This special issue of Spectator moves towards reflections on the phenomenology of illness and disability in global cinemas, and the ways that certain strands of film theory might be reanimated by a serious consideration of disability and disability studies.
Spectator is a biannual publication by the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Cinema & Media Studies.
CfP: Cinemas of Isolation: Disability and Film Theory
Deadline for manuscript/project submission: November 27, 2022.
A disability studies approach to media allows us to think critically about not only the stakes of representation, but also the ways that cinema draws out the contours of the viewing subject, incites complex processes of identification and disidentification, and frames the body as a site of contact and signification. As a phenomenon that is at once material and discursive—that is, insistently embodied and personal but also social, embedded in language and environment—disability troubles the mind/body split in generative and complex ways. Moreover, disability theory allows us to return to some of film theory’s earliest interventions—notions of lack, fetishism, the gaze, the apparatus—with a new set of questions and ethical concerns.
Recent months have already seen a proliferation of demand (in academia, journalism, art worlds) for new “takes” on COVID-19, special issues of journals that analyze the global pandemic from social sciences and communications perspectives, work by artist-practitioners chronicling this profoundly singular moment. A great deal of this work has focused on contagion and risk, often with a bias towards the concerns of the (currently) abled. This special issue of Spectator takes a step away from this discourse, moving instead towards reflections on the phenomenology of illness and disability in global cinemas, and the ways that certain strands of film theory might be reanimated by a serious consideration of disability and disability studies.
Like all global crises, COVID-19 has already produced its own unique rhetorics, a key one of which is of collective isolation—the uncanny sensation produced by the fact that so many people have spent unprecedented amounts of time in their homes, that spending a maximum amount of time alone is necessary for the public good, and that that isolation is, itself, a luxury.
While a great deal of media discourse surrounding the global pandemic has focused on COVID-19’s high mortality rate (which disproportionately affects people who are already living with disabilities), the number of people worldwide who are likely to become disabled as a result of the disease is even higher, and it is considered likely that many of these conditions will be lifelong. As disability becomes increasingly impossible to ignore worldwide, media scholars may offer new interventions that attend to disability’s representational and semiotic power, as well as its material significance in the history of cinema and cinematic thought.
Transnational and cross-disciplinary approaches to thinking about disability in and as media, language, and form are encouraged. A special interest lies in book reviews, film/TV reviews, photo essays, video essays, fiction and other hybrid forms.
Please find more information on the CfP and it's requirements here.
Contact
Emma Ben Ayoun
Tel: 90007 (917) 714-7309
E-Mail: benayoun /at/ usc.edu
USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 W. 34^th Street
Los Angeles, CA
