the other hand, is a term often linked 
to science, innovation and progressive invention. If the Industrial 
Revolution is emblematic of what one imagines a technological revolution 
to be, then technology becomes synonymous with the associations defining 
18^th Century culture, described by Terry Castle as “the period as an 
age of reason and enlightenment – the aggressively rationalist 
imperatives of the epoch” (Castle, 1995, 8).


Yet technology and the Gothic have been linked and have interacted since 
the latter’s beginnings in fiction. From the earliest reception of the 
original novels that give our Gothic films their name, fans and critics 
alike referred to the “machinery” of the narratives, implying that that 
the mechanisms that made them go were audible. Clara Reeve, who wrote 
/The Old English Baron/ – itself is a tad creaky – commented on /The 
Castle of Otranto /that “the machinery is so violent, that it destroys 
the effect it is intended to excite” (Reeve, 2008, 3). And Horace 
Walpole, himself, made reference to the story’s “engine” (Walpole, 2014, 
6).  The Gothic can thus be conceptualised as metaphorically mechanical, 
a link explored within a different context by Jack Halberstam who writes 
that “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity … designed to 
produce fear and desire within the reader” (Halberstam, 1995, 2).


Technology and the Gothic have also intersected in more literal terms, 
as with the horror created by the intersection of the two in Mary 
Shelley’s /Frankenstein /(1818). On the one hand, the novel stands as a 
canonical Gothic text, and Ellen Moers argues that the story can be 
defined as the Female Gothic, a term commonly associated with the 
women-in-peril narratives which later saw the influence of Gothic 
literature translated onto the cinema screen in Hollywood during the 
1940s. On the other hand, the tale of an unnatural and scientific birth 
is credited with establishing the generic tropes of science fiction, a 
mode of storytelling which is indebted to technology and acknowledges 
“contemporary scientific knowledge and the scientific method”, as Barry 
Keith Grant suggests. He also continues: “Science fiction, quite unlike 
fantasy and horror, works to entertain alternative /possibilities/” 
(Grant, 2004, 17). However, Fred Botting notes that the combining of 
science fiction and Gothic – two “generic monsters” – reveals a “a long 
and interwoven association” whereby both genres “give form to a sense of 
otherness, a strangeness that is difficult to locate” (Botting, 2008, 131).


Our conference aims to explore this relationship between technology and 
the Gothic by focussing upon its intersection as depicted on screen 
within visual media, with a specific focus on how such concerns impact 
on gender representations and, in particular, women. This connection may 
be explored figuratively: the “machinery” identified in Gothic fiction 
can also be extended to the filmic Gothics which centre upon the Gothic 
heroine. The Hollywood 1940s Gothics possess noticeably excessive 
convolutions of plot, as with /Sleep, My Love /(1948), and one could 
argue this trend has continued in contemporary returns to the Old Dark 
House and horror with films like /Crimson Peak/ (2015). Technology may 
also be physically present within these Gothic-horror films. If the 
“machinery is so violent” in /Crimson Peak/’s narrative, then this is 
additionally foregrounded within the diegesis: Thomas Sharpe’s engine 
for extracting the red clay from the ground stands as both a metaphor 
for the genre’s mechanical plot – drawing on familiar tropes which 
unearth deadly secrets – as well as functioning as a visual spectacle 
around which the climax of the film shall take place.


Actual mechanical or technological inventions which impact upon the 
story may be wide-ranging: the railway, cars, telephones, recording 
devices, electric light and gaslight are just some examples of 
technologies integrated into the narratives of Gothic films, often with 
the intention of contributing to the imperilment and oppression of the 
central heroine. Technology can also do this by evoking the uncanny, 
itself a phenomenon which forms “the background and indeed the /modus 
operandi/ of much Gothic fiction” (Punter and Byron, 2004, 286). Tom 
Gunning demonstrates this when he recounts several versions in early 
cinema of a woman-in-jeopardy story, /Heard Over the Phone/, which could 
almost be Gothic in that the woman is in her own home and menaced there 
by a male assailant. Drawing on Freud’s musings upon the ambivalent 
nature of technology, Gunning highlights the ambiguous – and uncanny – 
position of the telephone: it is a device which brings the absent near 
through sound, but actually this serves only to underline the actual 
distances involved. Gothic-type narratives, gender, and technology merge 
in these early films to reveal “the darker aspects of the dream world of 
instant communication and the annihilation of space and time” (Gunning, 
1991, 188).


