Monsters and the Monstrous

As excited as we are for the launch of our conference registration, we know that the level of interest the event has generated since September far exceeds the number of people who will be travelling to Edinburgh in June. While we hope to see as many of you at the conference as can make it, we also want to continue providing resources support for those of you who can't.

Which is why we are also excited to announce the publication of The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman. This sensational book looks to be a landmark release in the field of monster studies, and features essays by conference keynote Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who brought the collection to our attention), as well as Patricia MacCormack, John Block Friedman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Dana Oswald, Debra Higgs Strickland, Karl Steel, and Peter J. Dendle.

Sufficiently weighty, both in mass and in content, from the looks of the table of contents and available excerpts, to justify the list price, there seems little doubt that the Companion will become a stable of monster researchers' libraries everywhere. In an emerging field of study, we can't help but gleefully imagine the shock and awe it will inspire in newly inducted students as it works its way into core course syllabi.

On a lighter, and more literary, note, we would also like to point out that this week marks the "12 Days of Monsters" on the Weird Fiction Review website. Posts by Jeff VanderMeer and Nancy Hightower have already touched on China Miéville, and throughout the whole week Pretty Monsters, a novella by Kelly Link, is available, as is a free download of VanderMeer's own Monstrous Creatures collection. Well worth keeping an eye on as the week unfolds!

Of course, a reminder that registration, travel, and accommodation info can now be found on the "Fees and Information" page here.

Conference Registration Now Live!

We are very excited to be able to announce that conference registration is now live! We are currently offering reduced advanced booking which will be available until 15 April, after which time the rates will revert to the standard prices. Of course we encourage you to take advantage of the advanced booking rates while you can!

You can register for the conference here. The preliminary conference programme is available here, and information regarding travel to and accommodation in Edinburgh can be found here.

Advanced booking rates (currently online) are as follows:

• Advanced day-fee (unwaged) - £35
• Advanced day-fee (waged) - £50
• Advanced full-fee (unwaged) - £55
• Advanced full-fee (waged) - £85

The standard booking rates are as follows:

• Day-fee (unwaged) - £50
• Day-fee (waged) - £65
• Full-fee (unwaged) - £70
• Full-fee (waged) - £100

Day-fee bookings will include access to the conference on the chosen day, as well as access to any additional events which may take place on that day. Please note that conference-related events on days for which you have not registered may carry a small separate fee.

Full-fee bookings include access to all conference events on both days as well as to the conference itself.

Information regarding such external conference events, including a conference dinner, will be made available nearer to the event itself. Please don't hesitate to contact us via e-mail at sdefconference(at)ed.ac.uk if you have any questions or concerns regarding registration.

Preliminary Conference Programme

At long last, we are very excited to present a preliminary conference programme! Keep in mind that this is still quite early days, but this should give you some indication of the wonderful and exciting papers that will be presented come June.

Registration is also in the works and we very much hope to have that information for you within the week - sooner, if we have curried favour with one assortment of gods or another. There will be an advanced booking rate for those who choose to register by a certain deadline, and we of course encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity if you are able. There will also be reduced rates for unwaged participants, and day rates.

We would like to point out that the monster workshop and film night events are also still in the organisational stage, so the timing may change as things develop. We will post more details as things solidify. If you register for the conference on that date or for both days, you will be automatically able to attend both or either event; there may be an additional small fee for anyone not registered for that date.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted a proposal for the conference. It's difficult to really express how many truly fantastic papers we were sent, and how difficult it was to make decisions when constructing our panel sessions. We hope that as many of you as possible are able to still attend the conference, because if anything the quality and quantity of the proposals we received is an indication of the kind of exciting, innovative, and brilliant scholarship is being undertaken in this area at the moment, and we hope that you are able to come and participate in what will no doubt be a weekend of stunning academic ideas and discussion.

To that end, since we are aware that Edinburgh in June tends to be quite a bustling city, with quite a tourist influx, we have included a new page with details of accommodation ideas and travel details which you can find here, or at the top of the page under the "Coming to Edinburgh" tab. We hope this proves helpful, and that we can meet all of you in a few short months!

Fantastic Films, Fantastic Bodies

Our deepest apologies for the delay in posts; naturally we have been stunned into silence by the quality and volume of the proposals we have received in the last few weeks (and months). There's still a few days left to submit your abstracts - see the call for papers for details - so we hope to see a few more yet.

