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At Home in the Whedonverse: Domestic Entanglements in the Works of Joss Whedon
Deadline: 1 November 2015
Editor/Contact: Juliette Kitchens ([email protected])
PDF

Domestic representations feature prominently throughout the Whedonverse, frequently complicating not only narratological and rhetorical structures, but also contemporary ideological and sociopolitical assumptions. For example, both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel blur the distinctions between public and private domains by creating home-spaces from public, often commercial, domains. Firefly positions characters to live and work in spaces that challenge dichotomized readings of domesticity while echoing Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely,” and Dollhouse advances notions of hybridity’s object-entanglements in the posthuman home. Domesticity, itself, is complicated further when we consider the voyeuristic commentary offered by Cabin in the Woods or that Whedon set Much Ado About Nothing in his own home.

This collection invites original contributions focusing on representations of domestic space throughout the television and web series, films, and comics constituting the Whedonverse. From the small screen to the big screen to the mobile screen and the page, Whedon projects consistently display domiciliary signs of the subjectivity of objects, contestation of public and private spheres, and hybridity generated within technological and biological relationships. A focused exploration of the diversity with which domestic spaces can be read within the ‘Verse offers new perspectives to the ways in which alternative sites of cultural conflict become venues for fractured, contested, entangled participatory and discursive actions.

The anticipated collection seeks to showcase a range of theoretical lenses, including but not limited to feminism(s), posthumanism, new materialism(s), and object-oriented rhetoric(s), in order to frame the significant spatial and relational conflicts in Whedon’s films, series, and comics. Successful proposals will explore the constructions of, complications with, and relations between public and private domains and objects through one or more of these methodologies.

Key questions this text aims to address include, but are not limited to:

• How is domestic space used to simulate, provoke, or reflect social transformation?
  
• How do domestic domains in the Whedonverse challenge gender constructs?
  
• In what ways do these texts and/or specific spaces challenge constructions of domesticity (political, familial, ideological, etc)?
  
• How does technology impact domestic domains, interactions, and objects?
  
• How is narrative domesticity influenced or altered between mediums (i.e. television, comics, web series, films)?

Please send query letters and abstracts for proposed chapter-length original work (300-500 words) to Juliette Kitchens ([email protected]) with the subject line: Whedon Collection. Proposals should be submitted no later than November 1, 2015. Selected contributors will be notified by 1 January 2016.