All You Zombies: 
Using Scars to Question the Connections of Emotion, Body, and Identity

Mr Michael Stokes, Independent Scholar

Date: Wednesday 4 October, 2017
Time: 2.00pm–3.30pm
Place: EDEN 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK

This seminar centers on the Robert Heinlein short story “All You Zombies“ and its film remake Predestination (2014). Relying upon disability studies, queer studies, film studies, and performance studies, Mr Stokes questions the intricacies of identity and trauma in an assembled framework that notes the linkages of identity, disability, and science fiction. He follows the physical—and in particular sexual—transitions of the main character/s of the story. In so doing he explores the affective power of science fiction as genre to influence and be influenced by changing opinions regarding non-normative bodies and identities. 


Michael Stokes is an independent scholar based in Davis, California. His work focuses on the unique relationships that arise in the connection between disability studies and the film, television, and literature of science fiction. His written work has appeared in Analog Game Studies and he has presented at the CCDS conference at Liverpool Hope University.

This seminar is part of the CCDS series, Disability and the Emotions. Other dates include:

15 Nov 2017, Sorrowless Lamentation: Viewers' Emotional Response to the Disabled Poor in Art, Lennard Davis.

31 Jan 2018, Embracing Disorientation in the Disability Studies Classroom, Ryan Parrey.

07 Mar 2018, Affective/Effective Images? The Aesthetics of Representing Disability Experiences in Comics, Gesine Wegner.

18 Apr 2018, Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip, Brady Forrest.

23 May 2018, Remembering the Great War through Bodies and Emotions: The Experience of Disabled Ex Servicemen between the Two World Wars, Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre.

04 Jul 2018, Demanding Money with Menaces: Fear and Loathing in the Archipelago of Confinement, Owen Barden.


For further information please contact: Dr David Bolt