We'd also like to hopefully make up for our blog silence by bringing your attention to a very interesting article published in 2006 in Offscreen - David Church's "Fantastic Films, Fantastic Bodies: Speculations on the Fantastic and Disability Representation". The article offers an exploration of representations of disability in films whose potential to render "positive critical readings and powerful depictions of disability" has often been neglected. In fact, the "fantastic" films that form the basis for Church's discussion - namely Freaks (1932), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Videodrome (1982) - are more likely to be the focal point for negative criticism regarding their depictions of exceptional bodies than anything else, and in the case if Freaks this has typically been the case.

Church opens by addressing such criticism, emphasising the importance of genre in influencing the way that such representations are read. He notes that

'Although fantastic films stimulate the imagination, many of them also stimulate the body itself through the devices common to “body genres” (i.e., horror, porn, and melodrama); Hawkins, for example, notes the predominance of body genre affect in art-horror, avant-garde films, and various “paracinematic” films that easily classify as fantastic. With the direct appeals to the viewer’s body made by these “low” fantastic texts (not unlike the fearful and tearful affect sought by freak show practitioners showcasing “monstrous,” exotic, sexually ambiguous, and pitiable human specimens), perhaps it is not surprising that they have been ignored by disability studies scholars seeking to displace the site of disability away from the material bounds of the corporeal body... [however,] disability studies focuses its probing and analytical gaze upon the “proper” (or “normal”) body of social realist films, largely ignoring the “grotesque” and “improper” (or “abnormal”) body of fantastic films, leaving a conspicuous gap in the discipline’s critical discourses'

Offering a lengthy dissection of three "fantastic" cinematic representations of extraordinary bodies, Church raises some intriguing questions regarding the legitimacy accorded or denied portrayals of disability based often primarily on the basis or exclusion of the context within which the portrayal is presented. He concludes by considering that 'the imaginative framework of the fantastic film moves the grotesque disabled body from the margins of representation and into the spotlight, much like the freak show performer on stage: an exploitative spectacle for sure, but one which might inadvertently point back toward our own cyborgian mode of spectatorship.'

Sins Invalid: Disability and Sexuality

This post is going to be a two-for-one deal, to make up for the fact that we've still not gotten quite back into our usual routine of 2-3 posts each week.

First, we would like to draw your attention to a project based in San Francisco but which is thankfully reaching its way across America and the Atlantic - Sins Invalid. The project itself is a performance-based initiative which  "incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities," according to the website's description, "centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse."

What is even more exciting is that they are currently in the final stages of production on a 41 min film that reflects the project itself: Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty. The film is designed to, as they phrase it, "serve as an entryway into the absurdly taboo topic of sexuality and disability," a notion which pertains particularly to the aims of the conference, so naturally we are very excited to see the final result! The project is still looking for funding through a kickstarter campaign in order to complete the last details of production, and they offer incentives depending on your donation. As with any Kickstarter fundraising scheme, your donation only goes through if they reach their goal, and we certainly hope they do, so please check out their campaign and their website, and if you're lucky enough to be in the area, seek out one of their performances!

The second piece of news we have is more relevant for those of you in the Edinburgh area (or who might be in the Edinburgh area at some point). The Surgeon's Hall Museum will be open 12-4pm on weekends once more starting 31 March and lasting all the way until October. We can very much vouch for the quality of the museum, and it is well worth a visit. It could be a fantastic Saturday day-trip; not enough day-trips feature pathological anatomical specimens, and the team behind Sensualising Deformity thinks it's time to change that!

Call for Papers Extension

We have been incredibly blessed to receive a wealth of truly fascinating paper proposals over the last two and a half months. However, we must admit that when it comes to examples of academic brilliance, we are greedy, and so to maximise the number of proposals that we get to pour over, we have decided to extend the deadline for the call for papers to 16 February 2012.

"Sirenomelius, front and rear view", Human Monstrosities,
Hirst and Piersol (1893). Wellcome Library Collection.

We would like to take this opportunity to encourage everyone who reads the blog, has submitted a proposal, or follows us on Facebook or Twitter to pass the word along to anyone else who might be interested - they now have an extra two weeks to work on an abstract!

