Conference Presentations by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Like horror movies, heavy metal and hip-hop are often thought of as genres created for, and yet a... more Like horror movies, heavy metal and hip-hop are often thought of as genres created for, and yet a source of harm to, marginalised youth. Labelled monstrous, seeming to embody hyper-masculine aggression and misogyny, these musical forms also enable a gothic space where non-normative masculinities can flourish; exploring not only experiences of violence, but mental health problems and feelings of isolation, with sympathy and depth. This paper explores the Gothic as a space of masculine self-expression for three bands from the mid-eighties to mid-nineties; Metallica, Gravediggaz, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The setting for gothic fictions is very often domestic, which is a descriptor with distinctly fem... more The setting for gothic fictions is very often domestic, which is a descriptor with distinctly feminine connotations, particularly given the centrality of the home and family life in the female gothic. Much critical work following Ellen Moers focused on gothic authors’ articulations of women’s dissatisfaction with patriarchal norms that trapped them within the home. Despite the association between domesticity and femininity, these home environments are very often owned by, and ruled by men.
When Jane Eyre rails against the limitations placed upon women through this alignment of domesticity and femininity, she compares her situation and herself to the masculine norms of a patriarchal society saying that women feel ‘just as men do’. But how do men feel? How are men positioned within these homes, and these texts? The proposed paper explores the representation of men’s anxieties about their domestic identities - as fathers, sons, and heads of households – in the Victorian gothic novel, concentrating particularly on the figures of Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, and Philip Pirrip. This paper traces the parallels in characterisation between Miss Havisham and Heathcliff, in their passionate responses to romantic rejection and their desire to control the next generation, and the construction of the figure of the gentleman through the experiences Rochester and Pip, to explore the intersection of class and gender in the construction of the domestic masculinity in the mid-Victorian gothic.
A tale of police corruption, focused on a series of murders of young girls, set in a post-industr... more A tale of police corruption, focused on a series of murders of young girls, set in a post-industrial small towns in the late twentieth century. HBO television series True Detective (2014) and the Channel Four films that make up the Red Riding Trilogy (2009) are basically telling the same story. These two series share a focus; they examine in detail the specific cultural traditions, local social norms, and the geography that sustains and enables masculine dominance and abusive patriarchal power structures. I suggest that these two series are inherently, inescapably gothic. That this gothic is in the places, and the people, that they depict. These are series focussed on the world of the police investigation of the monster known as the serial killer, and the surrounding culture in which the crimes occur. The identities of the serial killers, the detectives and witnesses, are related to their physical environments; regional identity is as fundamental as gender identity. And these identities are as toxic as the post-industrial decay in the environment in which they developed.
The development of modern copyright law, and the rise of the literary celebrity, are trends linke... more The development of modern copyright law, and the rise of the literary celebrity, are trends linked by the core concept of authorship. This paper traces the development of nineteenth century literary fandoms and fan practices - from Byron’s Romantic celebrity, through to the women who propositioned Longfellow – through the lens of gender and space. The legitimacy of certain claims of authorship above others was enshrined in law partly as a response to the practices of fans, and those who would exploit fandom for financial gain. The authors who could access legal recourse to protect their work were almost exclusively men aligned with what Habermas termed ‘the public sphere’, whilst their fandoms were very often imagined as being (if not actually) composed of women who were significantly excluded from such discourse. In daring to step outside the domestic sphere to engage in the pursuit of erotic and artistic, female literary fans challenged dominant constructs of gendered spatial relations. Debates over authorship and copyright are as much about public space as those about enclosure; as Michel de Certeau recognised in categorising the fan as a ‘poacher’ on the land of the literary text.
A psychiatrist narrates what at first appears to be a patient’s story, then a friend’s story invo... more A psychiatrist narrates what at first appears to be a patient’s story, then a friend’s story involving a patient, that increasingly becomes his own story through his narrative choices. Are we then - as reader - an audience, a confidant, a witness, perhaps the narrator’s own therapist? Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (1996) sets up these subject positions within the text, both as characters and as possible reading positions, and then blurs the boundaries. Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, as the television show Hannibal (2013 -2015), develops the same technique. The entire third (final?) season of the series is devoted to psychiatrists and psychological profilers, who may also be murderers and lovers, debating agency, observation, participation, and responsibility. The focus of all this psychiatric narration is the same; sex and death.
This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers. Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?
The practice of compiling excerpts from texts and visual art related to an object of fan affectio... more The practice of compiling excerpts from texts and visual art related to an object of fan affection has been consistently employed in Anglo-American fandom since the eighteenth century. Tumblr and Pinterest enable fans to collate and share content in much the same manner as commonplace books and scrapbooks of the past two hundred years. Interestingly, both digital and paper-based modes have become loaded with the cultural associations of femininity.
