Please join us for our Library Athenaeum at 1pm on Halloween, Wednesday October 31. Birthing the Monster: Unnatural Reproduction will be presented by Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace, Assistant Professors of English at WSU.
PAPER 1: “Failed Futurity: Reproductive Anxieties, Undead
Children, and Queering Survival in Apocalyptic Zombie Films”
The zombie is the “monster du jour,” omnipresent in current horror media as the emblem of an imagined undead future. Apocalyptic scenarios tend to serve as the catalyst for the annihilation of the normative social order, producing a chaotic and anarchic time and place in which survivors become the marginal Other to the continuously expanding homogeneous zombie hordes. Collapse of the dominant social order occurs in tandem with the collapse of the symbolic order—the zombie apocalypse is always an abject one. Survivors must abandon the past and their conventional understandings of futurity, which generally revolve around the institutions of marriage, family, and the reproductive imperative, in order to survive in a world that has lost meaning. This paper examines how the failure of futurity becomes manifest in the figure of the zombie child, who provokes a queer understanding of survival predicated on alternative kinship structures and the temporality of living in the present moment.
PAPER 2: ‘Children of the Night’ Dracula, Degeneration and Monstrous Birth at the fin de siècle
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often read as a narrative of reverse colonization, revealing fears of degeneration at the fin de siècle. Anxieties over the decline of empire and the degeneration of masculinity in Victorian Britain resulted in a number of dystopic narratives, each revealing an uneasy relationship between devolution, sexuality, sexual identity and mental health. However, the signal terror of Stoker’s vampires lies not only in their overt sexuality and promiscuity—but also in their fecundity. Both “father” and unnatural mother, Count Dracula is capable of reproducing the undead at an alarming rate. Culminating in a re-examination of the only human birth in Stoker’s novel—Mina Harker’s son Quincy—this project seeks to provide new insight into 19th century anxieties about degeneration’s naissance.
The zombie is the “monster du jour,” omnipresent in current horror media as the emblem of an imagined undead future. Apocalyptic scenarios tend to serve as the catalyst for the annihilation of the normative social order, producing a chaotic and anarchic time and place in which survivors become the marginal Other to the continuously expanding homogeneous zombie hordes. Collapse of the dominant social order occurs in tandem with the collapse of the symbolic order—the zombie apocalypse is always an abject one. Survivors must abandon the past and their conventional understandings of futurity, which generally revolve around the institutions of marriage, family, and the reproductive imperative, in order to survive in a world that has lost meaning. This paper examines how the failure of futurity becomes manifest in the figure of the zombie child, who provokes a queer understanding of survival predicated on alternative kinship structures and the temporality of living in the present moment.
PAPER 2: ‘Children of the Night’ Dracula, Degeneration and Monstrous Birth at the fin de siècle
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often read as a narrative of reverse colonization, revealing fears of degeneration at the fin de siècle. Anxieties over the decline of empire and the degeneration of masculinity in Victorian Britain resulted in a number of dystopic narratives, each revealing an uneasy relationship between devolution, sexuality, sexual identity and mental health. However, the signal terror of Stoker’s vampires lies not only in their overt sexuality and promiscuity—but also in their fecundity. Both “father” and unnatural mother, Count Dracula is capable of reproducing the undead at an alarming rate. Culminating in a re-examination of the only human birth in Stoker’s novel—Mina Harker’s son Quincy—this project seeks to provide new insight into 19th century anxieties about degeneration’s naissance.
The Krueger Library Athenaeum is located on the second floor of the Library, bluff side.
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