Calls

2i JOURNAL | IDENTITY AND INTERMEDIALITY STUDIES

 

CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 11 (2025) : FIGURES AND CHARACTERS OF THE FANTASTIC: FROM CLASSIC HORROR TO POSTMODERN PARODY

Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th January 2025
Editors: Xaquín Núñez, Alessandra Massoni and Teresa Ángeles

Presentation

Monsters, vampires, ghosts, zombies, robots, superheroes constitute an expanded and recognizable gallery of figures and characters from fantastic literature. The transgression of reality or verisimilitude that narratives of the unusual propose is frequently based on distortions of space and/or time and also of the characters who represent the otherness of the human. They reflect, as philosopher José Gil (2006) reminds us, what we are not, but also what we could become, and enunciate our contradictions, limitations and metamorphoses. Whether in a dimension of perversion or aberration, or in an idealization of the superman, in which good is capable of overcoming evil, fantastic characters manage to disturb us because of what is both close and disquieting to us.

The fantastic narrative, represented in literature, cinema, television or comics, is based on a tradition of character figurations that led to several rewritings, remakes, adaptations or even homages. Since its creation, often associated with terror, horror, enigma or thriller, artistic practice has been incorporating new perspectives that enable creative updates, adapting the fantastic character's behavior to the ideological or cultural purposes of our days. Within the paradigms of postmodernity, resources such as parody, in the sense developed by Linda Hutcheon (2001), the grotesque, the ridiculous or the irony reinforce the performative capabilities of fantastic creatures. And, as Boccuti and Roas (2022) explain, the binomial between fantastic and humor, far from responding to an evasive or banal aesthetic, presents an ideological depth and an expressive forcefulness that add resources to the uncanny and its derivatives of horror and horror.

In this theoretical context, the present thematic issue of 2i Journal proposes to analyze the continuities and ruptures that the character of the fantastic supposes for the politics and poetics of contemporary identity; to study the narrative strategies that are carried out to re-update the most traditional and recognizable figures of fiction of the uncanny; to reflect on its revisions and rewritings in order to adapt them to new cultural paradigms and specific cultures; or even to critically explore the intermedial porosities and relationships that can be materialized between literary and audiovisual productions.

Ultimately, this edition of 2i Journal invites us to debate how fantastic characters and figures are represented today, which strategies are predominant in these representations and what they can tell us about human identity(ies).

Possible topics for reflection:

  • Media materializations of the fantastic character: literature, cinema, television, comics;
  • Rewritings of the figures of the uncanny;
  • Ideological dimensions of humor, parody and grotesque in the construction of the fantastic character;
  • Transmedia universes in fantastic works or myths;
  • Adaptations and updates of figures and myths of otherness in specific cultural universes.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 10 (2024) : WOMEN AND/IN REVOLUTION: SELF-PORTRAITS OF IBERIAN FEMALE WRITERS AND ARTISTS IN THE POST-DICTATORSHIPS

Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th June 2024
Editors: Eunice Ribeiro e Bruno Marques

Presentation

During the Salazar (1933-74) and Franco (1939-75) regimes, female sexuality, as well as other conceptions of “subaltern sexuality” (Guasch, 1997), was the object of several silencing strategies. The ways in which subalternity was rendered invisible, negated by dominant knowledge/power structures (Foucault, 1975), deprived it of voice and its own space of representation. This scenario began to change when new forms of self-representation of these subjectivities (Chamouleau, 2018) began to emerge during the democratic transition years in the Iberian Peninsula (Gaspar, 2018). Since the 1970s, women organized themselves in the form of activism for liberation, emancipation, and the assertion of their rights (Riggle; Tadlock, 1999). These resistance activities generated language subversions and alternative forms of self-expression as a combative strategy, constituting a symbolic rupture with the old system of systematic subaltern invisibility (Gaspar, 2018). As a group seen as a social minority, even though demographically the majority, subordinate to heteropatriarchy, women created their own modes of representation against the system that discriminated against them.

Focused on the topics of otherness and difference, contemporary self-representation in literature and art has privileged issues related to the affirmation of the female gender and sexual diversity. Portugal and Spain are, in this sense, similar case studies given that they share a very similar recent historical past — semi-peripheral, Catholic, dictatorial, colonial. In this sense, it is necessary to carry out a comparative analysis between the two Iberian countries, with the main objective of critically identifying both common and diverse strategies of resistance and empowerment.

In the year in which the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal is celebrated, this thematic issue of 2i Journal aims to reflect on heterodox modalities of self-portrait produced in the periods of the Portuguese and Spanish post-dictatorships by Iberian writers and women artists that history of literature and art have often neglected. In addition to regularly embracing topics of otherness and difference, the most recent self-representations by women authors raise issues related to the political assumption of sexual gender with significant frequency. The close connection of self-portrayal to narcissism and confessionalism makes self-portraiture a privileged path for assessing more or less profound and decisive changes in customs and mentalities, with direct repercussions on the questioning of the prevailing gender roles in a given sociocultural context.

Hence, the main question that this issue of 2i Journal aims to address is: after the colonial and dictatorial periods, how has the self-portraiture device been renewed by contemporary Iberian literature and art produced by women, contributing to the emancipation of previously subordinated, segregated, discriminated and stigmatized “female subjectivities”?

Contributions investigating the self-portrayal production of Iberian female writers and artists in the post-revolution period are welcomed, based on the possible topics for reflection indicated below.

Possible topics for reflection:

  • Writing and authorship;
  • Diaries and narratives of the self;
  • Body, sexuality and love;
  • Mirrors and masks, staging and disguises;
  • Stereotypes and conventions;
  • Freedom and censorship;
  • Memory and trauma;
  • Power and politics;
  • Voice and subjectivity.