Commonplace books circulated within domestic spaces, in an era in which women's participation in public life was severely curtailed and the majority of cultural producers were male. The public nature of Tumblr dashboards enables fans to find each other readily, and join networks of like-minded others not limited by geography, however, it leaves fans open to public interpretation of highly specific group practice. Though the public sphere is no longer as exclusively male as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century, the majority of cultural producers are still male. Spaces dominated by fan practices, such as Tumblr and Pinterest are, by contrast, culturally becoming coded as feminine.
Drawing particularly on feminist critiques and developments of Habermas' work on the public sphere, this paper explores the cultural constructions of binary pairs producer/consumer, active/passive, private/public, and male/female as applied to the study of fan practices. Are these inherently female modes of consumption and engagement with cultural productions? Or, are the practices of the disenfranchised within patriarchal power dynamics of production coded as feminine by a misunderstanding of their 'passive' consumer positioning? Changes in cultural and technological mores have radically changed the spaces available to women, and audiences in general, but a continuity of practice remains. Simply, this paper asks why?
Skintight latex, leather and rubber; the average superhero’s uniform cleaves to the figure of the... more Skintight latex, leather and rubber; the average superhero’s uniform cleaves to the figure of the wearer, showing off toned musculature and enhancing secondary sexual characteristics. Yet, despite their superficial conformity to Western society’s normative beauty standards, the superhero is often anomalously embodied or psychologically damaged: Bruce Wayne’s psychological struggles with past trauma are at the heart of every film development of the Batman mythos since the nineteen-eighties. There are even superheroes, such as Dr. Henry McCoy (aka Beast) of the X-Men (2000), who are barely recognisable as belonging to the human species.
The superhero genre presents an interesting array of ‘disturbed’ bodies; from the technologically enhanced, to those genetically mutated beyond recognition as human. There is a recognition in many of these films that the disturbed body - as non-normative, deformed or enhanced – is also a sexual body. For example, the narrative of Ben Grimm’s transformation into the ‘Thing’ in Fantastic Four (2005) focuses upon his coming to terms with his altered body through a narrative of romantic rejection and acceptance. However, the Thing’s new girlfriend is a blind woman who cannot see his ‘inhuman’ appearance, but can feel the difference of his skin texture.
Whilst these films thus seem superficially comfortable presenting and exploring the romantic lives of the non-normatively embodied, they often reinforce the fetishization of difference and reinforce the notion of the disabled body as non-sexual and non-sensual, or hypersexual/sensual. For example, the Thing never gets an on-screen kiss post-transformation, unlike other romantic parings within these films. This paper investigates the presentation of superheroes as sexual beings, through visual codes and conventions as well as narrative development. The analysis is built upon the work of disability scholars such as Margrit Shildrick, who argues that the anomalously embodied disrupt the dominant cultural construction of the self/subject and thus ‘fundamentally performs a queering of normative paradigms.’ Developing this idea, Alison Kafer states in her essay on compulsory able-bodiedness, as aligned with the compulsory heterosexuality thematized by Adrienne Rich, that ‘the sexuality of people with disabilities is understood as always already deviant; when queer desires and practices are recognized as such, they merely magnify or exacerbate that deviance.’ Thus, embodied difference is fetishized on screen, and the sexual agency of these embodied subjects denied or circumscribed.
However, the presentation of the non-normatively embodied on screen as heroes brings the anomalous body in the spotlight, and into the discursive space. It is important to examine the possibilities that the popularity of these fictions opens up, as well as those that are seemingly closed down. Essentially, these are all narratives of transformation, and it is well to recognise that all bodies transform through age, accident or experience. The boundaries of who is, or shall be, counted as disabled or anomalously embodied depend on individual circumstance. We all recognise the precariousness of youthful beauty, so who among us does not want to believe that even the Thing can be loved?
Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights focuses on the protagonists Heathcliffe and Cathy, and the... more Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights focuses on the protagonists Heathcliffe and Cathy, and the next generation Linton and Catherine, whilst they are in their youth. The romantic themes of the novel – love triangles, falling for the ‘badboy’, revenge of the spurred lover – are already recognizable in the teen melodrama genre. Much has been made of Stephanie Meyer’s referencing of Brontë’s work in her Twilight novels. However, this paper argues that the Buffyverse got their first, and did it better.
George Bataille’s essay on Emily Brontë develops a reading of Wuthering Heights in which eroticism is deeply tied up in ideas of transgression and transcendence. Themes of selfishness, adolescence as transition from childhood realm to adult society, sexual desire and the death drive are brought to the fore, highlighting the depth and complexity of the desires of Brontë’s characters, and their dangers. This paper offers a critical reading of these themes in Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer rooted in Bataille’s analysis. A crucial element for all these ideas is time – and it is here that BtVS demonstrates stronger affiliation with Brontë’s work.
