CFP: Beauties and their Big Screen Beasts
Prospective panel for SCMS Conference, Toronto, Canada, March 14-18, 2018

What constitutes beastly behavior, and who bears the onus of recuperation? What happens when Beauty can’t rehabilitate the Beast? The transformative power of love is a theme that continues to pervade contemporary culture while often shoring up constructs of romance, love, and gender. As a theme that often exalts heterosexuality as the only valid route to love and romance, women are dangerously scapegoated through the theme’s insistence that they are responsible for the recuperation of a beastly—or bad—man, and men are deprived of agency through the implication that they are not capable of rehabilitating themselves. 

This panel seeks to interrogate the limits of transformative love. In what ways does the theme reaffirm and/or propagate traditional gender scripts, and how does this trouble the pervasiveness of the theme? Moreover, how do texts challenge and/or subvert this theme by playing with it, moving it around, redesigning it, and reframing it? Potential topics might include but are not limited to: 

•	Beastly Overtones: Explorations of Masculinity and Hyper-Masculinity
•	Queer Monster Love: Narratives that Challenge Heteronormative Romance
•	Beastly Women: Narratives that Subvert Gender Expectations

Please submit a 300 word abstract with a 3-5 item bibliography and a brief author bio to [log in to unmask] by Thursday, August 10, 2017. Notifications will be sent by Monday, August 14, 2017. 

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