This article studies mediated erotic content, especially pornography, as a form of worlding in Michel Houellebecq’s work. Whereas love creates a space of alterity, pornography paradoxically combines the most intimate spatiality of the body with...
The adultification of Black children is a form of anti-Blackness that brings Black children into adult situations. The adultification of Black children can be rooted in early 20th-century children’s books with minstrel imagery showing Black children...
During 2018, three academics employed what they referred to as “reflective ethnography” to examine the hypothesis that many disciplines (e.g., sociology, educational philosophy, and critical race theory) are motivated by extreme ideologie...
The objective of this contribution is to create a first, ideal mapping of a “category” of manga that has experienced and is still experiencing a very successful season. Although they are generically identified with the term “horror...
India’s complex social fabric is marked by a rigid caste system that has perpetuated discrimination and marginalisation for centuries. The caste structure not only establishes clear boundaries between castes through endogamous social relations,...
A widespread revolt during the months of April and May 2021 in the Palestinian city of Jerusalem, also known as Habbet Ayyar, responded to Israeli actions aiming to ethnically cleanse and force out residents from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in...
North America is steeped in legends of cryptids, (mostly) unseen creatures woven into the fabric of its folklore. From legends told by early explorers to contemporary legends told today, these enigmatic beings shape societal perceptions and reflect c...
Silent cinema acted as a bridge between early motion pictures and today’s film industry, playing a transformative role in shaping feminist film history and American society. This article explores pioneering American women in the silent film ind...
This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatura...
The article considers the practice and praxis of graffiti and street art from the perspectives of law enforcement, local government and placemaking, and between the production and consumption of this ambivalent form of cultural expression. The work i...
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy t...
The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs decision in June 2022 came as a shock. Yet, upon reflection, the decision simply reinforced what history has shown: women’s rights and opportunities have always been subject to...
Loneliness and isolation were two factors introduced as “effective measures” during the COVID-19 crisis. The lockdown exacerbated loneliness among those already suffering from acute illnesses. In this context, a rereading of the film Lars...
The article argues that where secrecy and secrets are key aspects of conspiracy theory narratives and practice, the genealogies of the/a secret have not been well understood. We argue that two forms of the secret, one a premodern notion of the secret...
In the region of Northeast Asia, Korea has been identified as a nation that has a distinctive affinity for tigers. Koreans’ lives are deeply ingrained with emotions and thoughts related to tigers, even though they have completely disappeared fr...
This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its read...
Starting with European colonization, African natural resources in particular and nature in general have been coveted and exploited mainly in the interest of Euro-American industrialized countries, with China as a recent major player from Asia. Intere...
Israeli settler colonialism, in time, became highly linked to the idea of a state, culminating in an institution that defends the past, present, and future practises maintaining the relations between the “native” and “settlers&rdquo...
This essay explores the political dynamics of the Godzilla film franchise over the past 70 years, arguing that critical and scholarly characterizations commonly oversimplify the movies’ complicated messages, which reflect the complex, often con...
This article contextualises the history of kaijū scholarship and looks particularly at the swell of publishing that has emerged in the last decade. It argues that the release of a series of new Godzilla films has led to a greater focus on the ka...
Japan has a longstanding tradition of horror narratives that feature a variety of macabre embodiments. They draw upon ancient folklore, thereby providing a unique perspective on spirits specific to Japanese culture. The influence of these countless s...
In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western...
Gothic and sexual elements are embedded within both Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s tellings of “Little Red Riding Hood”. When popular culture turned to fairy tales from the late 20th century forward, reimagining t...
The Western is, in many respects, the essential American film genre, “a cornerstone of American identity” (Kitses). Yet, despite its distinctly American character, the genre has exerted a fascination all over the world. This contribution...
This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytell...
Black creators who tell Harriet Tubman’s story engage in an ongoing rhetorical battle over historical memory with regard to slavery and the Civil War. This essay examines the challenges Tubman’s story poses to a Lost Cause narrative that...
The objective of the present study is to analyze the operational methods employed by the secret police agency (Securitate) in exerting influence and control over individuals within the Romanian communist society, as depicted in the film Metronom dire...
In contrast to the field of global studies, which has seen spectacular expansion and institutionalisation since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have to date been only a few attempts to promote or institutionalise global humanities as a fi...
Toni Morrison represents the improvisations of life in the 1920s and posits her novel Jazz as a work that negotiates sound as a distinguishing characteristic of her writing genre. Many critics have described Morrison’s approach as a Jazzthetic...
Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has be...
In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong attempts to reweave the historical threads that have been brutally severed by American imperialism, forced migration and the imperatives of assimilation, as a practice of survival...
The release of ChatGPT and similar applications in 2022 prompted wide-ranging discussions concerning the impact of AI technologies on writing, creativity, and authorship. This article explores the question of artificial writing, taking into considera...
In the Odyssey, Homer’s Penelope and Circe have fundamentally important roles in ensuring the progression and success of the hero’s, Odysseus, journey home. Their actions in the Odyssey invite complex readings of the two women. Despite th...
The traditional interpretations of the Ramayana have been critiqued for preserving and promoting patriarchal gender structures by emphasising masculine heroism and often portraying female characters as unidimensional symbols of selflessness, purity,...
Studies show that diverse representation in children’s literature can positively impact the self-perceptions of marginalized children. To promote feelings of self-worth, children must see their cultural identities authentically portrayed in a m...
The influence of Plato’s concept of the soul as innately immortal and indestructible had a profoundly unbiblical influence upon many of the early church fathers’ views regarding human nature, the final judgment of the wicked, and God&rsqu...
The inquiry into whether food can be classified as “art” has long been a subject of debate. From its roots tracing back to Plato, this question has attracted the attention of both artistic movements and philosophers, especially throughout...
In 2024, Eilish Quin published the novel Medea, which is a feminist approach to the Medea myth from Greek mythology. Medea’s myth is heavily influenced by Euripides’ play Medea, a play in which she kills her children to enact revenge on h...
The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This...
This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCost...
This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of i...
Rudolf Fuchs (1890–1942) was an influential figure in Prague’s early 20th-century literary scene as well as an intermediary between German and Czech literature at a time of intense social and political transformation. This study places Fu...
This paper focuses on a peculiar aspect of film viewing, specifically the way in which—interacting with the viewer and their own story—visual images create identifications that can make the viewing a more or less disturbing affective expe...
Music videos of the MTV era often use gothic visual signifiers as decorative elements or creative expressions of the musician’s star persona or latest record. But several video clips from the early 1980s adapt the figure of gothic monstrosity,...
If there is one poet who has been widely represented under a legendary light, it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), mostly through the figure of a secluded invalid. Barrett Browning’s illness and death have been romanticised ever...
By modernizing Gothic tropes within a narrative exploring the trauma of intimate partner violence, the latest film adaptation of The Invisible Man from Leigh Whannel draws attention to the invisibility of the psychological and societal horrors of abu...
Higher education in Australia is in a period of crisis and transition. While COVID-related events and their impacts have made it difficult for all areas of university academic endeavour, among the hardest hit have been humanities. Drawing on live int...
An experience of anxiety is caused by the anticipation of unseen future events, especially in the context of ecological trauma, where the prospect of a world without humans in the distant future is often portrayed through mediated cinematic memories....
This article explores the relationship between the alcahueta or bawd, the evil eye, and midwifery in the early modern Spanish cultural imaginary. The evil eye, though an ancient belief, received renewed attention in theological and medical texts, inc...
The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies....
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