Cronenberg and the Abnormal Body

"Cronenberg and the Abnormal Body: Seeing Disability in Sci-Fi and Horror Films"

Presented by Billie Anderson, PhD candidate in Media Studies, Faculty of Information & Media Studies.

Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom

Abstract: This fields examination project is a hypothetical course syllabus for an undergraduate MIT course. It argues that film is a producer of and a product of the culture that it exists in. The cinema poses questions about how the unconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. This project considers what it means to be an ideologically invested spectator of film and differentiates between what audiences gain through the acts of looking, gazing, and staring. It simultaneously argues that audiences form their perceptions of disability through exposure to film while also using Cronenberg’s genre-defining body horror catalogue to deconstruct normative ideologies surrounding disability. The content suggests that body horror as a genre offers audiences the ability to subvert their understandings of what it means to inhabit a body and how we understand and form relationships with the Other.

Speaker Bio: Billie Anderson is a third-year PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. She completed her master's in Critical Disability Studies before turning to Media Studies. Her focus, however, remains in the realm of disability. She is currently researching the potential transformative power of body horror in film to understand intercorporeality, disability, and disablism.

Presented as part of the Mediations Lecture Series.