[Commlist] CFP: Cinemas of Isolation: Disability and Film Theory

*/Spectator 43.2, Fall 2023 /*

*Cinemas of isolation: film theory and disability*****

*/

/*

A disability studies approach to media allows us to think critically 
about not only the stakes of representation, but also the ways that 
cinema draws out the contours of the viewing subject, incites complex 
processes of identification and disidentification, and frames the body 
as a site of contact and signification. As a phenomenon that is at once 
material and discursive—that is, insistently embodied and personal but 
also social, embedded in language and environment—disability troubles 
the mind/body split in generative and complex ways. Moreover, disability 
theory allows us to return to some of film theory’s earliest 
interventions—notions of lack, fetishism, the gaze, the apparatus—with a 
new set of questions and ethical concerns.

Recent months have already seen a proliferation of demand (in academia, 
journalism, art worlds) for new “takes” on COVID-19, special issues of 
journals that analyze the global pandemic from social sciences and 
communications perspectives, work by artist-practitioners chronicling 
this profoundly singular moment. A great deal of this work has focused 
on contagion and risk, often with a bias towards the concerns of the 
(currently) abled. This special issue of/Spectator///takes a step away 
from this discourse, moving instead towards reflections on the 
phenomenology of illness and disability in global cinemas, and the ways 
that certain strands of film theory might be reanimated by a serious 
consideration of disability and disability studies.

In his landmark study of cinema and disability, Martin Norden famously 
argued that/isolation/was one of the defining characteristics of the 
experience of disability in the twentieth century, and that disability 
cinemas, however varied they might seem, returned time and again to the 
space of solitude, of amputation from the social world.

Like all global crises, COVID-19 has already produced its own unique 
rhetorics, a key one of which is of collective isolation—the uncanny 
sensation produced by the fact that so many people have spent 
unprecedented amounts of time in their homes, that spending a maximum 
amount of time alone is necessary for the public good, and that that 
isolation is, itself, a luxury.

While a great deal of media discourse surrounding the global pandemic 
has focused on COVID-19’s high mortality rate (which disproportionately 
affects people who are already living with disabilities), the number of 
people worldwide who are likely to become disabled as a result of the 
disease is even higher, and it is considered likely that many of these 
conditions will be lifelong. As disability becomes increasingly 
impossible to ignore worldwide, media scholars may offer new 
interventions that attend to disability’s representational and semiotic 
power, as well as its material significance in the history of cinema and 
cinematic thought. We encourage transnational and cross-disciplinary 
approaches to thinking about disability in and as media, language, and 
form. We also are (very!) interested in book reviews, film/TV reviews, 
photo essays, video essays, fiction and other hybrid forms.

**

*Deadline for manuscript/project submission: November 27, 2022. We are 
looking for completed manuscripts/projects; feel free to contact us 
before the deadline with questions about a potential pitch/project. *

*Spectator*is a biannual publication by the University of Southern 
California, School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Cinema & Media 
Studies. Submissions in the following areas are encouraged:

  * Social media and the chronicling of disability; illness and virtual
    communities of support
  * Architectures of illness and disability: quarantines, waiting rooms,
    medical offices, screens R
  * Revisiting New Queer Cinema and HIV/AIDS media in the time of COVID-19
  * Disability as recurring theme in the work of a specific director
  * Life-writing and self-authored representations of disability
  * Disability and/as performance: queerness, subjectivity, and ability
  * Police brutality, disability, and mediatic “liveness”
  * Non-theatrical disability media (instructional films for physicians,
    films about institutions and hospitals, public service announcements)
  * The visual technologies of the clinic (MRIs, ultrasounds, X-rays)
  * Psychosomatic illness, “faking it,” documentary
  * The hospital and theories of hospitality**
  * Disability as metaphor in film theory: rethinking the apparatus, the
    close-up, the gaze in light of disability theory
  * Affect, sensation, and abject medias of disease and disability
    (filmed surgeries, filmed autopsies, Dr. Pimple Popper, etc.)
  * Intersectional approaches to disability, race, and gender in
    contemporary media
  * Melodrama, soap opera, and disability as narrative device
  * Prosthesis, mobility, and visual technologies of the 21^st century
  * Chronic conditions, death, and comedy
  * Accessibility, space, and spectatorship: the movie theater,
    closed-captioning, and assistive technologies
  * Disability, monstrosity, trauma, and pathos in genre cinema



    Manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to:



    Emma Ben Ayoun

    USC School of Cinematic Arts, 900 W. 34^th Street, Los Angeles, CA
    90007

    (917) 714-7309

    (benayoun /at/ usc.edu) <mailto:(benayoun /at/ usc.edu)>



    Submissions should be e-mailed directly to the issue editor.
    Manuscripts should include the title of the contribution, name of
    author(s), postal address, e-mail address, and a phone number for
    the author who will work with the editor on revisions. Contributions
    should not exceed 5,000 words. Please include a brief abstract and
    author bio for publicity purposes.



    Articles submitted should not be under consideration by any other
    journals.



    Book Reviews may vary in length from 300 to 1,000 words. Please
    include title of book, retail price and ISBN at the beginning of the
    review.



    Additional section contributions can include interviews, works about
    new archival or research facilities as well as newly developed
    methods related to the field.



    Authors should send copies of their work via e-mail as electronic
    attachments. Files should be formatted in the latest version of
    Microsoft Word and endnotes should conform to the Chicago Manual of
    Style.



    Upon acceptance, a detailed format/style sheet will be forwarded to
    all contributors as to the requirements for the submission of images
    and text. No payment from the authors will be required at any point
    in the process.


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