As before, abstracts should be submitted to sdefconference@ed.ac.uk, and the full call for papers can be found here. We also have a page devoted to outlining specific strands of discussion that we hope to develop - here. Even if you are unable to submit a proposal or attend the conference, we encourage you to contact us or continue following the blog updates as it is our long-term goal to link this wide-reaching community of researchers together by mailing lists and other means once the conference itself has passed.

For the time being, we very much look forward to yet more brilliant paper proposals in the coming weeks!

Freakery and "Aesthetic Traces"

If you happen to be interested in "freaks," freakery, and its relationship to nineteenth-century medical "monsters", we'd like to draw your attention to a fascinating article published in 2005 in the Disability Studies Quarterly, Sheila Moeschen's "Aesthetic Traces in Unlikely Places: Re-visioning the Freak in 19th-Century American Photography". The article, which is open access, offers an intriguing reading of the role that photography played in the creation and presentation of extraordinary bodies in the nineteenth century; Moeschen denies that fictive division which might separate the objective medical photograph from its public side-show counterpart, typically deemed to be more deliberately titillating. Instead, she suggests,

"The two traditions form a reciprocal relationship that illuminates their representational and political imbrications. The historical persistence to delineate between a medical and artistic "aesthetic" reveals a disconcerting bias towards privileging the power and credibility of the empirical realm over the artistic."

Moeschen points to the role that "sensation" played in separating the clinical photograph of medical monstrosity from the "freak portrait", evoking perhaps a distinction between the sensational props and posing of the visual construction of freakery with the potentially sensualised medical photographs which are marked by their nudity in order to reveal the anomalous body more fully to the viewer.

The article focuses on what Moeschen calls the "performative trace," which she sees as characterising the construction of both medical and sensational photographs of individuals with extraordinary bodies, creating "an alternate frame around these subjects that explicitly signals the perceptual and cognitive apparatuses ascribed to performance." She notes that

"The performative trace becomes another presentational "mode" employed, ironically in the case of the medical profession, to disarm these unusual bodies, endowing them with a quality of the ephemeral that ultimately promotes uncritical fascination; it promotes a kind of fetishistic voyeurism and illicit titillation."

The instability which this theatrical element introduces into these photographs is, for Moeschen, a deliberate strategy on the part of both medical and sideshow photographers to manipulate the "cultural and ideological value" of their subjects.

Holiday Blog Break in December

We're not sure about you but we are certainly shocked to find that November is almost over already! Due to the usual winter holiday madness, we're sorry to say that we won't be able to maintain our usual blog post schedule. There will therefore be fewer posts throughout December and early January, especially around Christmas/New Years Eve. Hopefully you won't really notice because you will all be too busy having a wonderful holiday season yourselves!

However, by mid-January we will be back to our three-posts-a-week(ish) schedule, and I'm sure we will have many new articles, films, and online finds to share. Just don't forget about us completely - if we find anything fantastic or have any exciting news over the holidays we'll be sure to pull ourselves away from the mulled wine long enough to keep you in the loop!

Just a reminder that the deadline for paper abstracts is 31 January 2012, and that we will continue to reply to all submissions and queries (though you might see a slower response time). Once the deadline has passed and we have put together a schedule, we can look at posting specific information about fees, registration, travel, accommodation, and the like. So keep watching this space!

Once again, we are so grateful to have received such a wonderful reception of our conference, and such fantastic support all around! Thank you all for your interest and your kind words. Although it's still well in advance we'd like to wish you all a fantastic (and fantastically grotesque) holiday season and a wonderful new year!

A Monster Observatory

One of our keynotes, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, shared this fantastic link with us via his Twitter account, and we wanted to pass it along to our readers as well (share and share alike - it's a good motto).

With a name like A Monster Observatory and a tagline that runs "Cultural Teratology: Freaks, Monsters, the Grotesque", it should be pretty clear why we've taken an interest in this blog. However, if you needed convincing, we would refer you to the most recent post as of today, "Thinking About Monster Theory (Seven Theses)" - ten points if you can guess what it is about.

The site is managed by Dr Ian McCormick, and so far features a wealth of posts on mangled torsos, disability and the fourth plinth, and conjoined twins amongst other topics - in other words, every fascinating aspect of monstrosity, disability, and the grotesque body. If you're reading this blog, then A Monster Observatory probably deserves a spot on your bookmarks toolbar.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we do acknowledge all inquiries and submissions, so if you have sent in a proposal or a question and haven't heard back, do get in touch. Likewise if you think there's something that our blog readers might find interesting or useful - articles, books (ideally available online), art or museum exhibitions, other blogs, even other conferences. You can send it our way via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter (all information on the sidebar to your right). Pick your poison - we'd love to hear from you on any platform!

