I had a lot of fun keynoting at the Monster Media conference on 18 June, despite doing the talk online and on the road! I had a few technical issues at my end at the very start, but all went smoothly from there.
My talk was called “Making Media Monstrous: Frankenstein and the Feminist Killjoy”. Instead of talking about specific research I am working on, I decided to do something a little more metatextual, just for this conference, and look at some of the many examples of academics and PhD researchers comparing themselves either to Victor Frankenstein, or to his creation. With help from Sarah Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023), and following from her call to ‘be monstrous!’, I used examples from Frankenstein to illustrate how we might make monster studies more monstrous rather than less—i.e. how can we become monsters in a radical way, resisting the exploitative and exclusionary ways academia is often monstrous now.
You can see all of my slides for the talk by clicking on the image below:
It was a fantastic event, and everyone presenting at the conference was addressing some aspect of monsters in/and media. From the conference CFP:
As long as humans have been making media, we have been making media about monsters. From neolithic paintings of monsters in the Cave of Beasts and the myriad monsters of Homer’s Odyssey, to the now-classic monsters of 19th-century Gothic literature and the creature features of 20th-century cinema, to zombie video games and Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour, our fascination with monsters has spanned across nearly every medium. […] While it has often been accepted that media can be a cipher for a specific cultural moment, new directions in media studies, particularly theories of intermediality, find even more similarities between media and the monster: intermediality posits that media categories are not actually as solid as we may like to believe (Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev, Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film), and that media forms evolve and shift over time while maintaining traces of their predecessors in their new forms (Jay Bolter and David Gruisin, Remediation: Understanding New Media). This conference aims to explore the relationship between monsters and the media in which they are portrayed, and the way monsters and monster theory can help us better understand media itself.
Read more about the conference on its official website.