FALL 2023 COURSES
Linda Williams transformed the study of porn by inviting us to compare and analyze how horror, pornography, and melodrama—often dismissed as gratuitous—ensnare our bodies in the viewing process. Using Ti West’s recent film about a porn shoot gone wrong--X (2022), the first in his X trilogy--this lecture picks up where Williams left off and examines the continued relevance of the “body genre” for exploring the films that turn us on and freak us out.
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BECKY HOLT is a researcher who focuses on the intersections between Internet technology, digital culture, and adult content. A doctoral candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, her dissertation centers on the emergence of porn tubes, and Pornhub more specifically. Becky locates Pornhub alongside other tech giants and tracks the impact of online pornography on emergent digital economies and the web at large. Her work is forthcoming in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.
Thinking spectatorship across genres from horror to hardcore porn in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Bryan Gozzling’s pornographic series Hookup Hotshot, I consider the viewing subject’s identification with the empty object of the "already dead," as serialised woman of the slasher film, or the "annihilated" object of pornographic fantasy
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SOFIA DI GIRONIMO is a student living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, Canada). She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Communications at McGill University, where she focuses on the notion of limit experience at the intersection of affective and psychoanalytic theoretical methodologies. She is interested in revolution, psychoanalysis, and the pursuit of a life of leisure. Negotiating the intersections of theory with personal and political life practices, Sofia explores the boundaries of self-and-beyond, meaning-and-nonmeaning, moving towards something else.
Scholars of Shirley Jackson are quick to note her influence on contemporary horror and gothic literature. From overt references to subtle nods and barely visible traces, Jackson's oeuvre continues to resurface with a haunting persistence. This is fitting in that Jackson's own work is full of allusions that tempt her readers to pursue tangled webs of association and signification. This talk will consider Jackson's intertextuality from both of these angles and introduce Monstrum 6.2, Shirley Jackson: Intertexts and Afterlives.
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EMILY BANKS (MFA, Ph.D) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin College. Her work on Shirley Jackson has appeared in Shirley Jackson: A Companion, Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, Women's Studies, and JMMLA. She chairs the Shirley Jackson Society and is a managing editor of Shirley Jackson Studies. She has published additional scholarship on the American Gothic in ESQ, Mississippi Quarterly, and Arizona Quarterly, and is also the author of the poetry collection Mother Water. She lives in Indianapolis.