The span of Wuthering Heights’ narrative covers some thirty years, and is driven by changes wrought by time and experience, and Heathcliffe’s inability to adapt. The desire for transcendence, the eroticism of death, in Bataille’s analysis is an attempt to step outside of the inevitable march of time; to remain in the ‘kingdom of childhood’ where selfishness is indulged. The vampires of the Buffyverse live in this kingdom and, in loving Buffy, Spike and Angel are drawn back into adult/human society. By contrast, Meyer’s romanticism of unchanging Edward, Bella’s desire never to age, presents the kingdom of childhood as desirable through the escape to a romantic past. Whilst BtVS intimately explores the eroticism of the death drive, Twilight seeks to submerge the erotic within the romantic – a dangerous denial of the reality of time.
"Much can be made of the influence of new technologies in shaping spaces for fandom, and in shapi... more "Much can be made of the influence of new technologies in shaping spaces for fandom, and in shaping the nature of fandoms, leading to essays on the development of online fan communities and the changes wrought by web 2.0.
However, the intertextuality of fan experience does not remain on the screen. Fan ‘craft’, such as the knitting patterns to replicate the Firefly/Serenity character Jayne’s hat, involves the use of older technology to reshape the fictional into the physical, leading to intense debates about copyright and authorship. Bringing a physical item across the boundary from the fictional realm in this manner disrupts the dissemination of cultural items as monetised commodity.
This paper examines the ways in which new and old technologies are used by fans and producers alike to mould and shape an intertextual world, in which the boundaries between real and unreal, physical and immaterial, are increasingly blurred.
Savvy producers are recognising the meta-textuality of self-reflexive fan culture: before the release of Iron Man 2 a corporate site went live for a subsidiary of the fictional Stark Industries and ‘recruiters’ for the firm attended San Diego ComicCon. However, this strategy disrupts the traditional advertising modes; the fictional corporation logo on a t-shirt does not necessarily directly link the uninitiated to a purchasable product such as a film or book. Memorabilia advertising aspects of a fictional world, such as promotional t-shirts for fictional businesses, are popular in cult fandom; encouraging the market for collectibles, and the display of insider knowledge, whilst preserving a distance from the corporate media who own the rights to the texts themselves.
Drawing on Michael Saler’s analysis of the ‘literary prehistory of virtual reality’ this paper suggests that cult fandom uses the widest rage of technology available to its practitioners to establish and maintain a disenchantment/reenchantment dialectic. By embedding the physical manifestations of their favourite fictional world into their IRL existence, fans are not simply living the escapist fantasies of modern Walter Mitty’s. In fact, fan craft activity and independent purchasing reshapes the world to resemble their preferred fictional environment, whilst attempting to defy or reinterpret models of ownership and authority.
"
"This paper puts forward a reading of the redemption narrative within popular vampire fiction as ... more "This paper puts forward a reading of the redemption narrative within popular vampire fiction as exemplifying Derrida’s aporia on forgiveness; that forgiveness ‘only becomes possible from the moment that it appears impossible’ (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 37).
Tracing narratives of redemption in the Vampire Chronicle novels of Anne Rice, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this paper identifies the aporia at work in each, irrespective of the ostensible moral framework of the individual texts.
The redemption narrative addresses three concepts – acceptance/repentance, forgiveness, and restoration – all applicable only to the moral agent. It is only when the humanity, or ‘soul’, can overcome the oft-labelled demonic ‘other’ in the vampire’s divided self, that the vampiric being achieves the essential moral agency. The vampire is most monstrous, most unforgiveable, when it is most human; as a rational being subject to the universal law which it delights in transgressing.
As increasing numbers of published texts decry the moral relativism of secular Western society and/or the rise of fundamental religion, a propensity for secular understandings of absolute concepts, such as evil and redemption, has developed within popular the fantasy genre. Nor are the consumers of genre fiction unaware, or indifferent to, such philosophical underpinnings, as the increasing popularity of texts discussing philosophy through pop culture demonstrates. This paper argues that there is clearly an audience seeking to identify, redeem even, their ‘humanity’ within a range of moral frameworks, both secular and religious. As Nina Auerbach stated; ‘Our Vampires, Ourselves’ (1997)."
Chapters in Edited Collections by Evan Hayles Gledhill
The X-Men Films: A Cultural Analysis, Feb 2016
The X-Men franchise of science fiction fantasy explores uncomfortable biopolitical themes, in the... more The X-Men franchise of science fiction fantasy explores uncomfortable biopolitical themes, in the guise of big-budget action-adventure films. This chapter addresses these films’ engagement with complex discourses, exploring notions about what it means to be a “normal” human subject. Georges Canguilhem’s (1978) critique of the categorization of the normal and the pathological in medical science forms a basis for a critical perspective on the representation of the anomalous embodied as citizen and medical subject.
