Our Communication Liaison – Nick Scuillo, sent us this CFP he found – If you presented on monsters last year, you might want to check this out.
Current Call for Submissions
Volume 3, Number 2, Themed Issue on Monstrous Beauty and the Beauty of Monstrosity
Beauty, like Monstrosity, is a cultural construction framed by the fears, anxieties and aspirations of a particular time and place. Yet the configuration of both as tools of inclusion and/or exclusion position them more as sides of the same coin rather than Manichean opposites. This is clearly seen in the way that many monsters are often shown as beautiful, luring their victims into their dead embrace, just as Beauty itself is revealed as a cruel and thankless master/mistress, whose monstrous nature is hidden beneath a veneer of aesthetic perfection. Within this, of course, are also the ways that the Monster is itself shown to be beautiful, not necessarily for any exterior attributes, though this is sometimes the case, but for an inner, spiritual splendour that points to universal qualities beyond that of simple perception.
This special issue of the Monsters and the Monstrous journal will explore all facets of the ways that cultures, throughout time, have conflagrated the two concepts, to show the ways that the monstrous is truly beautiful and that beauty is the stuff of nightmares.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, stories, poems and art and/or visual pieces on the following or related themes:
-Monsters that use beauty as a lure or trap (vamps, sirens, lamias etc.)
-Monster as non-normative beauty, and the beauty of the non-normative
-The Sublime and beauty to monstrous excess
-Beauty that leads to monstrous obsessions/actions (i.e. Narcissus, Dorian Gray, Snow White’s Evil Queen, Countess Bathory)
-The monster as a form of perfection/beauty (i.e. in films such as Alien, poetry of William Blake)
-Beauty that hides a monstrous ideology (i.e. in political poetry of Yeats)
-Beauty and the Beast: contradictions in the outer manifestation of an inner state
-Beauty as a commodity used for monstrous ends
-Beauty as human/man-made creation: body modification/enhancement, cosmetic surgery and skin art
-Queering beauty and the monstrous: Cultural and social monsters as forms of non-normative beauty
-Didactic lessons on beauty via narratives on monstrosity (i.e. fairy tales, myths)
-Genderisation of monstrous beauty
-Death and beauty
Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 6th September 2013 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
We also invite submission to our review section on current fiolms and books and also our special feature on Non-English Language Book Reviews. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.
All accepted articles, artworks and prose pieces will receive a free electronic version of the journal.
Length Requirements:
Articles – 5,000 – 7,000 words.
Reflections, reports and responses – 1,000 – 3,000 words.
Book reviews – 500 – 4,000 words.
Other forms of contributions such as artworks, photographs, poetry, prose and short stories are welcome.
In the case of visual work and images we ask that all copyrights to publication are either obtained or owned by the author/artist Submission Information:
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line: ‘Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/…): Author Surname’
Submissions E-Mail Address: monstersjournal@inter-disciplinary.net.