Code of the Freaks: forthcoming feature-length documentary

We were quite interested to hear about the upcoming film, Code of the Freaks. The feature-length documentary being developed by a group of film-makers based in Chigago aims to explore the depiction and construction of disability in Hollywood movies. Their website sets out the film as "an irreverent project" seeking to "stimulate critical discussion among diverse movie lovers. Tracing themes of representation from the 1920's to the present, we examine how movie images shape the public's understanding of disabled people":

Production still from Code of Freaks

"Audiences have internalized these coded images. Their narratives are ultimately projected onto disabled people in everyday life. It’s hard to find a disabled person who doesn’t have an absurdly ridiculous story about experiences with total strangers while simply walking down the street. These experiences to a great extent mirror what the public learns about disability through movies.
Our goal is to produce a feature-length documentary that will deconstruct, lampoon, and critique uses of the disabled character in film... Our process involves conducting these discussions with diverse disabled and non-disabled audiences to learn just how images of disability shape the social consciousness of disability."

The project also involves several events, public discussions organised around themes illustrated by Hollywood film montages cut with critical questions. Each month, the project's blog will feature a clip about a selection of films, and a trailer is already available online.

The film will no doubt offer a fascinating exploration into the larger cultural representation of disability as well as the Hollywood depictions, and hopefully will raise some discussion about the mutual influence that the two have on historical and contemporary constructions of disabled bodies. We would be especially interested to consider what role the sensualisation/eroticisation of extraordinary bodies might play in these filmed representations, if at all, and its significance.

Curious Pursuits Exhibition, Manchester

For the Victorianists amongst you, we would like to direct attention to a new Art Historian collective based in Manchester, Porter & Jenkinson. Their mission statement should prove intriguing not just to scholars focusing on the nineteenth century, but also artists, art historians, and those interested in the medical humanities:

Vegetable Lamb from The Museum of Garden History, London

"Art Historian collective Porter & Jenkinson aim to showcase the best contemporary art of a curious and unusual nature. Through exploring the dark, strange and depraved themes of the Victorian era they curate exhibitions of works that respond directly to these ideas. They intend to bring to the foreground these forgotten aesthetics and to explore the responses and reactions in contemporary society."

Porter & Jenkinson's first exhibition, Curious Pursuits, will be taking place from the 2-29th February 2012 at the Portico Library in Manchester, and they are still accepting submissions until 31 December if you happen to be of artistic skill. If you are not so lucky, it should still prove a fascinating exhibition, well worth a trip to Manchester if you're not based in the area.

If Manchester seems a bit far to go, then their website - while still relatively new - is already exhibiting some interesting content, and we look forward to seeing what other finds they will post next.

A Grotesque Aesthetic? The Anatomia Collection

Joseph Maclise, Pl.III "Dissection of the
Neck and Thorax, Heart and Blood Vessels"
Surgical Anatomy (1856).

We would like to draw your attention to an absolutely fabulous resource provided absolutely free by the University of Toronto - perfect for researchers in the medical humanities, or anyone with an admiration for exquisite anatomical art. Please indulge yourself and explore The Anatomia Collection: 4500 anatomical plates from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, digitised and free to the public. The plates range in date from 1522-1867, and are fully indexed using medical subject headings (MeSH).

If you have perused our blog thoroughly, you might already have noticed that the gorgeous sketch depicting the face and skull of conjoined twins which we have selected as our header image is a section of a plate from Joseph Maclise's Surgical Anatomy (1856), all of the plates from which are available through the Anatomia Collection. This particular image was chosen not simply because of what it represented, but because Maclise's style itself, in this plate as throughout his body of work (pun fully intended), seems designed to elicit a highly sensual reaction.

His sketches often depict the hooks, strings, and instruments used to expose successive layers of flesh, vessels, and organs, remnants of the intrusion of medical probing which are typically erased from anatomical sketches. And also unlike many medical sketches, which hide the faces of their subjects, or else strip them of their identity, Maclise's "dissected figures", to quote the collection's description of the text, "seem almost life-like, with real faces, usually of young men with fair hair."