Blogs and Blog Posts by Evan Hayles Gledhill
A review of Liam Scarlett's first full-length ballet, based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and p... more A review of Liam Scarlett's first full-length ballet, based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and performed at London's Royal Opera House in 2016.
We can imagine a Gothic machine culture as having two parts; a clinical interpretation of signal ... more We can imagine a Gothic machine culture as having two parts; a clinical interpretation of signal to noise that erases emotion and ambiguity, and the potential for the construction of a labyrinth of logical systems that can only be ended/exited through paradoxically acknowledging the potential for ambiguity. Is Byzantine code, causing labyrinths and loops, simply badly designed and not fit for purpose? Can we introduce an atmospheric fog of noise into the communication channel deliberately, without this being a corruption of pure purpose? Is there an aesthetics of code that can be said to be beyond practical application? Or is this an attempt to elevate the human in the posthuman, to recentralise something that is irrelevant? Do we even need fog when we have a labyrinth? The question, at least for this scholar, is: can code itself be Gothic?
Gothic became a self-parodying genre very quickly: Jane Austen wrote the self-reflexive 'Northang... more Gothic became a self-parodying genre very quickly: Jane Austen wrote the self-reflexive 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798, though it did not see publication for nearly twenty years after that. Two hundred years later, the Gothic has expanded and adapted, and a mocking inter-textual awareness is a key quality for the popularity of the genre. The audience for this fiction has long been perceived as skewing feminine, as is recognized and critiqued in Austen’s work. The modern southern gothic of True Blood (2007-2014), and American gothic Supernatural (2005-ongoing), also recognize a majority female fanbase. Despite the very different eras of their generation, these fictions have much in common in their engagement with their audience and with their historical antecedents as Gothic genre fictions. Though the genre has always been self-reflexive and its heroes and heroines highly self-aware, the analytic capacity of the female audience is still denied and denigrated.
Named in memoriam for the late Professor Logan of the 'Jean Grey School for Higher Learning', the... more Named in memoriam for the late Professor Logan of the 'Jean Grey School for Higher Learning', the Logan Institute for the Study of Superhero Masculinities was founded by postgraduate student Eva Hayles Gledhill in 2015 as a web resource for collating commentary on the topic of gendered superheroism, and original content from fans, scholars, and cultural commentators. Its founder aims to examine gendered representations of the superhero in an interdisciplinary forum, and to encourage fans to develop their own critical perspectives on the superhero body.
Originating in the traditionally critically-maligned genre of the comic, labelled as immature entertainment for an immature audience, the superhero is an increasing presence in mainstream English-language film, television and print cultures. Associated for many with exaggerated fantasy, outmoded nationalism, and lycra jumpsuits, the superhero persona has been reinvented in the twenty-first century gritty realism and leather (though the nationalism seems to be a permanent fixture). The costumes, whether of lycra or leather, are still figure-hugging; gender is inescapably a crucial marker of the superhero body. The hero is, by definition, an ideal; an example set to the wider populace aligned with ideas of goodness and integrity. The gendering of the superhero is, therefore, also a gendering of the wider ideals which they represent.
Book Reviews by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Containing twenty three critical essays, not including the narrative overviews of Whedon’s three... more Containing twenty three critical essays, not including the narrative overviews of Whedon’s three television series or the aforementioned introduction, the range of content and contexts examined reflects very well the breadth of the critical works available in Whedon studies, and the variety of genres and formats in which Whedon himself works
An examination of the hyperbody of the superhero from the perspective of disability studies is a ... more An examination of the hyperbody of the superhero from the perspective of disability studies is a timely addition to the growing field of comic book scholarship. Drawing on theories and critiques addressing the representation of the body in visual art and narratives, as well as previous histories and analyses of comic books, Alaniz seeks to cover a lot of ground in his study. Excellent scholarship is unfortunately overshadowed by a construction which opens with the weakest chapters; a tighter focus on, and unpacking of, white masculinity would have formed a unifying core for what feels like a fragmented work.
Teaching Materials by Evan Hayles Gledhill
A teaching aid to help develop familiarity with the grammar of citation, and to help in teaching ... more A teaching aid to help develop familiarity with the grammar of citation, and to help in teaching referencing skills.
Other by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Fear, Horror and Terror can be seen as the defining experiences and political tools of modernity,... more Fear, Horror and Terror can be seen as the defining experiences and political tools of modernity, shaping public spaces, discourse, and popular culture. This is the era of the 'War on Terror', in which terror is politically, culturally, even racially defined. We are constantly confronted with, consuming, and discussing media images of horror, both fictional and factual. This year's 10th interdisciplinary Fear, Horror and Terror conference explores the production and dissemination these concepts and experiences as a political, cultural, and media commodity. We invite participants to consider questions such as:
~ How fear, horror, and terror manifest in everyday life, popular culture, fiction, society, communities and politics?
