The Poetics and Politics of Literary Assemblages: An International Conference

Keynote Speakers

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University) - "Queer Body Horror: From the Monster-Queer to Transformative Resilience"

Abstract:

This plenary proposes that queer horror has typically found expression as “body horror,” as a type of horror where sexual “perversion” manifests, and is read, corporeally. This representational move has been reflected in criticism seeking to interpret the embodied experience of the monster and its behaviours as symbolic of sexual alterity, conceptualising queers as Hyde-like sexual “others” whose difference is reflected in the danger and social rejection experienced by the monstrous body and its excesses. Acknowledging the importance of this work in bringing visibility to LGBTQIA+ struggles, I also propose that the acceptance of difference as not itself intrinsically monstrous is mirrored by a contemporary cultural shift whereby queer characters are increasingly both monsters and queer.

The plenary then turns to recent queer-authored and/or queer-centred body horror films like Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008), Closet Monster (2015), Good Manners (2017) and Swallowed (2022) to show that, while the equivalence between monstrosity and queerness has not been overcome, queer filmmakers have used body horror to articulate more complex narratives about social exclusion and rejection, homonormativity and assimilation, self-acceptance and feelings of (community) belonging and resilience. This section is in dialogue with broader research on new queer horror and queer Gothic (Elliott-Smith, 2016; Westengard, 2019; Elliott-Smith and Browning, 2020; Haefele-Thomas, 2023; Ollett, 2024) as well as more recent developments in trans studies, which have seen in body horror an evocation of “a central feeling of transness” (Gardner and Maclay 2024: 177). Although trans body horror is not as ubiquitous as gay and lesbian body horror, it mediates wider queer concerns about the policing of visibility and eradication of those whose identities (and bodies) do not fit the heteronormative, cissexist norm. Queer body horror is transformative, allowing for new corporeal assemblages that escape the limits of mimetic realism and its ideological trappings.

<div style="background: rgb(238, 238, 238); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 5px 10px; text-align: justify;">Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He researches twentieth and twenty-first century literature and cinema, and specialises in gothic studies, horror studies, embodiment and affect theory. His books include the monographs Body Horror: Biology, Biopower, Biotechnology (Columbia UP, 2026), Contemporary Body Horror (Cambridge UP, 2024), Horror Film and Affect (Routledge, 2016) and Body Gothic (UWP, 2014) and the edited collections Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester, EUP, 2019) and Horror: A Literary History (British Library, 2016). As fiction anthologist, he has prepared a number of collections for the British Library, including The Ghost Stories of Wilkie Collins (2024), ‘The Burial of the Rats’ and Other Tales of the Macabre by Bram Stoker (2023), Visions of the Vampire: Two Centuries of Immortal Tales (with Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, 2021) and Promethean Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad Science (2019). He has also contributed liner notes, video essays and audio commentaries to various home entertainment releases by labels like BFI Video Publishing, Eureka, Arrow Video, Radiance, Severin, Second Sight and Imprint. Xavier is president of the International Gothic Association and a founding member of the horror studies special interest group hosted by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.</div>

Margarita Estévez Saá (University of Santiago de Compostela) - "From a Critique of the Violent Anthropocene to a World of Posthuman Matter and Affects in Contemporary Irish Writing: The Case of Sara Baume"

Abstract:

There is a young generation of Irish women writers who are delineating in their fiction a move towards the west of Ireland. They feature protagonists who abandon urban settings and opt for an alternative way of life in isolated rural or coastal towns. This tendency was probably inaugurated by Anne Haverty with her novel One Day as a Tiger (1997) and followed other authors such as Roisin Maguire, Mary Costello, Clare-Louis Bennet, or Sarah Baume, among others. The protagonists of their novels are mostly young people with intellectual aspirations who are experiencing a critical moment in their lives. Once in their new abodes they reflect upon their human condition, become particularly conscious of the natural, material and creaturely world that surrounds them and with which they relate in terms of agency and finitude. These novels feature their protagonists revising anthropocentric stances and establishing alternative communities of live.

Considering Posthumanism, ecofeminist criticism and affect theories, it is our intention to assess the representation of creaturely life in the novels studied and to discuss whether the authors are offering a revision or a critique of anthropocentrism, or if they are projecting an alternative posthuman world of ontological liquidity and affects.

The second part of the presentation illustrates the previous debate by studying the particular case of the influential visual artist and writer Sara Baume, author of short stories, three critically acclaimed novels and a memoir, since we have detected an evolution in her fiction from a critique of the violent Anthropocene towards an attempt at representing a posthuman world of affects.

<div style="background: rgb(238, 238, 238); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 5px 10px; text-align: justify;">Margarita Estévez-Saá is Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research interests include the work of James Joyce and, more recently, contemporary Irish fiction by women. She has published essays focused on the topic of immigration in recent Irish fiction, such as “Immigration in Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger Novels” (2013). She has also read contemporary novels in English from a transcultural perspective in “Trauma and Transculturalism in Contemporary Fictional Memories of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks” (2016), “‘Us returniks’: Transcultural Atlantic Exchanges in Mary Rose Callaghan’s and Elizabeth Wassell’s Novels” (2018), or “Migrations in Times of Referendums. Transcultural Negotiations in Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers and Oona Frawley’s Flight; ‘Why Ireland?...Don’t Go to England’” (2024). She is the co-editor of The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s) (2019). Estévez-Saá is currently general editor of Estudios Irlandeses -Journal of Irish Studies.</div>

Abstract:  
 
With recourse to assemblage as a critical modus operandi, this keynote address explores filial relations and representations as ever beholden to the agentic impact of extra-human matter.  As adoptive family-making regularly uncovers, human filiation in general remains profoundly indebted to bonds between persons and things; but in the specific context of the non-normative family, the unfamilied person is often rendered as thing in order to sanction their adoptability.  In raising these matters, this keynote assembles three planes or panels of critical analysis between which it gamely shuttles: the adoption of children as a thingly matter, a report presented to Beverley County Court in January 1970 written by Guardian At Litem of an unfamilied child which confirms the suitability of proposed adopters, and a reading of the Irish writer Clare Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These (2021) which spotlights the childcare economy operated by Ireland’s Roman Catholic institutions (such as the notorious Mother and Baby homes) throughout the twentieth century. Eschewing tidy conclusions, this keynote invites us instead to wonder what we might discover when Critical Adoption Studies, assemblage theory, and cultural representations of alternative kinning are brought, and thought, together.

<div style="background: rgb(238, 238, 238); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 5px 10px; text-align: justify;">John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK.  He is the author of Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (Liverpool UP, 2014), Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), JG Farrell (Northcote House, 2007), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), and Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester UP, 2000/2010).  He is co-editor of the Ohio State University Press book series, Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture, and an Executive Board member of the US-based Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC).</div>

Dates Event local time

Oct

1^st

'25

09:00 Abstracts submission opening

Jan

19^th

'26

23:59 Abstracts submission closing

Feb

13^th

'26

09:30 Registration opens

May

14^th

'26

23:55 Registration closes

May

18^th

'26

09:00 Starting date

May

20^th

'26

19:00 Closing date

Event place

The Poetics and Politics of Literary Assemblages: An International Conference