The War Body on Screen
Call for Papers
Closing Date: Monday January 9th 2006
This proposal, for an edited collection of essays on the war body
on screen, emerges from what the editors see as a (post 9/11) concern
for bringing into view the troubling image of the ruined body, or the body
that is absent from vision (as in dead and gone, or captive and hidden).
The corporeal figure of the suicide bomber, the hostage, the soldier, the
terrorist, and the innocent victim, appear as cultural and ideological
vehicles of meaning for the way one is meant to understand conflict, war
and terror in the modern age.
In fiction and factual formats, and across a range of diverse, formal and
informal media sites, conflict and warfare is played out in and through
the body that has been, or very soon will be, marked by violence. This war
body leaks, weeps, defecates, bleeds and unravels.
Or, alternatively, this body (that is often visualised both before and
after the harm of war) is hard-bodied, virtual, hi-tech, robotic,
resistant to damage, and capable of great damage. Power saturated binaries
exist between the legitimate and legitimated bodies of war and bodies that
‘unfairly’ bring destruction.
The representation of the war body on screen is encountered in realist and
actuality genres, in the new ‘domestic’ sites of amateur filmmaking, in
the virtual worlds of the Internet and game playing, and in the fantasy
genres of horror and science fiction, where the image of the monstrous
Other, and the super-iconic cyborg, has been increasingly fused with the
wasted or hyper-masculine body of the soldier, in settings where
fictional/fantasy war is actually conjured up through the visual databanks
of actual wars, and vice versa.
The editors, then, take the war body to be any body that is caught up in
the symbolic signification of terror and ruination. This could include the
ruined body of the soldier, terrorist, suicide bomber, or hostage; the
(absent) body of the ‘returning’ corpse; the cyborg body of the modern
soldier; the ‘horror’ war body; the captive body; the innocent body; the
body of the child; and the body of the journalist.
The collection extends work done in single case studies such as Historian
Joanna Bourke’s work on the male body of the First World War (Dismembering
the male) and is designed to move beyond her work on the psychology of war
and the damaged body. Thus the collection is encouraging a
multi-discipline approach.
The editors welcome proposals that take the war body as their primary site
of investigation and analysis. Proposals can take a text based approach,
and/or one that explores the war body in terms of the contemporary
geo-political landscape. Analysis of the impact of new media and
information technologies on the construction and transmission of war
bodies, are also highly encouraged.
Proposals, of approximately 500 words can be sent electronically to:
Karen Randell Sean Redmond
Principal Lecturer in Film, Senior Lecturer in Film,
Southampton Solent University, Victoria University,
East Park Terrace, Wellington,
Southampton New Zealand
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Closing Date: Monday January 9th 2006
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