~ How experiences or images produced by/about fear, horror and terror shape or direct the way we understand the world?
~ What are the underlying power structures that determine how and why representations of fear, horror and terror are disseminated, and to whom?
~ How can we communicate, contain and overcome the effects and consequences of fear, horror and terror?
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Conference Presentations by Evan Hayles Gledhill
When Jane Eyre rails against the limitations placed upon women through this alignment of domesticity and femininity, she compares her situation and herself to the masculine norms of a patriarchal society saying that women feel ‘just as men do’. But how do men feel? How are men positioned within these homes, and these texts? The proposed paper explores the representation of men’s anxieties about their domestic identities - as fathers, sons, and heads of households – in the Victorian gothic novel, concentrating particularly on the figures of Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, and Philip Pirrip. This paper traces the parallels in characterisation between Miss Havisham and Heathcliff, in their passionate responses to romantic rejection and their desire to control the next generation, and the construction of the figure of the gentleman through the experiences Rochester and Pip, to explore the intersection of class and gender in the construction of the domestic masculinity in the mid-Victorian gothic.
This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers. Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?
Commonplace books circulated within domestic spaces, in an era in which women's participation in public life was severely curtailed and the majority of cultural producers were male. The public nature of Tumblr dashboards enables fans to find each other readily, and join networks of like-minded others not limited by geography, however, it leaves fans open to public interpretation of highly specific group practice. Though the public sphere is no longer as exclusively male as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century, the majority of cultural producers are still male. Spaces dominated by fan practices, such as Tumblr and Pinterest are, by contrast, culturally becoming coded as feminine.
Drawing particularly on feminist critiques and developments of Habermas' work on the public sphere, this paper explores the cultural constructions of binary pairs producer/consumer, active/passive, private/public, and male/female as applied to the study of fan practices. Are these inherently female modes of consumption and engagement with cultural productions? Or, are the practices of the disenfranchised within patriarchal power dynamics of production coded as feminine by a misunderstanding of their 'passive' consumer positioning? Changes in cultural and technological mores have radically changed the spaces available to women, and audiences in general, but a continuity of practice remains. Simply, this paper asks why?
The superhero genre presents an interesting array of ‘disturbed’ bodies; from the technologically enhanced, to those genetically mutated beyond recognition as human. There is a recognition in many of these films that the disturbed body - as non-normative, deformed or enhanced – is also a sexual body. For example, the narrative of Ben Grimm’s transformation into the ‘Thing’ in Fantastic Four (2005) focuses upon his coming to terms with his altered body through a narrative of romantic rejection and acceptance. However, the Thing’s new girlfriend is a blind woman who cannot see his ‘inhuman’ appearance, but can feel the difference of his skin texture.
Whilst these films thus seem superficially comfortable presenting and exploring the romantic lives of the non-normatively embodied, they often reinforce the fetishization of difference and reinforce the notion of the disabled body as non-sexual and non-sensual, or hypersexual/sensual. For example, the Thing never gets an on-screen kiss post-transformation, unlike other romantic parings within these films. This paper investigates the presentation of superheroes as sexual beings, through visual codes and conventions as well as narrative development. The analysis is built upon the work of disability scholars such as Margrit Shildrick, who argues that the anomalously embodied disrupt the dominant cultural construction of the self/subject and thus ‘fundamentally performs a queering of normative paradigms.’ Developing this idea, Alison Kafer states in her essay on compulsory able-bodiedness, as aligned with the compulsory heterosexuality thematized by Adrienne Rich, that ‘the sexuality of people with disabilities is understood as always already deviant; when queer desires and practices are recognized as such, they merely magnify or exacerbate that deviance.’ Thus, embodied difference is fetishized on screen, and the sexual agency of these embodied subjects denied or circumscribed.
However, the presentation of the non-normatively embodied on screen as heroes brings the anomalous body in the spotlight, and into the discursive space. It is important to examine the possibilities that the popularity of these fictions opens up, as well as those that are seemingly closed down. Essentially, these are all narratives of transformation, and it is well to recognise that all bodies transform through age, accident or experience. The boundaries of who is, or shall be, counted as disabled or anomalously embodied depend on individual circumstance. We all recognise the precariousness of youthful beauty, so who among us does not want to believe that even the Thing can be loved?
