CFPs (deadline extended): Three ICMS Sessions on Monsters and the Monstrous

Session I: Inexplicable, Indescribable, Inconceivable Monsters
Sponsors: MEARCSTAPA

Organizers: Mary Leech and Thea Tomaini

This session seeks to explore the implied monstrosity of characters through their deeds and/or words with physical features left out or minimally described. Through this approach, this session will analyze how monstrosity is not just a physical attribute, but also related to behaviors that threaten to undermine the underlying identity of a community. Other approaches to this topic include implied monsters or monsters within the community that are not initially seen as monsters. Participants should explore what identifies a monster beyond physicality.

Session II: Monsters on the Stage: Interdisciplinary Examinations of Alterity in Theatre
Sponsors: MEARCSTAPA

Organizers: Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan

Theatrical performances create a space where monsters can directly slither, breathe, roar, live, die, and interact with their audiences. This session meditates on how theatre produces or elicits a relationship to monstrosity that might otherwise not be possible through different mediums. This session invites 20-minute papers that consider monstrosity on the stage both hailing from the Middle Ages and its afterlives in medievalism. Far from just fantastical creatures, “monstrosity” may also refer to racialized, gendered, queered or otherwise othered bodies within normative society.

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Session III: Patris, Matris, Monstri: Depictions of Monstrous Parents and Parental Monsters
Sponsors: MEARCSTAPA

Organizers: Cortney Anne Berg

What makes a parent, what makes a monster, and what makes a parent monstrous? Can any parents escape the charge? How do these categories intersect in depictions, and what can the overlap tell us about descent, human nature, inheritance of traits, individual will, reproductive biology, and the definition of the human? This session calls for 20-minute papers examining medieval depictions of monstrous parents, or parental monsters — literal, behavioral, or metaphorical. We encourage proposals that crack open essentializing definitions.