University of Pittsburgh's Inaugural Queer Horror Conference

Foucault, the Posthumanist Gothic, and Clive Barker, oh my!

As I finish up sending out the last round of developmental edits for the Disease of Finitude zine, I nearly forgot to share that I will be presenting this forthcoming weekend (February 7th & 8th) at University of Pittsburgh’s Queer Horror Conference. This is the inaugural conference organized by their Horror Studies working group, and hosts a lineup of absolutely fascinating presentations and papers spanning everything from contemporary cinema to early gothic literature. I am especially excited that Gwendolyn Kiste will be the keynote author, speaking on Friday night. This conference is entirely free, and the good folks organizing it endeavored to make it as accessible as possible — including guaranteed captions for each talk.

I will be presenting on the Saturday afternoon panel, “Queer and Trans Theories of Horror”. My paper is titled “Where the Monster’s Live: Clive Barker’s Queer Biopower", and it’s aim is to explore how what I have been referring to (since my undergrad thesis on desire and transgression!) as the “monstrous body” (the ill, deviant, and/or abject “desiring-machine”) subverts the mechanisms of biopower and becomes a radical free agent capable of creating refuge-in-action, a la the psuedo-topia of Nightbreed/Cabal’s sepulcher-town of Midian. We will explore the hermeneutics and phenomenology of eros and thanatos in the Hellraiser franchise prior to concluding around why Midian becomes the model worth building toward. This talk is only 15 minutes long, and so it is an extreme abbreviation of ideas I have been working on for over a decade, but I’m glad to have any excuse to chat about the posthumanist approach and Haraway’s “Cthulhucene” a la one of my favorite philosopher-authors. I have included an excerpt, below:

The literary motif of the mutant is a perennial favorite for a reason: it represents the subterfuge of biopower by problematizing both the anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population. The mutant is abjured when it does not create biopower within the mechanised and disciplinary rules that society enforces; when the mutant rebels, their innate and inalienable anatomo-power is freed up to be assimilated into their population, as opposed to governmental institutions. This is why Midian is so important; this is why Midian, “where the monsters live” in Barker’s Nightbreed, is a pseudo-topia, a close approximation of utopia for the monstrous body which subverts its biopower. As we queer, chronically ill individuals and our communities consider America’s next four years, we are witnessing our de facto negative-value. Our itinerant subversion of biopower is wildly observable as each consecutive executive order signed by our current administration re-enforces that subsequent “unworthiness of life”. The more the disciplinary mechanisms seek to consolidate and reify biopower, the more the monstrous body is not just rendered expendable, but also meriting persecution and eventual extinction.

I hope you will show up and show out for this inaugural and super prescient conference. If you’re interested in attending for free, please go ahead and register HERE.

Hope to see you there, and back with more updates soon!

Sasha