George Bataille’s essay on Emily Brontë develops a reading of Wuthering Heights in which eroticism is deeply tied up in ideas of transgression and transcendence. Themes of selfishness, adolescence as transition from childhood realm to adult society, sexual desire and the death drive are brought to the fore, highlighting the depth and complexity of the desires of Brontë’s characters, and their dangers. This paper offers a critical reading of these themes in Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer rooted in Bataille’s analysis. A crucial element for all these ideas is time – and it is here that BtVS demonstrates stronger affiliation with Brontë’s work.
The span of Wuthering Heights’ narrative covers some thirty years, and is driven by changes wrought by time and experience, and Heathcliffe’s inability to adapt. The desire for transcendence, the eroticism of death, in Bataille’s analysis is an attempt to step outside of the inevitable march of time; to remain in the ‘kingdom of childhood’ where selfishness is indulged. The vampires of the Buffyverse live in this kingdom and, in loving Buffy, Spike and Angel are drawn back into adult/human society. By contrast, Meyer’s romanticism of unchanging Edward, Bella’s desire never to age, presents the kingdom of childhood as desirable through the escape to a romantic past. Whilst BtVS intimately explores the eroticism of the death drive, Twilight seeks to submerge the erotic within the romantic – a dangerous denial of the reality of time.
However, the intertextuality of fan experience does not remain on the screen. Fan ‘craft’, such as the knitting patterns to replicate the Firefly/Serenity character Jayne’s hat, involves the use of older technology to reshape the fictional into the physical, leading to intense debates about copyright and authorship. Bringing a physical item across the boundary from the fictional realm in this manner disrupts the dissemination of cultural items as monetised commodity.
This paper examines the ways in which new and old technologies are used by fans and producers alike to mould and shape an intertextual world, in which the boundaries between real and unreal, physical and immaterial, are increasingly blurred.
Savvy producers are recognising the meta-textuality of self-reflexive fan culture: before the release of Iron Man 2 a corporate site went live for a subsidiary of the fictional Stark Industries and ‘recruiters’ for the firm attended San Diego ComicCon. However, this strategy disrupts the traditional advertising modes; the fictional corporation logo on a t-shirt does not necessarily directly link the uninitiated to a purchasable product such as a film or book. Memorabilia advertising aspects of a fictional world, such as promotional t-shirts for fictional businesses, are popular in cult fandom; encouraging the market for collectibles, and the display of insider knowledge, whilst preserving a distance from the corporate media who own the rights to the texts themselves.
Drawing on Michael Saler’s analysis of the ‘literary prehistory of virtual reality’ this paper suggests that cult fandom uses the widest rage of technology available to its practitioners to establish and maintain a disenchantment/reenchantment dialectic. By embedding the physical manifestations of their favourite fictional world into their IRL existence, fans are not simply living the escapist fantasies of modern Walter Mitty’s. In fact, fan craft activity and independent purchasing reshapes the world to resemble their preferred fictional environment, whilst attempting to defy or reinterpret models of ownership and authority.
"
Tracing narratives of redemption in the Vampire Chronicle novels of Anne Rice, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this paper identifies the aporia at work in each, irrespective of the ostensible moral framework of the individual texts.
The redemption narrative addresses three concepts – acceptance/repentance, forgiveness, and restoration – all applicable only to the moral agent. It is only when the humanity, or ‘soul’, can overcome the oft-labelled demonic ‘other’ in the vampire’s divided self, that the vampiric being achieves the essential moral agency. The vampire is most monstrous, most unforgiveable, when it is most human; as a rational being subject to the universal law which it delights in transgressing.
As increasing numbers of published texts decry the moral relativism of secular Western society and/or the rise of fundamental religion, a propensity for secular understandings of absolute concepts, such as evil and redemption, has developed within popular the fantasy genre. Nor are the consumers of genre fiction unaware, or indifferent to, such philosophical underpinnings, as the increasing popularity of texts discussing philosophy through pop culture demonstrates. This paper argues that there is clearly an audience seeking to identify, redeem even, their ‘humanity’ within a range of moral frameworks, both secular and religious. As Nina Auerbach stated; ‘Our Vampires, Ourselves’ (1997)."
Chapters in Edited Collections by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Blogs and Blog Posts by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Originating in the traditionally critically-maligned genre of the comic, labelled as immature entertainment for an immature audience, the superhero is an increasing presence in mainstream English-language film, television and print cultures. Associated for many with exaggerated fantasy, outmoded nationalism, and lycra jumpsuits, the superhero persona has been reinvented in the twenty-first century gritty realism and leather (though the nationalism seems to be a permanent fixture). The costumes, whether of lycra or leather, are still figure-hugging; gender is inescapably a crucial marker of the superhero body. The hero is, by definition, an ideal; an example set to the wider populace aligned with ideas of goodness and integrity. The gendering of the superhero is, therefore, also a gendering of the wider ideals which they represent.
Book Reviews by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Teaching Materials by Evan Hayles Gledhill
Other by Evan Hayles Gledhill
~ How fear, horror, and terror manifest in everyday life, popular culture, fiction, society, communities and politics?