More recent Gothic and Gothic-horror films may update these technologies 
to include computers, the Internet and mobile phones. Technology also 
includes film and the moving image itself: this conference will explore 
how filmic technologies mediate and emphasise the connection between 
technology, the Gothic, and gender, including through the use of visual 
effects. Film is a particularly apt medium through which to contemplate 
these ideas as cinema’s ontology embodies both technology’s scientific 
roots and the Gothic’s appeal to excess and the supernatural. As Murray 
Leeder notes: “With its ability to record and replay reality and its 
presentation of images that resemble the world but as intangible 
half-presences, cinema has been described as a haunted or ghostly medium 
from early on” (Leeder, 2015, 3).


These ideas may also be explored by expanding upon the original notion 
of Moer’s Female Gothic: if the literary Female Gothic is defined by 
female writers working in this mode, then this conference would also 
like to explore how female filmmakers have made use of Gothic-horror 
conventions. It is significant to note that the most iconic examples of 
Gothic films focusing on stories about the victimisation of women, 
particularly in the 1940s, were directed by men. By thinking about the 
technology behind the screen, this event will also consider what 
influence women filmmakers have had upon this tradition, including 
within present day, and what further reflections may be offered between 
this relationship of the Gothic to gender and technology.


With this third annual Gothic Feminism conference, we invite scholars to 
respond to the theme of technology in the woman-in-jeopardy strand of 
the Gothic and Gothic-horror film or television.


Topics can include but are not limited to:

- the tension between Gothic and technology as the supernatural, 
fantastic and paranoia versus the rational, reason and logic. How do 
these elements intersect with the representation of gender in film and 
television?

- the traditions of the Gothic heroine on-screen and her interaction 
with technology. Does technology help the female character or is it 
another agent of terror used against her?

- the technology behind the screen. How have female filmmakers used the 
genres of Gothic-horror to express themselves?

- the technology of the screen. How has the technology of cinema, 
including visual effects, been used, and how do these aspects interact 
with the representation of the central female protagonist/s?


Please submit proposals of 500 words, along with a short biographical 
note (250 words) to (gothicfeminism2016 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(gothicfeminism2016 /at/ gmail.com)> by *Friday 1st March 2019*.


We welcome 20-minute conference papers as well as submissions for 
creative work or practice-as-research including, but not limited to, 
short films and video essays.


Conference organisers: Frances A. Kamm and TamarJeffers McDonald

https://gothicfeminism.com/

https://twitter.com/GothicFeminism


/This conference is the third annual event from the Gothic Feminism 
project, working with the Melodrama Research Group in the Centre of Film 
and Media Research at the University of Kent. Gothic Feminism explores 
the representation of the Gothic heroine on-screen in her various 
incarnations. /

*References*

Botting, Fred. (2008). /Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and 
Technology in Contemporary Fictions/. London and New York: Routledge.

Castle, Terry. (1995). /The Female Thermometer: 18^th Century Culture 
and the Invention of the Uncanny/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gunning, Tom. (1991). “Heard Over the Phone: /The Lonely Villa /and the 
de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology.” In: /Screen/. 32:2. 
184-196.

Grant, Barry Keith. (2004). “‘Sensuous Elaboration’: Reason and the 
Visible in the Science Fiction Film.” In: Redmond, Sean. (ed). /Liquid 
Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader/. New York, Chichester: 
Wallflower Press.

Halberstam, Jack. (1995). /Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology 
of Monsters/. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Leeder, Murray. (ed). (2015). /Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and 
Spectrality From Silent Cinema to the Digital Era/. New York and London: 
Bloomsbury.

Punter, David and Glennis Byron. (2004). /The Gothic/. Oxford: Blackwell 
Publishing.

Reeve, Clara. (2008). /The Old English Baron/. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press.

Walpole, Horace. (2014). /The Castle of Otranto/. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press.


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