Joseph Maclise, Pl. 2 "Arteries, Veins, and
Nerves of the Thorax and Neck" in Richard Quain's
Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (1844)

The description goes on to suggest that, "endowed with great dignity, the figures resemble the romantically noble heroic figures in his brother's paintings" (his brother being the artist Daniel Maclise). The assertion that Maclise endows his figures with dignity and romantic nobility is not necessarily untrue, but a scan through his work will reveal bodily contortions that seem more indicative of violent ecstasy, even torture, scattered throughout the romantic heroes. Amongst these evidently "life-like" figures also rises the gaunt, unavoidably lifeless face of one man, who simultaneously evokes images of decay, even of intense starvation.

Maclise's detailing of the feathered hair clinging to skin even as it is pulled apart to reveal each layer beneath, of the instruments that rip and tear as much as they slice, leaving ragged flaps as a grotesque frame, all of this casts a reflection of the dissected corpse on the page (or screen) onto the body of those observing it. As much as some images may evoke dignity and heroics, Maclise's overall style draws attention to a grim sensuality of dissection that is absent from many medical sketch. As he exposes the mystery of muscles and bones and blood vessels, his drawings render the subject/body monstrous; twisted, tortured, ecstatic, open bodies intimately tied to the living observer through an evocation of shared sensuality.

Plenary Speaker: Prof. Margrit Shildrick

"Lunatica", Fernando Vicente. From the series Vanitas. 
Copyright Fernando Vicente, 2008.

The Sensualising Deformity conference organisers are delighted to announce that Margrit Shildrick, Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production with Tema Genus at Linköping University in Sweden, will be joining Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, from George Washington University, and Peter Hutchings, from Northumbria University, to deliver a keynote lecture at the conference this June. 

We are honoured and excited to be bringing together such truly brilliant minds, each of whom offers a distinct perspective on the topic of monsters, monstrosity, and monstrous embodiment. They also reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the conference itself; despite their different research backgrounds, each have contributed significantly to our understanding of monsters and monstrosity, and are sure to add great depth and nuance to our discussions of sensuality and the anomalous body during the conference.

We look forward to offering a forum in which our speakers can communicate and engage with what we are positive will be an equally wonderful group of participants from across departments and disciplines, and encompassing the full range of the academic career spectrum.

Cute & Creepy Exhibition in Florida

Sadly for us, all of the organisers of the Sensualising Deformity conference are based in Edinburgh, which means we cannot attend the absolutely fantastic and grotesque Cute and Creepy exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University in Tallahassee. But we can help encourage others to attend in our stead, and hope that they will bring back tales of their creepy experiences. The exhibit will be held between 14 October and 20 November of this year, so there's plenty of time yet to plan your trip; perhaps your family or friends might enjoy a trip to Disney World while you nip off for some monstrous pop surrealism?

The site's home page offers different examples of the work, or the kind of work, that will be offered at the exhibit, and based on that alone there is no question that it would be of interest to this conference and anyone reading the blog, but as if to ensure no further doubt, curator Carrie Ann Baade writes,

To see beauty in the carnivalesque or macabre, in freaks and in monsters, is a matter of aesthetics. Most of us can agree on the artistic value of a Monet or Titian but this work is for a daring audience, an audience open to exploring the strange beauty and the ecstasy inherent in our culture's aversions.

Travis Louis, The Curse of the Goat, 2006.

There is something that makes us uneasy when confronted by the weird or the unusual. Those who can appreciate both have come to anticipate and enjoy unexpected sensations. Work of this nature is not going to be an underground movement any longer: the grotesque is going mainstream.

The website also offers a tantalising excerpt of Nancy E. Hightower's essay "Revelatory Monsters: Deconstructive Hybrids, the Grotesque, and Pop Surrealism" that is included in the exhibition catalogue, which is worth quoting in full:

We need monsters in our lives.