~ How experiences or images produced by/about fear, horror and terror shape or direct the way we understand the world?
~ What are the underlying power structures that determine how and why representations of fear, horror and terror are disseminated, and to whom?
~ How can we communicate, contain and overcome the effects and consequences of fear, horror and terror?
When Jane Eyre rails against the limitations placed upon women through this alignment of domesticity and femininity, she compares her situation and herself to the masculine norms of a patriarchal society saying that women feel ‘just as men do’. But how do men feel? How are men positioned within these homes, and these texts? The proposed paper explores the representation of men’s anxieties about their domestic identities - as fathers, sons, and heads of households – in the Victorian gothic novel, concentrating particularly on the figures of Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, and Philip Pirrip. This paper traces the parallels in characterisation between Miss Havisham and Heathcliff, in their passionate responses to romantic rejection and their desire to control the next generation, and the construction of the figure of the gentleman through the experiences Rochester and Pip, to explore the intersection of class and gender in the construction of the domestic masculinity in the mid-Victorian gothic.
This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers. Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?
Commonplace books circulated within domestic spaces, in an era in which women's participation in public life was severely curtailed and the majority of cultural producers were male. The public nature of Tumblr dashboards enables fans to find each other readily, and join networks of like-minded others not limited by geography, however, it leaves fans open to public interpretation of highly specific group practice. Though the public sphere is no longer as exclusively male as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century, the majority of cultural producers are still male. Spaces dominated by fan practices, such as Tumblr and Pinterest are, by contrast, culturally becoming coded as feminine.
Drawing particularly on feminist critiques and developments of Habermas' work on the public sphere, this paper explores the cultural constructions of binary pairs producer/consumer, active/passive, private/public, and male/female as applied to the study of fan practices. Are these inherently female modes of consumption and engagement with cultural productions? Or, are the practices of the disenfranchised within patriarchal power dynamics of production coded as feminine by a misunderstanding of their 'passive' consumer positioning? Changes in cultural and technological mores have radically changed the spaces available to women, and audiences in general, but a continuity of practice remains. Simply, this paper asks why?
The superhero genre presents an interesting array of ‘disturbed’ bodies; from the technologically enhanced, to those genetically mutated beyond recognition as human. There is a recognition in many of these films that the disturbed body - as non-normative, deformed or enhanced – is also a sexual body. For example, the narrative of Ben Grimm’s transformation into the ‘Thing’ in Fantastic Four (2005) focuses upon his coming to terms with his altered body through a narrative of romantic rejection and acceptance. However, the Thing’s new girlfriend is a blind woman who cannot see his ‘inhuman’ appearance, but can feel the difference of his skin texture.
Whilst these films thus seem superficially comfortable presenting and exploring the romantic lives of the non-normatively embodied, they often reinforce the fetishization of difference and reinforce the notion of the disabled body as non-sexual and non-sensual, or hypersexual/sensual. For example, the Thing never gets an on-screen kiss post-transformation, unlike other romantic parings within these films. This paper investigates the presentation of superheroes as sexual beings, through visual codes and conventions as well as narrative development. The analysis is built upon the work of disability scholars such as Margrit Shildrick, who argues that the anomalously embodied disrupt the dominant cultural construction of the self/subject and thus ‘fundamentally performs a queering of normative paradigms.’ Developing this idea, Alison Kafer states in her essay on compulsory able-bodiedness, as aligned with the compulsory heterosexuality thematized by Adrienne Rich, that ‘the sexuality of people with disabilities is understood as always already deviant; when queer desires and practices are recognized as such, they merely magnify or exacerbate that deviance.’ Thus, embodied difference is fetishized on screen, and the sexual agency of these embodied subjects denied or circumscribed.
However, the presentation of the non-normatively embodied on screen as heroes brings the anomalous body in the spotlight, and into the discursive space. It is important to examine the possibilities that the popularity of these fictions opens up, as well as those that are seemingly closed down. Essentially, these are all narratives of transformation, and it is well to recognise that all bodies transform through age, accident or experience. The boundaries of who is, or shall be, counted as disabled or anomalously embodied depend on individual circumstance. We all recognise the precariousness of youthful beauty, so who among us does not want to believe that even the Thing can be loved?
George Bataille’s essay on Emily Brontë develops a reading of Wuthering Heights in which eroticism is deeply tied up in ideas of transgression and transcendence. Themes of selfishness, adolescence as transition from childhood realm to adult society, sexual desire and the death drive are brought to the fore, highlighting the depth and complexity of the desires of Brontë’s characters, and their dangers. This paper offers a critical reading of these themes in Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer rooted in Bataille’s analysis. A crucial element for all these ideas is time – and it is here that BtVS demonstrates stronger affiliation with Brontë’s work.
