The War Body on Screen

Call for Papers
Closing Date: Monday January 9th 2006

This proposal, for an edited collection of  ‘new’ essays on the war body on screen, emerges from
what the editors see as a new (post 9/11) concern for bringing into view the troubling image of
the ruined body, or the body that is absent from vision (as in dead and gone, or captive and
hidden). The corporeal figure of the suicide bomber, the hostage, the soldier, the terrorist, and the
innocent victim, appear as cultural and ideological vehicles of meaning for the way one is meant to
understand conflict, war and terror in the modern age.

In fiction and factual formats, and across a range of diverse, formal and informal media sites,
conflict and warfare is played out in and through the body that has been, or very soon will be,
marked by violence. This war body leaks, weeps, defecates, bleeds (sometimes copiously), and
unravels. Or, alternatively, this body (that is often visualised both before and after the harm of
war) is hard-bodied, virtual, hi-tech, robotic, resistant to damage, and capable of great damage.
Power saturated binaries exist between the legitimate and legitimated bodies of war and bodies
that ‘unfairly’ bring destruction.

The representation of the war body on screen is encountered in realist and actuality genres, in the
new ‘domestic’ sites of amateur filmmaking, in the virtual worlds of the Internet and game
playing, and in the fantasy genres of horror and science fiction, where the image of the monstrous
Other, and the super-iconic cyborg, has been increasingly fused with the wasted or hyper-
masculine body of the soldier, in settings where fictional/fantasy war is actually conjured up
through the visual databanks of actual wars, and vice versa.

The editors, then, take the war body to be any body that is caught up in the symbolic signification
of terror and ruination. This could include the ruined body of the soldier, terrorist, suicide
bomber, or hostage; the (absent) body of the ‘returning’ corpse; the cyborg body of the modern
soldier; the ‘horror’ war body; the captive body; the innocent body; the body of the child; and the
body of the journalist.

The collection extends work done in single case studies such as Historian Joanna Bourke’s work
on the male body of the First World War (Dismembering the male) and is designed to move beyond
her work on the psychology of war and the damaged body. Thus the collection is encouraging a
multi-discipline approach.

The editors welcome proposals that take the war body as their primary site of investigation and
analysis. Proposals can take a text based approach, and/or one that explores the war body in
terms of the contemporary geo-political landscape. Analysis of the impact of new media and
information technologies on the construction and transmission of war bodies, are also highly
encouraged.

Proposals, of approximately 500 words can be sent electronically to:

Karen Randell     Sean Redmond
Principal Lecturer in Film,   Senior Lecturer in Film,
Southampton Solent University,  Victoria University,
East Park Terrace,    Wellington,
Southampton     New Zealand

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Closing Date: Monday January 9th 2006

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org