Mediations of Body in Popular Spaces/Culture
Fraught with moral, religious, racial, sexual, and transgressive configurations, the body is a potent site for reflective practices within popular culture. The self-reflexive matrix of popular culture’s representations of human body functions as a site for materializing possibilities of varying forms of living. As a cultural sign, body features in both normative and non-normative debates on identity, selfhood, social relations, power, institutional surveillance and regulation. The practice of its representations, on the other hand, traditionally enables a culture of shared meaning-making which shapes how an individual perceives, thinks, feels, and acts amidst the production and circulation of discourses. In rethinking the traditional certainties around human body, the space of popular culture fosters a field of inquiry where heterogenous approaches open new apertures in understanding the complexity of human body.
In times marked by advancement in the fields of science, medicine, and technology, the discourses on human body’s representations within popular culture continue to explore what it means to be an embodied human being. The human body is seen to be undergoing experiments to either ‘unlock’ its latent potentiality in terms of modification and amplification, or, to show its vulnerability, messiness, leakiness, and volatility to draw attention to the existential dimension of this embodied being. The pervasiveness of body within cultural spaces pertinently teases out a range of problematics that are also mirrored in virtual and augmented reality, and extend well beyond the corporeal finitude to generate new modalities of becoming. These emerging representations of digitally mediated bodies, virtual bodies, cyborg, etc., within the cultural spaces bring a novel spin to the discursive formations around human body.
In view of the changing contours of body in twenty-first century, LLIDS invites contributions that engage with the various modalities, entanglements, and contestations of human body in conventional spaces such as literature, cinema, painting, sculpture, and exhibitions, as well as new modes of embodiment such as posthuman/transhuman bodies, social/digital media presence, body in correspondence with AI technologies, among others. LLIDS seeks scholarly contributions which address the above theme and/or go beyond them. Some suggestive thematics are listed below:
- Problematics of ideal representations of body
- Body in non-western representation
- Aesthetics of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ body
- Religion and the regulation of body
- Body art vis-à-vis tattooing, scarification, cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding
- Body in Performance arts
- E-sports and body
- Military and the discipline of body
- Legal discourse and body
- Economics and labour of body
- Pre-covid and post-covid human body
- Representation of deviant body
- Queer bodies in popular culture
- Body and caste
- Migrant bodies
- Representation of disabled bodies
- Body, brain, and AI
- Metaverse and virtual bodies
Submissions: Only complete papers will be considered for publication. The papers need to be submitted according to the guidelines of the MLA 8th edition. You are welcome to submit full length papers (3,500–10,000 words) along with a 150 words abstract and list of keywords. Please read the submission guidelines before making the submission – http://ellids.com/author-guidelines/submission-guidelines/. Please feel free to email any queries to – editors@ellids.com.
Please make all submissions via the form: https://forms.gle/W3uJ2SknA5iGxNUN6
Submission deadline: 15th June, 2024
Website: http://ellids.com/
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