The span of Wuthering Heights’ narrative covers some thirty years, and is driven by changes wrought by time and experience, and Heathcliffe’s inability to adapt. The desire for transcendence, the eroticism of death, in Bataille’s analysis is an attempt to step outside of the inevitable march of time; to remain in the ‘kingdom of childhood’ where selfishness is indulged. The vampires of the Buffyverse live in this kingdom and, in loving Buffy, Spike and Angel are drawn back into adult/human society. By contrast, Meyer’s romanticism of unchanging Edward, Bella’s desire never to age, presents the kingdom of childhood as desirable through the escape to a romantic past. Whilst BtVS intimately explores the eroticism of the death drive, Twilight seeks to submerge the erotic within the romantic – a dangerous denial of the reality of time.
However, the intertextuality of fan experience does not remain on the screen. Fan ‘craft’, such as the knitting patterns to replicate the Firefly/Serenity character Jayne’s hat, involves the use of older technology to reshape the fictional into the physical, leading to intense debates about copyright and authorship. Bringing a physical item across the boundary from the fictional realm in this manner disrupts the dissemination of cultural items as monetised commodity.
This paper examines the ways in which new and old technologies are used by fans and producers alike to mould and shape an intertextual world, in which the boundaries between real and unreal, physical and immaterial, are increasingly blurred.
Savvy producers are recognising the meta-textuality of self-reflexive fan culture: before the release of Iron Man 2 a corporate site went live for a subsidiary of the fictional Stark Industries and ‘recruiters’ for the firm attended San Diego ComicCon. However, this strategy disrupts the traditional advertising modes; the fictional corporation logo on a t-shirt does not necessarily directly link the uninitiated to a purchasable product such as a film or book. Memorabilia advertising aspects of a fictional world, such as promotional t-shirts for fictional businesses, are popular in cult fandom; encouraging the market for collectibles, and the display of insider knowledge, whilst preserving a distance from the corporate media who own the rights to the texts themselves.
Drawing on Michael Saler’s analysis of the ‘literary prehistory of virtual reality’ this paper suggests that cult fandom uses the widest rage of technology available to its practitioners to establish and maintain a disenchantment/reenchantment dialectic. By embedding the physical manifestations of their favourite fictional world into their IRL existence, fans are not simply living the escapist fantasies of modern Walter Mitty’s. In fact, fan craft activity and independent purchasing reshapes the world to resemble their preferred fictional environment, whilst attempting to defy or reinterpret models of ownership and authority.
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Tracing narratives of redemption in the Vampire Chronicle novels of Anne Rice, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this paper identifies the aporia at work in each, irrespective of the ostensible moral framework of the individual texts.
The redemption narrative addresses three concepts – acceptance/repentance, forgiveness, and restoration – all applicable only to the moral agent. It is only when the humanity, or ‘soul’, can overcome the oft-labelled demonic ‘other’ in the vampire’s divided self, that the vampiric being achieves the essential moral agency. The vampire is most monstrous, most unforgiveable, when it is most human; as a rational being subject to the universal law which it delights in transgressing.
As increasing numbers of published texts decry the moral relativism of secular Western society and/or the rise of fundamental religion, a propensity for secular understandings of absolute concepts, such as evil and redemption, has developed within popular the fantasy genre. Nor are the consumers of genre fiction unaware, or indifferent to, such philosophical underpinnings, as the increasing popularity of texts discussing philosophy through pop culture demonstrates. This paper argues that there is clearly an audience seeking to identify, redeem even, their ‘humanity’ within a range of moral frameworks, both secular and religious. As Nina Auerbach stated; ‘Our Vampires, Ourselves’ (1997)."
Originating in the traditionally critically-maligned genre of the comic, labelled as immature entertainment for an immature audience, the superhero is an increasing presence in mainstream English-language film, television and print cultures. Associated for many with exaggerated fantasy, outmoded nationalism, and lycra jumpsuits, the superhero persona has been reinvented in the twenty-first century gritty realism and leather (though the nationalism seems to be a permanent fixture). The costumes, whether of lycra or leather, are still figure-hugging; gender is inescapably a crucial marker of the superhero body. The hero is, by definition, an ideal; an example set to the wider populace aligned with ideas of goodness and integrity. The gendering of the superhero is, therefore, also a gendering of the wider ideals which they represent.
~ How fear, horror, and terror manifest in everyday life, popular culture, fiction, society, communities and politics?
~ How experiences or images produced by/about fear, horror and terror shape or direct the way we understand the world?
~ What are the underlying power structures that determine how and why representations of fear, horror and terror are disseminated, and to whom?
~ How can we communicate, contain and overcome the effects and consequences of fear, horror and terror?