CFP “Mutants, Monsters and Marvels: Anomalous Human and Non-Human Bodies in Literature and the Arts” (Online, June 30th and July 1st 2025)

Abstract Deadline: April 30th

The next phase of Disney’s global sensation, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is set to include the comic book company’s much cherished X-Men, a motley cast of mutant superheroes. Because these characters are better known for their spectacular powers, one never really thinks of them as monstrous, deviant or anomalous, given that those are terms we normally use to classify bodies that swerve from the norm in a conspicuously “negative” fashion. So, even though their repression and pariah status is a running theme in X-Men stories, it is hard to see these heroes as underdogs. Moreover, in a world that has been colonized by superhero franchises and in which their boilerplate quests dictate our horizon of possibility, our sense of the marvelous (as something truly different and otherworldly) has all but been extinguished.
Nevertheless, the bodies that surround us in the real world, both human and nonhuman, are as eccentric as ever. Nature’s penchant for the generation of novel forms (creatures that deviate from the mold, the real mutants, one might say) means that many of our kin, human or otherwise, display a wide array of differences when it comes to the spectrum of ability and disability. Overall, the natural world is chalk full of down-to-earth marvels: vampire squids with humanlike cognitive capabilities, extremophile bacteria that inhabit the darkest depths of the ocean or curious animals like the axolotl, which remains in its juvenile form throughout its life. With the advent of biotechnology, chimeras and Frankenstein-like monsters are no longer bound to the realms of myth and fiction. Genetically-modified foods are nowadays pervasive and animal-human organ transplants is a pressing debate. Finally, if we look within ourselves, we realize that we too have never been “normal”: our bodies are a hybrid interspecies melange of genetic material inherited from bacteria and viruses and our well-being is predicated on the symbiotic work of the billions of microorganisms we carry inside us.
This conference wishes to problematize the concept of normality from the perspective of medical-environmental humanities, as recently theorized by Slovic, Rangarajan and Sarveswaran (2023). Preconceptions about what healthy bodies and environments look like inform the discourses and practices of doctors and scientists alike. At the end of the day, it is the very definition of nature that is at stake. Taking literature and the arts as our point of departure, we wish to foster critical debate about how anomalous bodies are and should be perceived as we keep making progress towards a more equal and caring world across species lines.

You are very welcome to send us proposals about these and other related topics:

– Under what circumstances do living beings, human and nonhuman, become “monsters” and what renders them “killable”? We are interested in discussions of eugenics and euthanasia both in the context of the medical humanities as well as in animal studies.
Medical-Scientific discourses and their role in the dissemination of ideologies of normality and superiority.
– Animal monsters: the otherness of nonhuman creatures.
– “Other otherness”: what bodies are excluded by discourses that promote diversity?
– Representations of disability and bodily deviance in mass culture: to what extent should anomalous bodies be glorified? How do we make disability more visible in culture at large without commodifying the experience of disabled people and/or being insensitive to the question of pain? Can we conceive of a society that does not assume able-bodiedness and neurotypicality as the norm?
– Colonial memory in nonhuman spaces (we are especially interested in probing how notions of nature, health and able-bodiedness are constructed in the context of Israel’s ongoing war against Palestine).
– The difference between “desirable” and “undesirable” animals; to what extent is the human preference for domestic and endemic species unfair?
– Animals and monsters of the Pre-Anthropocene: extinct species and prehistoric megafauna.
– Freakshows and cabinets of curiosity: when do monsters become marvels and what are the ethical problems/benefits of turning anomaly into spectacle?
– Chimeras and mutants: to what extent does taxonomy make sense in a world that is ever more hybrid, transgenic and contaminated?

Send your 200 word abstracts to mutantsconference@gmail.com

You can send us proposals in a language other than English but, if accepted, you must provide us a translation of your paper before the day of the event.

Keynote Speakers: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Maria Esther Maciel

Organizers: João Paulo Guimarães, Ana Carolina Meireles, Ezra Beatriz Félix, Isadora Cavalcanti and Shayla Barros