We like to fear them, to run hiding under the covers or clenching a lover's arm until the monster is destroyed or banished to far off lands. they are wonderful like that, refusing to ever completely disappear from our lives, affording us the opportunity for self-introspection if we take a moment to recognize that monsters don’t die because they are essentially us(Cohen 5). Once they are eradicated from our cultural memory, we go, too. And that monstrous, wondrous body is at the heart of the grotesque. From the playful grotteschiunearthed in the Domus Aurea to demons of the illuminated manuscripts that overflowed from the margins onto the actual text, the monstrous body has always threatened what our culture has desired to contain (or perhaps more accurately, trapped, vetted, and fixed to incorporate whatever impossible standards it has set up to differentiate us from them). But the monstrous body is also prophetic in nature.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that as a “construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals’ that which warns…like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself”. What sets up this kind of fulcrum is society itself: “The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration…”. These kinds of juxtapositions are what form the definition of the grotesque.

Greg Simpkins, Knightengale, 2008.

Of course, with such passages accompanying the examples of art included on the home page of the site, monsterphiles who, like us, don't live anywhere near the exhibition will be working out calculations in the vain hope that a trip to Florida this autumn might be within their budget (we feel your pain). But if you happen to be so lucky as to be in Florida, or close enough for a visit, we highly recommend visiting the exhibition.

If not, perhaps you will have to do as we are doing and wistfully pass on the information to any fortune-favoured friends you might have who could attend! In the meantime, console yourself, perhaps, with a closer look at the artists involved, whose work is engaging with monstrosity in such sensational ways.

British Medical Journal Teratological Memoranda

Images courtesy of the BMJ Publishing Group,
BMJ 1889, June 8; 1(1484): 1288–1289.

Those of you interested in teratology - 19th century especially - will probably already be quite familiar with the British Medical Journal's Teratological Memoranda, but if you haven't had a spare hour or two to browse through their older archives looking for reports of "human monsters", we would like to direct you to articles such as this, which describes the birth of three monstrous infants, a pair of conjoined twins and a limbless child whose birth is attributed to the mother having "seen a fish she never thought existed". Perhaps the most interesting thing featured in both reports is the woodcut included with each, that of the conjoined twins especially. 

In placing the figure of the twins against a black background, the gap between them and the band of flesh which binds them together are thrown into sharp relief; their faces seem closer, within kissing distance, because of the space between them. Their position seems transformed into a sensual one by the intense nearness, which is itself born of that crucial gap. Contrasted with the harshly tactile description given by the author of his involvement in their birth, focused on his probing hands and fingers, in this image it is the lack of contact which is the more sensuous.

The image of the limbless child, on the other hand, is memorable for the almost wistful expression depicted on the baby's face, its humanity over emphasised as if to counter the anomalous form below.

Audio Teratology

In the interest of inspiring discussion and debate, we draw your attention to some samples from The Teratologist music project, which released its third album, Cabinet of Curiosities Parts III & IV, this  June.

Descriptions of the albums include "an amalgamation of musique concrète, electroacoustic, harsh ambient and drone", "deep textures of acoustic and electronic composition", and "a[n] esoteric feeling generally stimulated by ritual music" - raising questions of how such industrial, electric, "harsh" music can be integrated with a project title that gestures towards a phenomenon that is more often soft, flesh-like, wrapped up within a body that is open or opening, moist, textured, palpable.

The samples do not pander to the senses, but deliberately offend them, evoking sensations that stand on the edge of paranoia, a rejection of sound which is an intrusion upon the flesh. The disembodied music forces a bodily response, tying the internal with the unnatural, external stimulus - eerily reminiscent of the teratologist himself, a figure of intrusion, of harsh metallic instruments who sought to inflict pain in his study of the monstrous body. In encompassing the discipline of teratology within a sensuous experience, what does such a project do to the monstrous specimen in the cabinet of curiosities itself, the figure which lies behind the music, which is denied any mention but remains an intrinsic part of it?

Questions, comments, disagreements, re-articulations - anything short of outright insults - are encouraged in the comments section.

The Sensualising Deformity Blog

One of the long-term goals of the Sensualising Deformity conference is to bring together scholars and students around the world and across disciplines who share an interest in deformity, monstrosity, or freakery, and to develop a network that connects them together.

This blog is a central part of that aim, offering links to all things related to the conference themes, be they articles, seminars, exhibitions, websites, films, or general miscellanea. We also hope to post calls for papers and contributions for other conferences or collections that are being organised in the field.

For those who may not, for whatever reason, be able to attend the conference in June, we hope the blog will ensure that you are still welcomed as part of a network of like-minded individuals, and that you will find here a source of knowledge and ideas as fascinating as the conference itself!